Chichester honours Holocaust Memorial Day

Clare Apel, from the Chichester Marks Holocaust Memorial Day committee, said: “For Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27 this year in the Minerva Theatre at 7.45pm, Kate Mosse will be interviewing David Nott, the amazing surgeon who goes into war zones and trains junior doctors to do unbelievable surgery to patients wounded in war zones. He is an amazing man.

“We are also putting on the new film Finding Anne Frank at New Park on January 26 and 27. This is a new animation film on the story of Anne Frank made by an Israeli director. It will be shown to about 200 school children with educational workshops after each performance.”

Clare added: “David Nott is a Welsh consultant surgeon who works mainly in London hospitals as a general and vascular surgeon, but is famous worldwide for his volunteer work in disaster and war zones. Having recognised that training others could greatly increase his capacity to help, Nott established the David Nott Foundation, along with his wife Elly, to organise training in emergency surgery for others working in war and disaster zones. He has been honoured for this dangerous work and is now often styled the Indiana Jones of surgery. He began working in disaster and war zones in 1993 when he saw footage of the war in Sarajevo. He has worked in disaster and war zones for several weeks each year since then, working as a volunteer surgeon for agencies such as Médecins Sans Frontières and the International Committee of the Red Cross. He has also served in a similar capacity for the Royal Auxiliary Air Force where he holds the rank of wing commander. The locations have included Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chad, Darfur, Gaza, Haiti, Iraq, Libya, Sierra Leone and opposition-held areas of Syria. Between 2013 and 2014 Nott trained and assisted medical students and other doctors to conduct trauma surgeries in opposition-held East Aleppo.

“During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, he visited Ukraine to train surgeons, in conjunction with UOSSM International. There will be a question and answer session after his talk.”

Tickets are available from the Festival Theatre.

CMHMD has commemorated HMD in Chichester since 2015. 2015: Service at the Abel-Smith Chapel and at University of Chichester; 2016: Opera The Last Train by Carl Davies at the Cathedral and a screening of ‘Conspiracy’ at the New Park Cinema; 2017: Screening of Citizen No, 2 (Pol Pot Massacres) by Robert Lemkin cousin of the legal definition of genocide; 2018: Push the Opera by Howard Moody. Also performed at the Speaker’s apartments, the House of Commons; 2021: The Mozart Question.

Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT) encourages remembrance in a world scarred by genocide. It promotes and supports Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) – the international day on January 27 to remember the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, alongside the millions of other people killed under Nazi persecution of other groups and during more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.

January 27 marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.