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'We're in difficult times', says Holocaust survivor

Ethan Gudge,South of Englandand
Emma Evans,Witney
News imageBBC Steven Frank has short white hair and is wearing a grey blazer over a lilac shirt and red tie. He is standing in a staff room.BBC
Steven Frank has visited schools more than a thousand times to share his story

"I don't really want another Steven Frank in 70 or 80 years time to be standing in front of a whole lot of schoolchildren to tell them what it was like being a Jew in Britain in 2026."

Steven Frank BEM was one of approximately 150 survivors out of 14,000 Jewish children who passed through the Theresienstadt concentration camp, in occupied Czechoslovakia, during World War Two.

Once liberated, he moved with his family to England, where he has gone on to speak about the Holocaust and his experiences during more than 1,000 visits to schools across the country, including Wood Green School in Witney.

To honour his contributions, the Oxfordshire school has presented Frank with a book of personal thanks from those he has shared his story with there over the past three decades.

Born in Amsterdam in 1935 to a Dutch father and English mother, Frank was five when Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands.

"When you're five, seeing soldiers marching in the streets is really quite exciting," he said of his first impressions of the German occupation.

"But one soon began to realise that being a Jew meant you were different.

"It didn't really begin to show until we had a park nearby where we'd go and play but, one day, there was a notice on the board that said 'Für Juden verboten' - 'For Jews forbidden'.

"I remember thinking at the time, at five years old, why being a Jew meant you can't go and play in the playground, it just didn't seem to make any sense."

News imageGetty Images A high-angle view through barbed wire of the fourth courtyard at the Theresienstadt Ghetto, in the fortress town of Terezín, German-occupied Czechoslovakia (Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia), 1945.Getty Images
Frank and his family had been interred in the Theresienstadt concentration camp

Frank and his family ended up passing through three concentration camps during the war before Theresienstadt was liberated on 9 May 1945.

"If you ask refugees the question about 'why Britain?' they nearly always say 'because I feel safe here'," he said of his family's relocation.

His comments come after a spate of violence across the UK targeting Jews, including the stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green last month.

"We're living in very difficult times at the moment," he said. "We're seeing not only an increase in antisemitism but also in anti-muslim [sentiment] and anti all sorts of things," said Frank.

"It doesn't go away, you've got to do something about it to get rid of it.

"Humanity just does not seem to understand how silly and how destructive all this is."

News imageA group of school children listening to Steven Frank talk from a stage.
Frank has spoken to year nine students at Wood Green School every year for three decades

Frank said he has spent his life trying to ensure the events of the Holocaust are not forgotten or repeated by sharing his story.

The book containing personal messages from pupils, parents and staff past and present at Wood Green School was presented to him on Wednesday.

If the thousands of students who have heard him speak took anything away from his personal story, he said he hoped it would be that "there is nothing more destructive than hatred".

"Nobody wins, everybody loses," said Frank.