In the past I didnt tell people about my childhood. But as I got older I felt a responsibility to talk about the Holocaust. 

My mother and father lived in Hamburg with my three siblings before I was born. They had an ordinary middle class life. But that was shattered one morning in 1938 when the Nazis came and arrested my father, then sent him onto Oranienburg concentration camp.

I was born while my father was in the camp. My mother wanted to call me Susie but the Nazis made her choose from Ruth, Rachel, Leah, Sarah and Rebecca. My birth certificate says Rebecca but everyone has always called me Susie.

After some time, my mother got my siblings on the Kindertransport and they came to England.

She was also told that with enough money, she could get my father out. He was sent to Shanghai, which at that time took in thousands of Jews.

Eventually I came to England with my mother in mid-July 1939. My mother went into domestic service and I quickly went into foster care and eventually children’s homes. My siblings were also in care and we never lived together again as a family.

In 1947, my mother came to visit me with a man I didn’t know at the children’s home where I was living.

He gave me a little silver charm bracelet and I asked him if he was Father Christmas. He was my father.

Ours is a story of survival but not of great happiness.

I only really understood what happiness was when I met my husband, got married and had a family of my own.

When my father first left, he said to my mother that if she ever made it to England, she should tell people about what was happening in Germany.

When she first came over, people didn’t believe her. So she never talked about it.

Now I’m educating young people for my father and those who went through the Holocaust, especially the ones who didn’t survive.