Paul was born in February 1938, in Budapest, Hungary. He was an only child and lived with his parents in an apartment, opposite the city’s largest synagogue. They had a comfortable middle-class home. In 1942, Paul father died of a heart attack and from this point he was brought up by his mother.

Paul didn’t realise that he was Jewish until he was affected by the increasing restrictions enforced on Jews by the Hungarian government. He was unable to travel on trams on certain days and only ever in the open part of the carriage. He didn’t understand why he and his family were affected by these rules as they were not actively part of the Jewish community.

During 1944 life became more difficult for Paul and his family, following the German invasion of Hungary in March of that year. They were forced to wear a yellow star on their clothing, which his mother made for him at home. He and his mother had to leave their apartment and move to a village outside Budapest to escape the rising persecution. They obtained false identity papers giving them a new name and date of birth to hide their identities.

They returned to Budapest in early autumn 1944 and used their false papers to move from a Yellow Star House (a place where Jews were gathered before deportation) to another apartment outside the Jewish district. Paul had noticed the missing yellow star from his coat and began to ask his mother where it was before realising his mistake. They were overheard and reported by another child to his parents and knew at that point that they were no longer safe at the apartment.

With the help of Paul’s uncle, he and his mother spent the next few days hidden in a cellar. The conditions were so bad that they left after a few days, despite the danger. Paul’s uncle managed to secure a space for them in a Swiss protected house where they were safe for a few weeks before having to move on. During this time, Paul’s uncle was killed in a bombing raid, devastating his mother and leaving them to fend for themselves. They spent the winter of 1944 in a cottage in the hills outside Buda where they were protected by a non-Jewish family. During this time the bombing of Budapest began; Soviet forces occupied the area where Paul was living, and they were afforded some protection by the soldiers’ presence.

As soon as they were able to, Paul and his mother moved back to the city. They were reunited with his grandparents, who had both survived, in late 1945. Unfortunately, after the war, life continued to be difficult for Paul and his family. After 1947, they were considered class enemies by Hungary’s Communist government. His mother wanted him to have a better life and in 1956, Paul was able to leave the country. He left for Britain and continued his education here, studying at Leeds University. Paul built a life for himself in the UK; he married, had a family and visited his mother frequently until her death in 1990. He shares his testimony regularly.

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.

Lily was born in Bonyhád, Hungary on 29th December 1923. She was the eldest daughter in a family of six children.

When the Nazis invaded Hungary in March 1944, Lily’s happy childhood was changed forever. In July 1944, when Lily was 20 years old, she – along with her mother, younger brother and three sisters – was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Lily’s mother Nina, younger brother Bela, and younger sister Berta were immediately sent to the gas chambers whilst Lily and her sisters Renee and Piri were selected for work in the camp.

Four months after arriving in the camp, Lily and her two sisters were transferred to a munitions factory near Leipzig in Germany where they worked until liberation by Allied forces in 1945.

After she was liberated, Lily travelled with her surviving sisters to Switzerland in order to start rebuilding her life. In 1953 Lily was reunited with her older brother, who had survived the Nazi camp system, and the family were able to live near to each other in Israel. In 1967 Lily and her husband moved to the UK.

Manfred was born on 21 April 1930 in Kassel in central Germany into an Orthodox Jewish family. He and his family suffered escalating persecution in Germany under the Nazi regime in the years before the Second World War. Manfred’s father was able to escape to Britain in August 1939, just days before the war began, but the rest of the family were unable to join him. The situation deteriorated following the outbreak of the war and in 1940 Manfred’s Jewish school was closed by the Nazi authorities.

In December 1941, Manfred, his mother and younger brother were deported by train from Germany to the Riga Ghetto in Latvia. Life in the ghetto was characterised by lack of food, use as slave labour and constant fear: throughout Manfred’s time in the ghetto, the Nazis and their Latvian collaborators regularly selected inmates of the ghetto for mass shootings in forests on the edge of the city. Despite this, Manfred was able to celebrate his Bar Mitzvah in March 1943.

In August 1943, just three months before the ghetto was finally liquidated, Manfred was sent to a nearby labour camp where he was forced to work laying railway tracks. The prisoners in the camp were treated brutally and again subjected to frequent selections. As the Red Army approached Riga, Manfred and the other surviving prisoners were evacuated to Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig (today Gdańsk in Poland) in August 1944. He spent more than eight months as a slave worker in Stutthof and its subcamps, including Stolp and Burggraben. The camp was abandoned just days before the war ended and Manfred and other prisoners were sent on a death march in appalling conditions. Manfred was finally liberated at Neustadt in Germany on 3 May 1945.

Manfred came to Britain in September 1946 to be reunited with his father. After learning English, he managed to catch up on some of his missed education and he eventually graduated from London University with a degree in Electronics. He is married with four sons and several grandchildren.

