1912, the second daughter of Marie and Isador Frankel.

Being Jewish wasn’t a big part of their lives. Like many Berlin Jews who’d lived there for decades they felt that they were completely integrated. They were friendly with their neighbours and those they worked with.

They had a very comfortable life, with few worries.

That comfortable, middle-class existence wasn’t to last long.

By 1930 Hitler had been elected to power and Nazi storm troopers celebr ated their electoral victory by smashing in the windows of Jewish shops and restaurants.

My grandfather was thrown out of his job and died within a few months of that.

Both my mother and aunt married in those early years of the thirties. My aunt moved to Czeckoslovakia to be with her husband (photo left) and my mother stayed in Berlin with her's but realised very quickly that she had ‘married in haste’.

The years after Hitler became dictator in 1933 were extraordinarily tough and my grandmother, mother and aunt were trying to get to England. Somehow, my grandmother got permission to come and arrived here in 1937.

My mother was then left, at 25, on her own in Germany.

One morning a year later my mother received a letter in the post. It was from the police asking her to come to the police station the following day to have her passport marked with the Star of David and to pick up the yellow stars that she would then be required to wear on her clothes to mark her out as a Jewess.

She put on her coat, picked up her handbag and walked. She walked to the train station and got a train through Germany and then Holland, praying every time her passport was checked. She then boarded a boat for England.

She had no idea if the British would let her in. She had, so far, been refused entry and England wasn’t as easy to get into as it likes to make out. She decided that if she wasn’t allowed into Britain she would throw herself overboard rather than return to Germany.

24 hours later she alighted onto British soil and was given permission to stay.