Channels

Photo: Liverpool Football Club
Renee Salt surrounded by the squad members
Photo: Liverpool Football Club

Holocaust survivor meets Liverpool Football Club

The British soccer club invited Renee Salt to speak with the junior squad members as part of its fight against anti-Semitism; Salt told the boys she was ten when the Nazis ripped her from her family; she decided to tell her story now in light of the recent rise in anti-Semitism in Europe.

British soccer team Liverpool Football Club hosted an event during which members of its junior academy squad met with a Holocaust survivor. Tom Brewitt, a defender on the team, said that it was important for him and his teammates to learn about this period in history.

 

 

Renee Salt, a holocaust survivor living in Liverpool, met with the junior team players and told them her personal story or surviving Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.

 

Renee Salt and the Liverpool Football Club junior squad (Photo: LFC)
Renee Salt and the Liverpool Football Club junior squad (Photo: LFC)

 

The players range in age from 14 to 23, and they are considered the future stars of the prominent soccer team. After the event, the players were photographed together with Salt.

 

Photo: Liverpool Football Club
Photo: Liverpool Football Club

 

The meeting was due to see new guidelines set by the soccer club for the upcoming season, in an effort to create a deeper connection between the team and its fans. Moreover, the club even tweeted that it welcomes any initiatives that aim to decrease anti-Semitic acts in the stadium.

 

The UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation also took part in the event, hoping to increase local knowledge and awareness about the realities of the Holocaust.

 

Two weeks prior, the Liverpool Football Club issued a statement that any anti-Semitic fans will be removed from the stadium's premises, emphasizing that it will take a “zero-tolerance” policy toward discriminatory language or behavior exhibited by its fans. Any fans found guilty of using racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic or ableist language, of chanting offensive songs or of prohibited behavior will be removed from the fields and subject to a ban which could last for an entire season or forever.

 

Renee Salt was ten years old when the Nazis broke into her family apartment, separated her and her parents from her younger sister and sent them to the Lodz Ghetto. From there they were sent to Auschwitz, where her father was murdered. She was then sent with her mother to Bergen-Belsen, where her mother eventually perished, leaving young Renee alone in the world.

  

For years, she remained silent about what she had endured. Recently, though, with the rise of anti-Semitism in present-day Europe, Salt found herself fearing for the lives of her grandchildren and therefore decided to speak up, so that such atrocities would never repeat themselves.

 


פרסום ראשון: 10.31.16, 12:50
 new comment
Warning:
This will delete your current comment