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Joan was born Fanny Zimetbaum in Brussels, Belgium, on 15th February 1940. She lived with her parents, who were both originally from Poland, and her older half-sister, Lilane.

When Joan was still a baby, her father was arrested and was held in prison in France for six months. He was then put on a train to be sent to an internment camp but managed to jump off the train near Paris and escape. Although he was able to make it back to Belgium, the family decided it would be safer to leave and so they moved to Paris. Joan, Lilane and their mother stayed with Joan’s aunt, but it was not safe for Joan’s father to remain with them so he stayed in hiding with a cousin.

In June 1941, male Jews in Paris were being rounded up and Joan’s father woke up in the night to find that his street was full of French police removing Jews from their homes. Her father managed to stay hidden during the round-up but it was too dangerous for him to stay and so he travelled to Lyon in Vichy France.

At this time, women and children were not being rounded up and so Joan, her sister and her mother remained in Paris. Every week, Joan’s mother had to go with the children to the local police station to register as aliens. One day in 1942 while they were registering, a policeman told her that the deportations of women and children were due to start the following day and that Joan, Lilane and their mother were all on the list for the first transport. Joan’s mother was able to arrange for the Resistance to help the family to escape and in the middle of the night they were smuggled out of Paris hidden in a laundry van and joined Joan’s father in a village outside Lyon.

Although at this time Vichy remained independent, there was a great deal of Nazi influence within Lyon and round-ups still happened. Joan’s father was once again arrested and was taken to an internment camp. Once again, he was able to escape and travelled to Spain. He was afraid that Spain would also soon be occupied so he soon moved on to Portugal where he was able to contact the British Embassy and was drafted into the Pioneer Corps.

Joan, Lilane and their mother remained in Lyon until winter of 1942-43 when they travelled over the Pyrenees mountains into Spain. They were captured by the Spanish police and Lilane was put into a convent while Joan and her mother were put in prison. In June 1943, Joan and Lilane were able to leave Lisbon by boat and travelled to the USA. The American government had agreed to help to rescue children but their parents were not permitted to travel with them, so their mother had to stay behind.

On arrival in America, Joan was taken in by a foster family and had her name changed from Fanny to Joan. Lilane, being older and more aware of the situation than Joan, was very traumatised by the time they arrived in America and so struggled to settle with a family and was moved between a number of foster homes.

In 1947, Joan and Lilane were reunited with their parents, both of whom had managed to survive the war and were living in the UK. Joan found it very hard to adjust to life with her parents and spent the next decade travelling between the UK and her foster family in the USA.

Joan now lives in London and regularly shares her testimony in schools and colleges across the country.

Harry was born Chaim Olmer in 1927 in Sosnowiec, Poland, the fourth of six children. Following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Jews of Sosnowiec faced escalating persecution and violence, so in the spring of 1940 Harry’s family fled to his grandmother’s village of Miechów-Charsznica in the hope that conditions might be better there. However, this turned out to be a false hope and the Jews of the village were subjected to forced labour including street cleaning, repairing roads and working in German homes.

In 1942 the Jews of Miechów-Charsznica and neighbouring villages were expelled from their homes and assembled in a field where they were held for several days before the Germans carried out a selection. Some of the men and those incapable of working were shot immediately and the women and children sent by train to Bełżec extermination camp, where they were murdered on arrival. The remaining Jews, including Harry, his brother and his father, were sent to the Płaszów labour camp in Kraków, where Harry worked on a railway line. After a year in Płaszów, Harry was sent to another notorious forced labour camp, Skarżysko-Kamienna, where he was one of tens of thousands of Polish Jews forced to work in chemical factories owned by the German HASAG company in the most horrific conditions. His work – filling shells and land mines with acid – was incredibly dangerous and thousands of prisoners died from poisoning, epidemics, starvation and exhaustion. The SS also carried out periodic selections in which weakened prisoners were shot.

A final selection took place in July 1944, just before the Germans began their retreat, and Harry was one of only 6,000 prisoners who survived to be sent on to Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. This was a temporary stop before they were moved on to Schlieben, a subcamp of Buchenwald attached to another HASAG factory, where Harry again had to work in exhausting and dangerous conditions. Finally, with the Soviet Red Army approaching in April 1945, the surviving prisoners were sent on the Terezín ghetto in Czechoslovakia, where they were finally liberated by the Red Army on 8th May 1945.

After a period of recuperation, Harry came to the UK with a group of child survivors known as ‘The Boys’, moving to Glasgow where he lived in a hostel. Despite knowing no English when he arrived in 1945, Harry completed his Highers exams in 1947 and went on to qualify as a dentist. In 1950 Harry became a British citizen and later served in the army as a dentist. Harry went on to marry and have four children and eight grandchildren.