In 1944, a man started growing tomatoes. I don’t know if he had ever grown them before, or even that he particularly liked tomatoes, but he began growing them. A very ordinary plant, a very ordinary thing to do.

put the rest of the family including Steven on the so-called Barnerveld List, a group of prominent Dutch Jews who were held at a castle in Barneveld rather than being deported, an action which delayed their arrival at the camps and almost certainly saved their lives.

Hundreds of people attended the funeral of much-loved survivor Zigi Shipper at Bushey New Cemetery as his two daughters Lu and Michelle made speeches paying tribute to their father.

William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales, released a statement expressing their sadness at his passing. Zigi famously accompanied them on their 2017 visit to Stutthof, from which he survived. In 2021, Zigi met Kate again with his friend Manfred Goldberg, to mark

What makes it extraordinary is he was in Westerbork, a transit camp established by the Nazis in the Netherlands. What makes it even more extraordinary is that before he was murdered he tasked a young boy with continuing to grow his tomatoes in the event of his death. When he was deported, the boy, Steven, continued to grow tomatoes in memory of the man who grew them before him.

Steven Frank was born into a secular Jewish family in Amsterdam, one of three sons. He loved football, was good at school, didn’t always listen to his parents. He was ordinary.

When the Nazis occupied Holland, life changed forever. Steven’s father joined the Resistance, issuing false papers to people fleeing to Switzerland, hiding people in his home. He was betrayed, arrested, deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and murdered.

The one concession the Nazis made was to

Eventually the family were sent from Barneveld to Westerbork, a transit camp, and then to Terezin in Czechoslovakia, where Steven survived conditions beyond imagination – lack of sanitation, insufficient food and deportations – a euphemism for murder.

Eventually he and his remaining family were liberated by the Red Army. Steven and his brothers were three of the fewer than 150 children believed to have survived the camp out of 15,000 children who passed through. It is almost impossible to comprehend – 1.5 million children were murdered during the Holocaust, six million Jewish people in total.

When we remember these events, it is easy to think of those affected as a nameless, faceless mass. But in remembering the stories of ordinary people like Steven we remember that before the Nazis they had lives, families, hobbies. They were real people, individuals, families, friends, communities. And because they were Jewish, they were murdered.

That is why we tell the story of Steven, and the man before him, growing tomatoes. Because it is an extraordinary story, born of ordinariness.

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