Leon Greenman...

I’m a regular reader of The Week, which is a weekly magazine that digests all the big national and international news stories into bitesize chunks. It’s a wonderful magazine and whatever I’m doing or however busy I am I always put an hour aside to read it from cover to cover.

A recent edition featured the obituary of Leon Greenman, who was the only Englishman to be sent to Auschwitz. His wife and son died in the gas chambers and for two and a half years he was a slave labourer who was subjected to beating and experimentation.

He survived Auschwitz and, widowed, returned to the UK to live in London’s East End where he worked as a market porter. Few wanted to know about the things he’d seen and he never talked about the horrors he’d witnessed… until he saw a National Front rally in 1962 and feared the race hate of facism could happen again but this time in the UK.

So for the next 46 years he went into schools and talked about his experiences in Auschwitz in the hope of convincing people that race hatred and intolerance are never a solution.

For his anti-facist stance he received death threats from the far right and he had to install wire mesh on the windows of his Ilford home to prevent the bricks that were occasionally launched through them from doing any damage.

For his tireless campaigning against facism he received an OBE. He died on March 7 2008 aged 97.

Reading his story made me realise that in our current age of half-witted celebrities and over-paid multi-millionaire footballers there still are real heroes doing important work out there and Leon was certainly one of those.

Rest in peace...