The International Day of Commemoration to mark victims of the Holocaust is on Friday 27 January with events being held in Dorset.

In Dorchester a service is to be held on the day at the Corn Exchange from 12.30pm – 1.30pm, whilst elsewhere in the county events are to be held before and after that date.

The Holocaust is being marked in Wimborne with a Holocaust Memorial Service in Wimborne Minster church on Sunday 23 February at 2.30pm.

The Bournemouth and Poole HMD Committee will host the free-to-attend Memorial Day event at the Lighthouse, Poole on Sunday 29 January. The theme this year is ‘Ordinary People’ to commemorate those who quietly help those in need and do extraordinary things to make the community a better place.

The Act of Commemoration, which will mark the start of the event, will commemorate all the ordinary adults and young people who have quietly done extraordinary things.

Lynda Ford-Horne, one of the organisers of Bournemouth and Poole Holocaust Memorial Day, said: “Ordinary people were perpetrators, bystanders, rescuers, witnesses – and ordinary people were victims. Our theme this year highlights the ordinary people who let genocide happen, the ordinary people who actively perpetrated genocide, and the ordinary people who were persecuted. The event will also prompt us to consider how we can perhaps play a bigger part than we might imagine in challenging prejudice today.”

Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines will be the event’s main speaker where she shares her story as a Holocaust survivor.

In her talk, Lady Milena will share her story of survival at 10 years old when her father was forewarned to leave the country before the Nazi invasion due to his involvement with Thomas Mann, who was known to be a supporter of the democratic Czechoslovak state and government against the German nationalist Sudeten movement.

The family were able to leave Prague on the last Kindertransport train that left Prague on 31 July 1939 with the help of Trevor Chadwick and Nicholas Winton, organisers of the Kindertransport operation which brought nearly 10,000 Jewish children in danger to the United Kingdom.

Lady Milena continued her schooling at a refugee Czechoslovak school in Llanwrtyd Wells in Wales, where she finished in 1945. After school, she went on to obtain her Nursery Nursing Diploma and worked in a children’s home before moving to France to work as an Au Pair for two years. In 1954, Lady Milena married her husband, Sir George Grenfell-Baines, who she had two children with, and now has four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Bournemouth and Poole HMD Committee is hoping to fill all 669 seats in the Lighthouse Theatre, as this is the same number of children that were rescued on the last Kindertransport train.

The official Holocaust Memorial Day marks the liberation of Auschwitz. It is an annual event to commemorate and remember the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, alongside the millions of other people killed under Nazi persecution and in genocides that followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.

Lynda Ford-Horne, said: “With the current struggles that everyone is facing, acts of kindness are so important to pull communities back together and remind everyone that you don’t have to have a lot to be able to help someone else.

“We’re so grateful to Lady Milena for being willing to share her story. We must continue to remember and share these stories and to forever honour the victims and survivors.”

The free memorial event is being held at the Lighthouse Poole on Sunday,  29 January from 2 pm to 4.30 pm, and can be booked on Eventbrite at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/commemoration-of-holocaust-memorial-day-2023-tickets-483001479427