Tuesday, January 27, was Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) and was marked in Maybole with a service at 11am at the Greenside.

This was organised by the local branch of the Royal British Legion Scotland and branch chaplain Rev Brian Hendrie led the service which was also attended by pupils from all four local schools and members of the public. The service was marshalled by Alex Davidson; Carrick Academy S5 pupil Iain Fisher played the lament and George Taylor, Maybole Branch Chairman laid a wreath on behalf of the Legion. Standard bearers were Ray O’Neill and George Tevendale.

January 27 is the anniversary of the date of the liberation of Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau and this year, the 70th anniversary of the liberation, the theme was “Keep the memory alive”. Mr Hendrie asked primary pupils to hold up the theme and Carrick Academy captains to hold up the name “David Berger”.

David Berger was born in 1915 in Przemysl, south-east Poland. He left his hometown when the Germans invaded in 1939 and was shot dead in Vilnius, Lithuania two years later in 1941. He belonged to Akiva Zionist Youth Movement and in 1939 he went to Vilnius, where Zionist youth groups gathered. David sent a group photo taken in 1940 in Vilnius to his girlfriend, Elza Gross, who had left Poland in 1938 for Palestine. On March 2, 1941, David sent a postcard to Elza to say goodbye, as he correctly assumed he would not survive. He wrote to her that “the worst of it all is the lack of knowledge of when I will return and see you. “If something happens, I would want there to be somebody who would remember that someone named D. Berger had once lived.  This will make things easier for me in the difficult moments.”