Generation 2 Generation: Remembering the Holocaust

As part of the Lower 6 lecture series and to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, the Lower 6 welcomed Noreen Plen from Generation 2 Generation. Noreen spoke of her parents' and grandparents' experience with the Holocaust. 

Noreen started with her father's story. He grew up in a small town in Poland, a town which his family were forced to flee. On the 13 Sept 1939 bearded Jews were rounded up and slaughtered along with the Synagogue being burnt down. Fearful for their lives, the family borrowed a car from a Christian family whom they where friends with. The family decided that the men should continue to flee and that the rest of the family would be safe in a new town, they truly believed that the Germans would not harm women and children. 

Noreen's father was unfortunately deported and separated from his brother, he endured a two week journey from Poland to Russia on a train, in cramped and inhumane conditions. What awaited him in Russia was a labour camp. He worked each day in temperatures that dropped to as low as -45 degree centigrade, trading his allowance of cigarettes for bread to stay alive. In May 1942 he was released from the camp and travelled to a Sanitorium to regain his strength.

Noreen's mother was living in Warsaw when war broke out, on the sixth day, the Germans arrived in Warsaw and her mother's family were taken to the Warsaw Ghetto. At it's height the ghetto was home to 460,000 Jews. Those living in the ghetto were forced into slave labour. Noreen's mother and Aunt hatched a plan to escape in January 1943, just days before an uprising. Delivery vans were allowed in and out of the ghetto to provide the families inside with their measly food rations, the driver had agreed to load Noreen's mother and aunt into the empty van once he had completed his delivery; this plan came with great risk as the driver and both women would be shot if caught. They were however, able to escape and were taken to a farm on the outskirts of Warsaw. The two sisters were forced to dye their hair blonde and change their names to ones of Polish Catholic girls, something many Jews had to do, to simply survive.

Noreen's mother was part of a very small percentage of Holocaust survivors to have been within the Warsaw Ghetto and her father, also one of very few who survived the Russian labour camps. Her parents met in Warsaw in 1945 and made the decision to leave Poland. This proved difficult as they had lost everything during the war including all their necessary official documentation. After travelling through Prague and France, eventually, her parents settled in Newcastle, where Noreen was born.

Unlike Noreen's parents, her grandparents along with approximately 80 of her relatives, did not survive the Holocaust. At age 64, her grandfather, on her father's side was the victim of a death march and her mother's parents were brutally shot at a mass grave site that they had helped dig.

Noreen tells her family story to educate others on the horrors of the Holocaust. The Lower 6 were extremely grateful to hear a personal story and it is a story that will resonate with them for a long time.