It's more than 80 years since the end of The Holocaust, but the effects of that horrendous episode in human history are still being felt today – even within the Manchester United community.
The six million Jewish men, women and children that were murdered by the Nazis are particularly on our minds today (27th January), which is Holocaust Memorial Day in the United Kingdom and in many other countries around the world. As are the millions more from other communities who also lost their lives under Nazi persecution.
You might think: 'What has Manchester United got to do with such events?' But The Holocaust has impacted so many parts of our world, both in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and during the long decades since, that it's little surprise that our fanbase has its own connections.
United fan Jackie Field is a second-generation Holocaust survivor from north Manchester, whose father, Mayer Bomsztyk, was brought to the UK in 1945 after being liberated from the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp. Mayer had been separated from his family at the age of 11 and never saw his mother and older brother again.
Incredibly, he managed to forge a happy life for himself and his family after arriving in Manchester shortly after – with United and Old Trafford a keystone in his assimilation to a new community – but, inevitably, the past was never far away from his mind.
Mayer passed away in 2009 but, for Jackie, this time of year remains loaded with emotion and sadness. However, alongside those feelings lives a fierce determination: to ensure that the dangerous consequences of racial hatred are confronted head-on.
“What starts as hating somebody can lead to six million people being killed, unless people are educated and they learn tolerance,”she says. “So, it's a really important day for the whole world.
”But for us, as Jews, it never goes away. Not just because it's my family, or because a third of world Jewry were murdered and lives were changed forever. But because, if you ever spoke to a Holocaust survivor – and, of course, nowadays there are fewer – their message would always be: no hate. They saw what hate does to people and they would always say: look positively, be kind to people. So, although it seems a Jewish thing, it is a thing for humanity. And that's really the message that needs to get out.“
Jackie's father came from a small town in Poland called Staszów, which the Nazis invaded on 7th September 1939. The terrorising of the local Jewish community – which made up around half of the town's modest population (circa 11,000) – began almost immediately. Within a year, the first Jews from Staszów were taken to concentration camps and murdered.
Mayer and his family initially went into hiding, using the cellar of their building along with other Jewish families. But the non-Jewish neighbours soon revealed their whereabouts to the Nazis, and the family were separated: Mayer, then 11, was sent to work in a munitions factory, while his mother and older sister were taken to the notorious Auschwitz. After numerous traumatic experiences in work camps and on 'death marches', he ended up in Buchenwald.
“As a family, we did [hear about his experiences],”remembers Jackie, who is one of the three children Mayer had after he married. “As children, we would talk about his family, then as we got older, he would talk about the horror in the concentration camps and how he was affected.
”There were odd stories, like he would never eat a potato with its skin on – either a baked potato or a new potato. And the reason was he worked in the kitchen for a while at Buchenwald, and he stole a potato because they were starving, and he was beaten up by one of the guards for stealing this potato. But from then on, all the time he was married to my mum and we were at home, he would never eat a potato with the skin on, because that memory stuck with him. That never went away, or the significance of it.
“Another prisoner at Buchenwald, who was in the bunk above his, came back from work one day and had his legs hanging over the bunk, and the mud from his shoes dropped in my dad's soup,” she continues, recalling another story. This man became one of his life-long friends.
“And they always talked about this. About how you got so little food and how that bit of soup that kept you going now had the mud from these shoes. It seems irrelevant, but that was a major thing in his life. And it was one of those stories that he always told. So, we found out about the experiences then, and what happened to him. It doesn't go away, but he managed to build a life after that.”
The trauma of being separated from his family and losing his mother, who was gassed at Auschwitz, never left Mayer. But the legacy of his life is not only what he suffered as a child, but the strength of human spirit that enabled him and other Holocaust survivors to endure and then build new lives for themselves.
After the Buchenwald camp was liberated in April 1945, Mayer and other orphans were initially taken to Prague, from where they flew to Carlisle in the UK. Britain had agreed to take in 1,000 orphans from Europe, and he and others wound up in Windermere in the Lake District – which he likened to 'paradise' – and then London, Glasgow and, in his case, Manchester.
“He was a very chirpy fellow, and he was lucky that he didn’t suffer from nightmares,”explains Jackie, who is a member of the Manchester United Jewish Supporters’ Club.
“But because he lost all his family and he came over with a group of boys, they became his family. And their kids became our family. Because we didn't have aunts and uncles and grandparents on his side.
”When they first came over after the war and started to try and live lives, what they wanted to do was live like everybody else. They didn't want to be treated like damaged goods. So, things like buying tickets for Old Trafford, or joining a golf club, or starting work... they wanted to be like other people.
“Football was part of my dad feeling normal again, and he was always going to support Manchester United. All of them did. Every week, he and his mates would meet at Manchester Central and go to the match together. They were great memories. Though there later came a point where he couldn't even watch on the television because he got so excited about it, so we thought it wasn't that good for him as he got older!”
Playing football also had an important impact on Mayer's life, too: after he and his pals had formed an amateur team called Springfield, many local girls would come down to watch the games. One of them would become Mayer’s wife, and Jackie's mum.
In 2001, Mayer and some of his family, Jackie included, returned to Staszów as part of an episode of the BBC’s long-running show Songs of Praise. Understandably, it brought back some painful memories. But it also helped him to move forward.
“We were all really nervous about it because we didn't know how he was going to react; if we were opening a can of worms,”admits Jackie. “We stood in this cellar where he and five other families had been hiding, and he broke down. So naturally we all broke down, and as we walked out of that cellar he said: 'That's it, I'm done. I'm closing the book.' And, in the end, it was a positive experience.
”We went to the Jewish cemetery and we said prayers there; we saw the building he used to live in; he told us where he'd seen his first dead body; showed us the square where all the Jews were gathered before they were deported and taken to concentration camps. For him, that closed the book – that part of his life was well and truly over. He'd seen it and had no desire to ever go back there.“
For Jackie, the future is now about continuing to keep alive Mayer's life and experiences. And spreading the message of human fellowship and non-violence that she knows he believed in. Because the responsibility of remembrance doesn't end with the survivors – it lives on through their children, their grandchildren and through all of us.
“The most important thing is that it's not forgotten,”she concludes. “It is important, because there's so much friction in the world at the moment. And if everybody was a bit more tolerant, and a bit kinder and more understanding, we'd all be happier. It would be a better place.
”That's the message of the survivors. They didn't carry hate, or vengeance, because there's nothing you could do other than go on and build a life... I just wish he could pop back and see us all for 20 minutes, now his grandchildren are married, and there's great-grandchildren…
“Pop back on a Saturday afternoon and we can all watch the football.”