A commemorative evening is being staged at Wembley Stadium to tell the stories of victims who survived the horrors of the Holocaust.
The remembrance event is aimed at learning lessons of the past, and includes testimony from Dr Agnes Kaposi, a Hungarian-born engineer and author who survived the Nazi atrocities against Jewish communities across German-occupied Europe.
Performances are being staged in the stadium’s Wembley Suite on January 23, with performances by pupils from JFS secondary school in Kenton and the London Cantorial Singers, followed by memorial candle lighting.
Brent Council is one of 80 local authorities and organisations taking part in a nationwide ‘80 Candles for 80 Years’ education project.
“We come together on Holocaust Day to remember the lives lost to persecution,” Brent Council cabinet member Cllr Harbi Farah said.
“We reflect on history so that we can push forward to a society free of discrimination, regardless of our religion or beliefs, and take a stand against hate.”
The event from 6pm is open to all at the stadium in Olympic Way, Wembley, with free registration on the Eventbrite website to secure a place. Vist https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/brent-holocaust-memorial-day-2025-tickets-1109201313989 to book a place.
One of the stories being told in the nationwide education project is about the life of the late Naomi Blake, a Holocaust survivor living in north London who went on to become an internationally-acclaimed artist.
Naomi and her sister Malchi were forced into slave labour in a German munitions factory during the war. They got through it and also survived a death march — but their family of 32 had been decimated and only eight were still alive by 1945.
Naomi later settled in Muswell Hill in 1955, and enrolled at Hornsey School of Art, now part of Middlesex University, to begin her journey as a sculptor.
This month is the 80th anniversary of the Allied liberation of the largest of the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27, 1945.
Auschwitz alone was responsible for the deaths of at least one million Jewish men, women and children, including babies.
The Jewish population of Europe was nine million when Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. His ideology of hate led to six million being murdered by the end of the war — the worst mass killing in human history.
Holocaust Day also marks other genocides since, including Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.
But nothing ever came near the industrial scale of the Nazi state-organised extermination against the Jewish people.