The Dora Love Prize

The Dora Love Prize 2024

Whilst in the first 11 years, the Dora Love Prize was administered and generously funded by the University of Essex, from this year (2023-24) it will be organised by the Dora Love Prize Advisory Group, with the University of Essex acting as the main sponsor.

In contrast to previous years, there will be two induction days to kick-start the new round of the Dora Love Prize: on 10 January 2024 at the University of Essex, Colchester Campus, and on 29 January 2024 at The Hold/University of Suffolk, Ipswich. Participation will also be possible remotely without attending any of induction day, and we there are two (possibly three) Canadian schools taking part this year; one of then, Collingwood School, for the third time. There will be an online resource bank available from mid-January for those schools who for whatever reason cannot come to one of the in-person induction days.

The theme of the 2024 Dora Love Prize will be "The Fragility of Freedom - what can you do in your local communities to support understanding and equality for all groups of society?" At a time when our society is rapidly becoming more fractured than ever, the Dora Love Prize Advisory Group feel that this is an important theme for students to engage with.

Whilst the official deadline for registering for the Dora Love Prize 2024 has now passed, we are still able to accommodate a few late-comers.

If you'd like to find out more about taking part, or have any questions about the Prize, please contact the chair of the Dora Love Prize Advisory Group, Professor (em) Rainer Schulze, at rainer@essex.ac.uk

The Dora Love Prize 2023

Over 200 school students from Essex, Suffolk, and Kent took part in the on-campus launch of the 2023 Dora Love Prize and we welcomed them back for our Prize-giving event in June 2023. To find out more about what the Prize could do for your students, read our blog by the Collingwood School team who took part in the 2022 Prize.

Ten years of being a "beacon of hope"

In 2022 the Dora Love Prize celebrated its tenth anniversary, was praised by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust as being a “beacon of hope”, and for the first time welcomed a school from outside the UK. Congratulations to the 2022 winners, the Newmarket Academy in Suffolk, and our runners-up,  The Sandon School in Chelmsford and Collingwood School in West Vancouver, Canada, the first international school to take part.

Changing minds and changing lives

The Dora Love Prize gives young people unforgettable experiences and the confidence to make positive change in the world around them. It continues to influence and inspire them long after they leave school. But don’t just take our word for it. 

Dora Love (1923-2011)

Dora Love was born on 21 May 1923 in the small town of Plunge in western Lithuania, the third of four children of Hirsch and Jetta Rabinowitz. Her father owned a successful porcelain and glass business, and in 1924 the family moved to nearby Memel on the Baltic Sea. Four days after her graduation from the German lyceum in Memel, in March 1939, the German Wehrmacht occupied the Memelland, making it part of Hitler’s Greater German Empire. Dora, her sister and one of her brothers were hurriedly smuggled out of the Memelland into Lithuania where she was re-united with the rest of her family in the little town of Šiauliai (Schaulen).

In June 1941, the Germans marched into Lithuania as part of their war against the Soviet Union. The SS quickly rounded up all Jews and crammed them into a Jewish ghetto set up in Schaulen. The ghetto inhabitants had to do forced labour, and in late 1943, when the ghetto was cleared, most of the inhabitants were transported, in cattle trains, to Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig. It was here that Dora experienced what she calls 'the depth of inhumanity' – her brother, her sister and her mother did not survive the inhuman and brutal conditions in the camp.

Dora survived, and in late April 1945, with Soviet troops advancing, she was one of the prisoners who were sent in small boats westwards across the Baltic Sea. Many of the prisoners died along the way; Dora was one of the few who reached the shores of Schleswig-Holstein after seven and a half days drifting across the Baltic Sea without food or water. She was found by British troops. Among them was her future husband, Frank Love, whom she married in January 1946.

After her recovery, Dora stayed in Germany until 1948, working first for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and then the American Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC), a Jewish relief agency, looking after concentration camp survivors who had nowhere to go. She soon became involved in a project to set up a home for Jewish child survivors in Blankenese, a suburb of Hamburg on the river Elbe.

In the 1950s, her husband’s work took her to South Africa, where her two children were born. It was during this time, at the height of apartheid, that she began working as a teacher and giving talks on her experiences under the Nazi regime. She later settled in Colchester where she continued in her efforts to educate younger generations about the Holocaust.

Dora Love's poems

'After Stutthof Concentration Camp What Hope?' is a collection of poems written by Dora Love in 1945, in the period following her survival of Stutthof concentration camp. Dora had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and was kept in isolation.

During this time she was visited regularly by Frank Love, a Public Saftey Officer working for the British Army, who she would later marry. Frank gave her a few pens and pieces of paper which Dora used to write down poems. Frank kept a number of these and many years later they were collected together and eventually published in 2010.

'After Stutthof Concentration Camp What Hope?' is available from Red Lion Bookstore, High Street, Colchester, priced £6.99. Proceeds from the sale of the book will go toward the Dora Love Prize.