A furious Rachel Riley has blasted entertainment retailer HMV after a tweet was published which she said failed to acknowledge Jewish children being saved from Nazis.
The Countdown presenter, 37, took to social media platform X – formerly known as Twitter – to express her rage at a tweet by the high street giant plugging a film about British humanitarian Nicholas Winton, which stars Anthony Hopkins and Helen Bonham Carter.
The HMV tweet said: “The story of British humanitarian Nicholas Winton, who helped save hundreds of Central European children from the Nazis on the eve of World War II. SECURE YOUR COPY.”
Riley – who last year was awarded an MBE for services to Holocaust education and fighting antisemitism – was quick to share her disgust at what she said showed what the store chain really thought about Jewish Holocaust survivors: that they were no longer “creditable”.
She shared the HMV tweet and posted: “Wow. They can’t even bring themselves to say ‘Jewish children’ were saved from the Nazis.
“Jewish child Holocaust survivors no longer creditable? Sign of the messed up times.”
The tweet has so far been liked 1,000 times and been retweeted hundreds – but due to her account restrictions only people the Countdown presenter follows can comment.
However readers of the original tweet added context to it – a feature on the social media platform.
It read: “The salient fact about the children saved by Nicholas Winton from the Nazis is not that they were ‘Central European’, but that they were Jews.”
Sir Nicholas George Winton MBE was born in 1909 and died in 2015.
He was a British stockbroker and humanitarian who helped to rescue Jewish children at risk of being murdered by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.
