A POIGNANT event was held in Bolton to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

More than 260 children, from nine schools, attended Wednesday’s service in the Festival Hall, Albert Halls.

Civic and community leaders also attended the event to remember the victims of The Holocaust — the systematic murder of six million Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War.

Members of Bolton School Girls’ Division Quartet played string instruments and Carl Austin, who is currently studying at the Royal Academy of Music, performed a piece on the viola.

Frank Baigel, president of Manchester Jewish Representative Council, said: “It was a poignant event.

“I was particularly impressed by the involvement of so many varied schools and of the message conveyed to the children of ‘hope not hate’ in their daily lives.”

The service, led by Revd Canon Matthew Thompson and also attended by Rabbi Joseph Lever, had the theme of journeys.

Mr Baigel shared stories about his old school friend Tibor Molnar, later known as Terry Samuels, who was dragged away from his home in Hungary six months before the end of the Second World War and endured the journeys to Ravensbruck and Belsen camps where his mother died.

He added: “I also felt it a privilege to tell the story of Frank Henderson, originally known as Friedrich Hirschfeld, who also made many journeys, arriving here alone in 1939 and serving in the British Army during the Second World War. Later, in common with many other Jewish refugees, he called his son George in gratitude to King George VI who signed the government decree allowing them into the UK.”