More than a hundred people have attended a memorial service at City Hall in Cardiff this morning.
Holocaust Memorial Day marks the liberation of the concentration camp ‘Auschwitz Birkenau’.
The speakers included the Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones, the former National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke, Cardiff Council Leader Phil Bale and Holocaust survivor Eva Clarke.
She was visibly moved on stage as she told the audience about her mother’s story of surviving Auschwitz and settling down to a new life in Wales.
Eva Clarke, Holocaust Survivor
She was born in Mauthausen concentration camp on 29th April 1945 weighing only 3lb. She moved to Cardiff in 1948 with her mother and step-father after the camp was liberated.
She said: “It is a particular honour for me to have been asked to be the speaker for Cardiff’s holocaust event. My step-father got a job on the Treforest Trading Estate near Pontypridd and that’s how I came to grow up in Cardiff.”
“What I also stress these days is that although we came legally, we might have been asylum seekers, we might have been refugees, we might have been migrants.”
First Minister Carwyn Jones was also at the memorial service. He described the service as “moving” and said:
“We must make sure that what happened then will never happen in the future. If we forget it, it will happen again.”
The service included music played by the Cardiff County and Vale of Glamorgan Youth String Quartet and sung by their choir.
It ended with a minute’s silence and the lighting of a candle in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.
