Interviews

Pinchas Gutter is from Łódź, Poland, where he enjoyed a very happy childhood before the Second World War. He survived six different Nazi concentration camps – a life forever changed by the traumatic events of the Holocaust. 

The worst moment of all, was when he lost his father, mother, and sister on the same day, murdered by the Nazis.

In this powerful and moving interview marking this week of Holocaust Remembrance at the UN, he tells Nathan Beriro, that he turned “almost into a nothing”. Survivors, he says, “can’t ever run away from what they have lived”. 

A dusty old suitcase that lay undiscovered for decades in a backyard shed in Australia, has revealed an astonishing story of friendship, courage and resistance to the Nazi regime and its extermination camps, where millions of Jews were systematically murdered during the Second World War. 

Letters inside the suitcase relate to an Australian family with a generational commitment to peace, whose friendship with another family in Germany, the Schindlers, produced a network bonded by a powerful sense of humanity, to save peoples' lives. 

The Chair of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), former Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete, says that although the key objective is helping disadvantaged children everywhere get access to quality schooling, supporting girls is their top priority.

In an exclusive interview with UN News, Mr. Kikwete said that gender equality is hard-wired “in everything we do”.

There was already a learning gap before the pandemic, with disadvantaged and marginalized children lagging far behind in terms of educational achievement.

Since the onset of COVID-19, which has seen millions of children affected by school closures, it has become a gulf, and by some estimates, around 70 per cent of 10-year-olds can’t read a simple piece of text.

One week after the volcanic eruption and tsunami that hit the islands of Tonga, the UN Coordination Specialist there, says people “are still overwhelmed with the magnitude of the disaster.” 

The disaster has affected 84,000 people, more than 80 per cent of the population, and killed three people - although many islands have yet to be reached.  

Stunning images of a just-discovered deep-sea coral reef near Tahiti travelled across the world on Thursday – the result of a UNESCO-supported scientific mission to map the oceans.

For dive team member Laetitia Hedouin, from France’s National Centre of Scientific Research, it was an exciting chance to examine how living coral can adapt to our warming seas, as she told UN News’s Daniel Johnson.

The head of the UN labour agency warns that a recovery in the international labour market is still a long way off, with a lot of uncertainty for workers and businesses, hoping for the economy to bounce back.

Guy Ryder, the Director-General of the International Labour Organization (ILO), spoke to UN News at the launch of the agency’s World Employment and Social Outlook Trends (WESO) 2022 report, which offers gloomy projections of increased unemployment, and widening inequality between developed and developing countries.

A powerful and haunting exhibition featuring the Hibakusha – the Japanese survivors of the nuclear bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki more than three-quarters of a century ago – has just been staged at UN Headquarters in New York.

It’s not the first exhibit dedicated to the issue of nuclear disarmament that Japanese art director Erico Platt has created for the UN, and although she is far too young to be a hibakusha, she is proud to amplify their voices against the horrors of nuclear weapons.

Amid daily mass protests in Sudan and the reported lethal shooting of three demonstrators in Khartoum on Thursday, the UN rights office, OHCHR has urged the country’s military rulers to respect people’s fundamental freedoms. 

Tensions have been running high since generals seized power in a coup last October, and there have been daily protests since the resignation of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok last weekend, as OHCHR’s Seif Magango tells UN News’s Daniel Johnson. 

In the three decades leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, world tourism grew steadily year on year. But in 2020, the industry suffered an unprecedent hit, accounting for a staggering 70% of the fall in global gross domestic product (GDP).

The UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) has been constantly assessing the impact of the pandemic, and working hard to help kickstart the industry on behalf of millions around the world who rely on it.