Thank you for your interest, if you are here to get a ticket for my talk on 24 January 2024 you are out of luck - they are all sold. Which is great for me and my fundraising and means I may do the talk again another time.

Thanks for taking the time to visit my JustGiving page. Here's why I'm doing this.....

This year, I am 60 years old, when I was 31, I found out my mother had survived Auschwitz and the Holocaust; and therefore, that I was Jewish. So began the second half of my life with a different background, family story and “identity”.

In July this year I am going to re-trace my mother’s Holocaust and emigration by bike, cycling from my home in South West England to Targu Mures, the town in central Romania where she was born; and deported from. It’s going to be a journey of nearly 4000Km, which is further than this year’s Tour de France, visiting Auschwitz on the way. I’m planning to ride it over four weeks, a week longer than the Tour but as I'll be loaded with camping gear and self supported, a significant challenge, even though I’m a keen cyclist.

My mother arrived as a refugee in England in 1947 and eventually made a life for herself and lived till she was 96. It’s taken me the five years since she died to understand it’s my generation that increasingly has the most direct link to and experience of a family that went through the Holocaust. And it’s my generation that can use this to keep Holocaust stories alive. I am hoping to tell my family story through the Holocaust Education Trust’s (HET) ambassador programme that provides speakers in schools and colleges. 

My cycle trip should enable me to better tell my story because the route is a re-tracing of my mother’s steps, in reverse. I will cycle from my home in South West England through France, Belgium and Germany to the factory in what was then Czechoslovakia, where she was made to do forced labour. Then on to Auschwitz in Poland, and then south through Slovakia, Hungary and on to Targu Mures in Transylvania Romania.

I’d like to use my journey to help raise awareness about the Holocaust and to raise money for the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) and the Holocaust Education Trust (HET). The AJR, because they supported my mother emotionally and financially in her last years and the HET to support their work educating about the Holocaust.

Any money raised here will initially go to HET who have an agreement in place with the AJR to split the money equally.