Joining her will be two other speakers, who will pass on memories from very different perspectives. Eitan Neishlos, 42, an Australian tech entrepreneur and philanthropist, will tell how his Jewish grandmother narrowly survived the Nazi death squads, courtesy of a Christian couple who sheltered her. Nobuki Sugihara will tell how his father, Chiune issued transit visas that helped at least 2,000 Jews escape while working as Japan’s vice-consul to Lithuania, earning comparisons to Oskar Schindler.

The three speakers have been brought together ahead of next month’s March of the Living, an international education programme that brings thousands of people from all over the world to Poland each year to walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau, the two adjacent camps where 1.1 million Jews died. This year’s march – the first in three years because of the pandemic – comes with added symbolism.

Firstly, it is likely to be the last march featuring death camp survivors, many of whom are now frail, and wish to make this their final journey. Secondly, it comes at a time when Europe’s eastern flank is one again ablaze, courtesy of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, where many of the Holocaust’s worst crimes took place. More than a millions Jews perished there in the Second World War, including at the Babyn Yar massacre in Kyiv, when 34,000 were killed between 29 and 30 September 1941. Earlier this month, the Babyn Yar memorial garden in Kyiv was hit by shrapnel from a Russian missile, making a mockery of Putin’s claims to be “de-Nazifying” Ukraine. The Kremlin’s leader, if nobody else, could perhaps do with refreshing his memory about what Nazism really is.

“It makes these messages far more important, to stand up against any form of hatred, or antisemitism,” Hohnecker says. “We see hate everywhere, and how easy it is for one nation to attack another.”

Yet the young also need reminding, says Neishlos, whose Courage to Care organisation in Australia teaches high school students about the importance of being “upstanders” against prejudice. It is only because people did that for his grandmother, Tamara Ziserman, he points out, that he is here to pass the message on today.

Unlike Hohnecker, Neishlos grew up knowing something of his grandmother’s story. But he only got the full details after her death in 2011, when his mother gave him a shoebox full of his grandmother’s own notes, penned in flawless handwriting.

They told how she was saved from the Nazi death squads who killed her parents by Janina and Piotr Chodosevitch, who took the weeping, terrified 11-year-old into their own home. Much of her time was spent hidden in a dark, dank basement, or amid the soot and insects of the chimney.

The Chodosevitch family’s courage was remarkable – and unrewarded. They themselves were later arrested and executed, along with one of their toddlers. Despite that, Tamara was then given shelter by Piotr’s mother. At Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial site, the Chodosevitch family are now among 27,000 names listed as “the Righteous Among The Nations” – a roll-call of non-Jews who risked their lives to Holocaust victims.  

“I can’t think of a more powerful example of the righteous,” says Neishlos. “When the Nazis discovered what the Chodosevitch family was doing, they took them to the same location where my late grandmother’s family were murdered, and shot them dead with one of their babies.”

He adds: “I don’t think we will lose the moral message [of the Holocaust], as long as my generation carries on the torch. That’s what this campaign is all about.”

For Hohnecker, it is not so much a question of passing a torch on, as rekindling it altogether. Her own father never spoke much about her grandfather Hugo, beyond saying that he was excessively fond of corporal punishment. So after reading Hugo’s memoir, she resolved to find out more, delving into German historical records.

The Nazi ancestry, it turned out, ran on both sides of her family, with her maternal grandfather, Rolf Weigele, serving in the SS. Then, in 2017, an aunt told her that Hugo’s wife, her grandmother Isolde, had been a guard at a children’s concentration camp at Lodz in Poland.