Ahead of the national Holocaust Memorial Day taking place tomorrow, we look at the lives of two Holocaust survivors who made their home in Dorset. Although ARIEH SIMONSOHN of Winfrith and HARRY GRENVILLE of Dorchester are no longer with us, Joanna Davis shares their courageous stories of survival as we remember the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust and subsequent genocides.

THIS picture tells a story that words could never do justice to.

It is one of the most iconic images from the Holocaust and captures a seven-year-old boy with his hands up, surrendering to armed German soldiers. The boy's mother is just behind him and the horror etched on the youngster's face speaks volumes.

This image was taken in 1943 in the Warsaw Ghetto, from which Jews were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp. It shows German soldiers pointing guns at women and children during liquidation of the ghetto.

The boy in the photo, Ludwick Simonsohn, survived and spent the final years of his life in the peaceful village of Winfrith Newburgh, near Dorchester, where he was known to friends and neighbours simply as Arieh.

He passed away on March 26, 2017, aged 81.

Before living in Winfrith, Arieh made his home in Lulworth where at first residents had no idea of what this keen bridge player, a popular figure in the village, had been through. He escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto, where thousands died from starvation, disease, torture and murder.

Mike Halsall, Arieh's former neighbour, said he found out more about his neighbour's history 'over time'.

"We were next door neighbours when he lived in Lulworth and we would play bridge with each other. He was also a very keen chess player. He would go round to different people's houses to play with them.

"He talked quite a bit about what happened to him. He was a great one for talking and seemed to have an encyclopaedic memory of what happened and knew a lot about the history of the Holocaust," he said.

When being marched out of the ghetto with his parents on their way to work, Arieh was able to flee. In a 2005 interview he remembered, "My mother said 'When you get to a certain corner, you run' and I did.

Arieh believes his family, apart from his aunt and uncle who had already left the country, were transported to Treblinka death camp where they were murdered.

A half-Jewish half-Polish man called Mr Schreidman, who worked as a driver for the Gestapo, risked his life to hide Arieh. Mr Schreidman was eventually executed by Polish nationalists and Arieh became the subject of frequent abuse from Mr Schreidman's wife Janina and her son.

Arieh was then forced to look after himself. He learnt many skills including running with a gang, removing German landmines to help the Allied advance and stealing food. He triumphed over all the odds and came to the UK for a new life.

He arrived on the Ragne - the first ship of child refugees saved from destitution by the efforts of Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld and the Jewish emergency council. Arieh arrived in this country with nothing but ragged clothes, a multitude of diseases, lice and a head clouded with horrors of the previous five years.

Arieh worked for an airline in London before coming to Dorset because of his love of the countryside. He got married and had three sons.

Arieh went on to give talks at Holocaust memorial events throughout the region - and couldn't speak highly enough of his adopted country.

On having a pacemaker fitted at Southampton General Hospital, he said, back in 2005: "I told the surgeon how strange I found this. Fifty years ago "My life wasn't worth a brass nickel, and here I was with this wonderful team trying to give me a quality of life and let me live a little longer.

"It is costing the NHS a fortune and this wonderful country is allowing me to have this without even knowing who I am."

Arieh's funeral was held in West Lulworth village hall on Friday, April 7, 2017. Donations were requested for the Abbotsbury Ward of Dorset County Hospital in Dorchester - Arieh's way of giving something back to his much loved NHS, which helped him so much.

IT took decades for Harry Grenville to find out what happened to his parents.

Holocaust evacuee Harry, who came to call Dorchester home, finally discovered in 2013 that his mother and father were executed in Auschwitz, after a photo of his father’s suitcase there was sent to him 69 years on.

Harry, who was born in 1926, and his sister Hannah were among 10,000 Jewish children sent to Britain from Nazi Germany before the war as part of the Kindertransport refugee mission.

Their parents, Jacob and Klara Greilsamer and grandmother Sara Ottenheimer, were later rounded up and sent to an internment camp in Czechoslovakia for two years.

Harry and his sister received brief notes via the Red Cross on their welfare until a last chilling message in 1944 which stated the family were being sent ‘east’.

He was 18 at the time and suspected that this meant to the extermination camps in Poland. Harry never saw or heard from them again.

He received confirmation of their deaths at the end of World War Two but never knew when or where they were killed.

In 2013 Harry was sent a poignant picture of an old suitcase that has spent years as part of an exhibit of a pile of cases at the Auschwitz Museum. On it was the name Jacob Greilsamer and a serial number.

Harry's family owned a successful packaging company in Germany until it was taken over by a member of the SS in 1938.

In July 1939 he and Hannah, who was nine at the time, were sent to England and lived with a foster family in Cornwall.

Harry remembered that when on the Kindertransport, he accidentally pulled the emergency cord, stopping the train at one point, but was lucky because ‘had the Gestapo been around at the time it would have been a disaster’.

A keen contributor to the local community, Harry was known for his efforts picking up litter around the Borough Gardens in Dorchester. He died in November aged 92.

BOTH Arieh and Harry spent years talking at Holocaust Memorial events speaking about their experience of the Holocaust and reminding everyone of the duty to keep the memory alive.

Yesterday Harry's presence was much-missed at Dorchester's Holocaust Memorial Day, where he was a regular speaker. A celebration of his life was held before a production of And Then They Came for Me - Remembering the World of Anne Frank.

Emma Scott, community development officer at Dorchester Town Council, said: "Harry’s first-hand reflections of surviving the Holocaust himself, through being brought to the UK as a child, served as a powerful reminder that these terrible events have happened in the not so distance past.

“Harry spoke at the event, as well as visiting local schools, to help ensure that we remain aware of the risks, sadly lurking in every society, of these types of genocides taking place again.

“As well as his work for peace, Harry contributed in so many other ways to his local community as well, volunteering for a range of different organisations, all of whom feel his loss, as indeed does the whole town.”