Concert to recall Kitchener Camp

It was “the concert that never took place”, according to Antony Lishak, chief educational consultant of the Holocaust charity Learning from the Righteous.

Next Thursday, 83 years after it should have been staged, a concert to evoke memories of the unique, pre-war Kitchener Camp, will take place at London’s Wigmore Hall.

The 28 April lunchtime concert, with narration from outgoing BBC presenters Jon Sopel and Emily Maitlis, will form part of this year’s Yom HaShoah remembrance events, which begin the previous evening, on Wednesday 27 April.

Yom HaShoah 2022 will draw on the experience of commemorating the anniversary during the pandemic.

The ceremony was forced to move online in the past two years, but, unexpectedly, there was a greater audience for the event. As Neil Martin, chair of Yom HaShoah UK, put it: “Stuck at home, the community gathered online for Yom HaShoah, lit yellow candles and remembered together as one”.

Now the event is once more going ‘live’, with the national broadcast taking place from Jewish Care, the home of the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre. But there will also be the opportunity for families across the UK – and around the world – to watch online. There will be choirs, musicians, guest speakers and, of course, testimony from the last remaining survivors, as well as refugees.

Additionally, this year there will be the delayed launch of the Yom HaShoah Legacy of the Holocaust initiative. The plan is for 200 “commemorative legacy boards” to be installed in synagogues, school and communal buildings across the UK. They will, says Martin, “create a permanent reminder and focal point to remember, to tell, and never forget”.

Kitchener Camp, remembered with great affection by some of its residents, is a sometimes forgotten aspect of the work of the Central British Fund for German Jewry, which set up this ‘haven’ for refugees in 1939, before the outbreak of war.

The camp, in the coastal town of Sandwich, in Kent, housed young German Jews and was operated by members of the Jewish Lads’ Brigade.

The story of Kitchener Camp is not as well known as that of the Kindertransport, but it made its mark on a large number of people.

World Jewish Relief, the successor to the CBF, the Jewish Lads’ and Girls’ Brigade, Learning from the Righteous (which deals with young people aged 10 to 14), the Association of Jewish Refugees, the ’45 Aid Society and the Board of Deputies, have teamed up with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, to present this year’s memorial concert.

The story of Kitchener Camp is not as well known as that of the Kindertransport, but it made its mark on a large number of people.

The residents – as would happen later with the internment camps on the Isle of Man – set to and offered cultural activities, including the formation of a locally popular orchestra.

Eventually, after donations of instruments made it possible, an official camp orchestra was formed, and, says Lishak, it gave its first public performance on the second day of Pesach, attracting an audience of 700 Sandwich residents.

Such was its reputation that there were even arrangements for the BBC to broadcast a live concert from Kitchener, an ambitious ideal thwarted by the inevitable outbreak of war.

Three ‘icons’ who made an impact on the Kitchener Camp and its refugees were the brothers Jonas and Phineas May and Ernest Joseph. At the conclusion of the concert on Thursday, their descendants will accept on their behalves the British Heroes of the Holocaust medals, awarded by the government to British citizens who helped or rescued Jews in the Holocaust.