Annick Lever was born in November 1943 in Nazi-occupied France to a Jewish mother and a Catholic father. In the summer of 1939, Annick’s mother, her mother’s sister and her grandparents had come from Paris on holiday to the south of France, where Annick’s mother met her future husband, who was not Jewish. They remained there following the outbreak of the Second World War in September. Life became very difficult for French Jews after the German invasion in 1940. Annick’s family had to register, declare all their possessions and, from 1942, wear a yellow star on their clothing. Their identification papers were stamped with the word ‘Jew,’ and a curfew was imposed preventing Jewish people from being out of their homes in the evening.
In 1944 Annick, along with her mother, aunt with baby and grandparents, were taken to the local prison and kept there pending deportation to Drancy (the main transit camp in France). Her father, as a non-Jew and a member of the Resistance, was able, with the help of some friends, to smuggle Annick and her baby cousin out of the prison. The rest of the family were transported and were taken from Drancy by cattle train to Auschwitz-Birkenau on 10th February. They did not survive and later Annick learned that her mother almost certainly died on the journey.
After the war, Annick was brought up in a small town in south-west France by a Catholic family. When she was 17, she went to Amsterdam to meet with her mother’s surviving sister. This led to her learning about her Jewish heritage and her family’s experience during the Holocaust. She came to Britain in 1963 where she met her husband, Allen. They live in London and have two children and five grandchildren.