More than six million Jews died during the Holocaust, the single worst genocide in human history. Silvain Gilbert survived. Now 74 years old, he lives in Hong Kong and advocates tolerance.

Gilbert began speaking to students at local international schools roughly four years ago. He breathes life and personal experience into the inhuman tragedy of Holocaust victims. After all, the statistics include his family. He lost 52 direct relatives while Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” nearly eradicated Jews from Europe.

Gilbert’s grandfather and aunts went to a concentration camp called Belzec — they were shot execution style, a few years before the Nazis had perfected mass-murder. Meanwhile, his grandmother, uncles and cousins hid in the mountains. They were eventually discovered. Nazis sent them to Auschwitz, the largest death camp. It was a site at which gas chamber showers, medical experiments and unspeakable atrocities occurred. Gilbert’s relatives never returned.

Gilbert was one of the Holocaust’s “hidden children”. He survived because his parents abandoned him to Catholic priests who spirited him into the Belgian countryside. His family name is a legacy from that period, modified from the common Jewish name Silber.

At the close of World War II, 78 percent of Europe’s Jewish population had perished. These were men and women, some highly educated, successful professionals, artists, musicians, even innocent children. They were accompanied by countless other Nazi-deemed undesirable social elements: gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, eastern European ethnic groups, and the physically handicapped. Aggregated Holocaust death counts reach 11-17 million.

The world will never know the true cost of such staggering human loss. Today, Hong Kong’s Jewish community honors the victims by hosting the United Nations Holocaust Remembrance Day Ceremony.

This evening’s ceremony marks the first official event of the recently established Hong Kong Holocaust and Tolerance Centre. Although the international date occurs annually on Jan 27 — the date Allied forces liberated Auschwitz — local organizers rescheduled to avoid conflicting with Chinese Lunar New Year festivities.

The ceremony is one of two annual Holocaust commemorations worldwide. The United Nations designated the date in 2005, the 60th anniversary of the Auschwitz’s liberation. Another commemoration — Yom HaShoah (Hebrew for “Holocaust Remembrance Day”) — is a national Israeli holiday, inaugurated in 1953. Yom HaShoah falls on April 27 in 2012.

Hong Kong’s Jewish community (of roughly 4,500 people) has honored both dates in the past. The event today will feature keynote speaker Stephen Smith. Smith is not Jewish, but he is a prominent public figurehead for Holocaust research.

Smith cofounded both Britain’s Holocaust Centre and the Aegis Trust for Genocide Prevention before taking his current position as executive director of the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education.

As a gentile, an outsider to the Jewish faith, Smith’s presence embodies the Hong Kong center’s goal to promote tolerance irrespective of nationality, creed or ethnicity.

The Shoah Foundation is home to the world’s largest video archive of Holocaust testimonies, with more than 52,000 recordings in 32 languages, representing 56 countries. The American film director Steven Spielberg first launched the archive, inspired by his experience making “Schindler’s List”, as the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994; it later came under the auspices of the university.

The archive is now accessible in Hong Kong via a computer terminal in the Holocaust and Tolerance Center inside Elsa High School, East Asia’s only Jewish international high school. The next closest access points are at centers as far flung as Australia and Eastern Europe. Japan is the only other Asian country with an actual Holocaust center (it has two). However, China’s Jewish community has a longer history, and China also played a role as a vital safe haven during WWII for Jewish refugees fleeing Europe.

Currently, the Hong Kong site occupies a temporary setup, tucked into the corner of the school library. “We still need to decide what form it might take. Is it a museum we want? Or is it an educational center?” said Jeremy Amias, a Hong Kong based business executive spearheading the project. “I like the vision of having a Center in a school with classrooms, facilities and students.”

Amias said the center is beginning to play a liaising role for foreign Holocaust educators and research institutions. Board members are in the preliminary stages of planning an academic symposium next November in conjunction with Yahad in Unum, an organization founded by a French Catholic priest, Father Patrick Desbois, who is chronicling undocumented Ukrainian mass graves during the past decade.

The center is also organizing local participation for the March of the Living, an annual march from Auschwitz to Birkenau on Yom HaShoah in Poland. Board member April Kaminsky welcomes interested local participants from all ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

In October of 2011, when Smith, the Shoah Foundation’s executive director previously visited Hong Kong for an academic conference, he introduced Amias to survivors of genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda. Amias felt a deep connection between their suffering, and the suffering of Holocaust survivors.

“Not to diminish the relevance of the Holocaust, but standing in the context of the Nanjing Massacre, (and genocides in) Cambodia or Rwanda, they all share relevant lessons,” he said. “This guy from Rwanda had lost his sister, mother and father. They’re all dead. There are very few Jews still alive today who remember that happening to them. That’s a powerful message to share.”

