JUST over four years ago an amazing thing happened in Bournemouth.

Mark Goldfinger, who was a boy of just nine when German tanks rolled into his home town of Rabka in Poland at the start of World War Two, met Werner Oder, a minister at Tuckton Christian Fellowship.

The incredible part was that Werner’s father, Wilhelm, was involved in setting up a Nazi SS extermination training school in Rabka.

Now, after an emotional journey through the past, they plan to take a trip together to Rabka in August, where they will be involved in a conference aimed at helping people, in particular the young, understand the horrors of the Holocaust.

Werner told the Daily Echo: “I always felt as a Christian that I wanted to go to Rabka to do some kind of reconciliation while there was still time.

“It’s such a unique window of opportunity in history that cannot be repeated.”

Mark has just returned from Israel, where he marked his sister Lucia’s 90th birthday. She gave written evidence in Wilhelm Oder’s trial and almost certainly met him during the Second World War.

Mark, now 80, said he represented the children of Rabka, while his sister represented the older people and Werner the perpetrators.

Rabka’s school trained the Einsatzgruppen death squads – on live people.

Mark said: “We were living very close to this school. I could hear the screaming sometimes and certainly firing of rifles. People just don’t seem to have learnt or understood. Rabka was the cradle of the German fascist hate campaign against Jews and gypsies and it was just horrendous.”

He said that members of the SS were brought in from far and wide to witness “demonstration” executions.

Mark and some of his family escaped Rabka the night before the Nazis rounded everyone up to be either killed or transported to concentration camps – they were tipped off by the wife of an SS member.

They got split up. Mark – or Marek – lived in the Krakow ghetto and later spent time at Plaszow concentration camp and then Buchenwald, where he was liberated on April 11, 1945.

The Russians captured Oder in early 1945 – he had been responsible for ordering the execution of many Jews.

He was actually Austrian and came from Linz, the same town as Adolf Hitler.

He was sentenced at a tribunal in Austria after the war and was released from prison in 1953. He died in the late 1960s.

Werner said: “I’ve caused the conference to be organised because we want to teach the next generation.

“In the words of Simon Wiesenthal, the new generation must hear what the old generation refused to tell them.

“When we don’t tell them, we miss the chance to say that these things must never happen again.

“It’s a great way to use the memories of the past to build a future for the new generation.

“We have a responsibility to teach them.”

Mark added: “They need to hear it from the people who were involved in one way or another.”