Paul Calvert spoke with Dr Susanna Kokanon

Paul: Are you collecting names today?

Susanna: Yes we are and it is very difficult work. As time passes it gets more difficult, because some of the names of course came from the survivors as they were able to report on family members who perished and their friends. Then of course we need to go into archives, for example until the Eastern Block was open there was no possibility to look for those names, so now they can, but it's very slow work. It's not easy at all, but still if you think about four million it's a large number of names.

Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust and if we know of all the killings sites and all the places where people were murdered like for example in Eastern Europe, or places like Ukraine, it could be that there would be murder places where people were mass murdered and not identified. There has been a lot of talk in the research scene of the Holocaust about whether that number is accurate or whether there would be more victims.

Paul: Have Holocaust survivors been very quiet about what happened, or are they now beginning to learn to talk about the situation and what happened many years ago?

Susanna: The Holocaust survivors, many of them, kept their silence for a long time. There are several different issues immediately after the war and nobody wanted to hear what they had to say, because people didn't want to believe that this kind of thing could have happened. Then when Eichmann was brought to Jerusalem to face justice in the early 60's, that's when all these testimonies came out and that is when they started to get their books published. So some survivors started to speak at that time, but many of them kept silent until they suddenly understood that if they weren't going to speak then that story would be lost forever because we have to realise that we are in 2013 and most of the survivors that are still among us now were children when the Holocaust happened and certainly many of them are passing away. Another project that Yad Vashem is doing and it's a very urgent project is to collect the testimonies of the Holocaust survivors.

Paul: Has it been important building a Christian presence here between Christians and Jews.

Susanna: I think it is very important because until the Holocaust there wasn't really a relationship between Christians and Jews. Not a lot of people think about that, but actually it was like two separate communities, although in Western Europe Jews became very integrated to their societies and assimilated, but what we mean when we speak about Jewish/Christian relations today is totally different from what existed at that time. Also the State of Israel today is the representative of the Jewish people and Israel needs support. There are a lot of voices out there who are now coming against the State of Israel, so we Christians need to recognise those voices for what they are and we need to be informed. It's no use to speak up if you don't know what to say. We need to be informed and one of those things that we do is we educate Christians about what happened and how they can know that it happened. We have facts; we don't need to debate the Holocaust. We don't give them that honour of debating them, but there are a lot of people who are unsure, who don't know and we need to be able to answer those people's questions.

Paul: What sort of stories have you been hearing; you say that you know Holocaust survivors, what sort of stories do they have?

Susanna: Every person has their unique story. One of the things that is special for Yad Vashem is that we think that it's impossible to understand six million, because it's too large a number. You have to go back to an individual to be able to see the wider story, so for example in the museum you would have all these films where people tell about their families, how they survived and what happened to the rest of their family. That is very important, because that way we can sympathise with the one person. A lot of people around the world don't know anything about the Holocaust, but they have heard the name Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler, or Corrie Ten Boom, so that gives them some kind of reference and something that they can identify that is part of the Holocaust.

Many of the survivors at some point during the time had to receive help from a non-Jew, because it was practically impossible to survive if you didn't have that help. They had to survive for years. One of the survivors I have worked a lot with and that Christians love to come and hear her story, her name is Lisha Rose and she comes from Holland. Lisha was just 18 years old when Germany occupied Holland. That was in 1940 and she was working in a Jewish hospital in Amsterdam. She joined the resistance and was helping Jews to get to these non-Jewish families, or farms, where they could be hidden. Three times she escaped from Gestapo and they put a price on her head. She managed to escape and survive. One of the most moving things happened to her at the very end of the war, it was just before the Allied victory was very apparent. The Germans already knew they were losing the war and the German soldiers towards the end of the war didn't really have man power anymore, because so many men had been taken to the Russian front. They had very young people and old people drafted, so this young guy, this German soldier, he was in Holland and many of them they were trying to get in touch with the resistance. They were hoping that they would not be killed when the war ended if they made some kind of deal with the resistance. In order to be able to do this, the resistance were taking their uniforms and weapons. If you could have a German uniform you could go anywhere. So Lisha Rose, she was a young girl, so she was sent to meet with this young German soldier and he would have been killed by the resistance in the place where she would have led him; they would have gotten his weapon and his uniform. How she tells the story is really moving. She went and met him and she was expecting to meet the enemy; she was expecting to meet the person who had murdered her whole family - all of her family members, 100 people, were murdered. She was the sole survivor. So when she saw him, she saw this young man and she just felt that she couldn't do it. She knew that liberty was just around the corner and she didn't want to start her new life with him on her conscience, so she told him, "You have to leave. You cannot come back. Just go quickly and don't ever come to this meeting again otherwise you will be killed".

He left and I don't know what she told the resistance, but she saved his life. She saved her enemy's life and like so many of the Holocaust survivors after the war, she advocated for tolerance and human relations that need to exist between different peoples.

That's her story and coming from a person who can say that 100 people in her family were murdered, it's much more than if I say it or you say it; it's a different story.

Paul: Do you think the West is anti-Semitic today?

Susanna: When we look at anti-Semitism, one thing we need to realise is that in history anti-Semitism has changed its form many times. You might be able to recognise anti-Semitism if it is a broken window or a headstone in the cemetery that has turned upside down, but that's not how we recognise anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism changes its form and it survives because it always adapts to the circumstances around it. It has been religious, Christian anti-Semitism; it has been racial and it has been economic and social envy of the Jews and things like that. All of those still exist in different ways, but one of the new things that is very powerful today, is that anti-Semitism calls itself anti-Zionism, as if it is possible to be against the State of the Jews and not be anti-Semitic. So yes, in the West there is great ignorance today about what is anti-Semitism; there is a great ignorance about what Israel stands for and yes there is anti-Semitism.