A mathematics and Jewish Studies teacher at Elsa High School, David Vincent, said a fellow teacher is currently creating Chinese language curriculum and ready-made lesson plans to be shared with schools around Hong Kong. They also wish to invite local teachers to use their Shoah Foundation access for supplemental teaching materials.

“At the moment, we’re in development stages of this project, but eventually we’d like to branch out to Chinese mainland as well,” Vincent said.

Gilbert moved to Hong Kong 16 years ago after a lifetime working as a diamond trader in Belgium. As the ranks of Holocaust survivors dwindle with the passing years, he feels compelled to share his story.

He never witnessed the horrors of a concentration camp, but he lives with the trauma shared by Holocaust survivors. He spoke with China Daily from his home in Clearwater Bay. Gilbert said he no longer believes in God, but he and his wife of 14 years, Sabine, are both active members of Hong Kong’s Jewish community (her father survived Auschwitz).

Talking about the Holocaust wasn’t always easy for Gilbert. “(When I started speaking at schools), honestly, I could hardly speak,” he said. “I was crying sometimes. Sometimes I would have to stop, but the more I spoke about it, the easier it became.”

At the age of five, Gilbert went into hiding, as authorities began rounding up Jews. His memories remain tangled in a swirl of terror and confusion. “How can the parents explain this to a child? Impossible. How can you explain what is death and life? How can you explain what it means to be Jewish?”

The mayor of Antwerp ordered police to raid Jewish homes. State-sanctioned thugs woke families in the night, forced them into the street, herded them into wagons, transported them to camps, confiscated their earthly possessions.

“We didn’t exist anymore. On the ID card, there was a big “J” for Jew. The child couldn’t go into the school. A woman can’t give birth in the hospital. You didn’t exist. So you had to hide or you were deported. You cannot hide a whole family, so we had to be separated.”

He had forged documents and food stamps to make slow, careful two-day journey, 100 kilometers into Belgium’s French speaking countryside. His parents had to abandon Gilbert and his 10-year-old sister Toni to a complete stranger.

“Why did my parents abandon me? Did I do something wrong, that’s how a child thinks.” He had to adopt a new existence. He began biting his nails. Nightmares disrupted his sleep, a problem he struggles with even today.

His savior was an elderly Catholic woman, Tante Fanny. She spoke French. Gilbert and his sister spoke only Flemish and Yiddish. They learned quickly and even pretended to be Catholic to complete their disguise.

The image of Jesus Christ on the crucifix initially shocked Gilbert, but he soon grew accustomed to the church’s foreign sights and sounds. He even served as an altar boy and remembers his prayers today.

Three years after going into hiding, the war ended. Fortunately, he reunited with his parents, but they had become strangers to him. He had forgotten his Yiddish and Flemish, and his parents didn’t speak French. His first Sunday back with his parents, he stole away from his home to attend Catholic mass with his sister.

As the years progressed, they regained their Jewish identities and learned of their parent’s struggle. His mother went into hiding in Brussels. His father went to a work camp to build the Nazi’s wall of defense along the Atlantic. When Nazis were about to start deporting inmates, he escaped and reunited with Gilbert’s mother. But one day while in public, the Gestapo captured him and sent him to Auschwitz. Again he escaped, this time squeezing through a ventilation shaft of the crowded cattle wagon train.

Gilbert eventually followed his father’s footsteps into the diamond trade. He lived in Brussels, maybe a 25-minute drive from the villa where he hid as a child, but he was never able to return. He tried many times, but before he could drive down the road to the village, his stomach would clench in knots, and he couldn’t continue.

Then about nine years ago, he decided it was time. He returned to Mont-Saint-Guibert and located Tante Fanny’s villa. He learned the small village of 1,200 people had saved 21 Jewish children during the war. He met with the mayor and arranged an annual recognition for Tante Fanny, who saved four children, risking her own life in the process.

He also worked to have her name honored in Israel. At a park at Yad Vashem, her name is engraved in a stone record of the men and women who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust.

“For her, this was the city of Jesus Christ. And I know for her — she was very religious — I cannot make a better tribute than to put her name there in the park forever, for eternity.”

Not long after he began his efforts to honor Tante Fanny, he began speaking in schools. Talking has been therapeutic for him. The nightmares that plagued him since childhood, have left his dreams lately.

“I come to young people with a message of tolerance, to accept the stranger because he can bring you a lot — exactly because he is different,” Gilbert said.

“Not everybody should have the same religion. Not everybody should have the same folklore, the same cuisine, the same literature. What is beautiful in this world is that there are so many different cultures, and the paradox is that we are all the same. Both strangers want exactly the same thing. We both want happiness, to create a family, to achieve and educate our children. Exactly the same, we are no different, and we are different.”

He’s 400 pages into writing a book, in French, about his experiences. Eventually, he hopes to translate it into English and Chinese. Later in the year, he will speak for the first time in Macao and possibly the Chinese mainland.