Alice Engel, who was only 13 at the time, remembers the terror of 1938 on the anniversary of Kristallnacht and cannot forget her encounter with the Storm Troopers – the Brown Shirts – after they attacked her house.
But she fears that younger generations are unaware of the horrors of the murderous anti-Semitic Nazi regime.
“I think it’s important that people are still aware of (what happened) and unfortunately the general public has no idea about the Holocaust,” she said.
“The anti-Semitism that is in this country and other countries is horrible, and why do people get aggravated when they see that the Jewish people have contributed so much to humanity, to medicine, to the arts, to things that affect everyone’s lives, and they want just not that we exist.
“We are just people, we want to get on with our lives and educate our children and make them aware that they can contribute to whatever country they live in and whatever life they choose, that they can contribute to the lives of people.”
The Vienna-born 99-year-old escaped from the clutches of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party during the Second World War together with dozens of other children.
But her father Julius Engel was sent to concentration camps, including Dachau and Buchenwald, for 50 weeks after being taken away by the Nazis in May 1938.
About 91 Jews were killed, 30,000 arrested and 267 synagogues destroyed, while many other businesses were ruined and looted during the Nazis’ hate campaign on the night of November 9.
She said: “What I remember about that night and those particular days is people knocking on the door and two brown shirts coming into the flat, looking around and eventually going into our bedroom where we had wardrobes.
“(They asked) what are you hiding there and what’s in there, and then they came across a little savings box that my dad gave me for my birthday.
“They found that box and opened it up, took all the money out, which made me very angry when I saw that my father had given it to me and of course by the time that happened my father was already in a concentration camp.
“If you’re a young girl and you’re walking by and there’s something on the ground on the street, you try to see what this is and you pick it up and as it was it was a swastika that for some reason I had picked up.
“They discovered that in this wardrobe and they were very angry and this one man got so angry and said you have no right to that and he hit me and he hit me really bad and it hurt.
“I thought, no, I’m not going to cry, I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of showing that you hurt me.
“So that was that, they just looked at everything and when they found that there was nothing to be taken from our apartment, they finally left, but of course what happened after they left our apartment, they went downstairs and opened the store. “
She added: “Our shop was on the same block as where we lived, we were on the third floor, the shop was on the ground floor, we had a perfumery where we sold women’s make-up and household cleaning supplies and razor supplies and so on. for men.
“We sold a lot of things, but what these brown shirts were particularly interested in was why they went through the store to the front and broke one of the big windows and opened the shutters at the front of the store so they could take everything out. the cleaning products we sold.
“The reason they wanted cleaning supplies is because they took them with them and mainly had the men kneel on the sidewalks and scrub the sidewalks with toothbrushes until they were clean. Of course at the time we weren’t completely aware that we were upstairs the whole time what they were doing, but they cleared out that section of the store and then left and of course the store was in a terrible state and that that was.
She originally thought she would be able to leave Austria on the Kindertransport to the Netherlands, but after its cancellation she was sent to England on her departure day of December 10, 1938.
Alice originally lived in Lincoln with her friend Lotta Heilpern, whose printer father helped them escape, before moving to the south of England and various parts of the United Kingdom.
She was given the opportunity to move Israel at the age of 14 and the couple were separated as she agreed, but instead she remained in Britain and lived on Lord Balfour’s estate in Whittingehame.
Lord Balfour is said to have signed the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which set out British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This was reportedly signed in the library of Whittingehame House when he was then Secretary of State.
Her mother Renee and her father eventually moved to Shanghai and the next time she would see her father was in 1947 after returning to Vienna to start a new life after the Americans bombed the Chinese city and destroyed the house of had hit their neighbor.
London-based Alice, who had three children with her husband Monty Hubbard, originally worked as a hairdresser (bus conductor) before working as a seamstress in the West End.
Alice was reunited with further details of her arrival in Britain through World Jewish Relief’s archival information, which acts as a treasure trove of documents for Jewish refugees.
She said: “I haven’t had an easy life, but I just feel very grateful.
“I’m a British girl. Even though I wasn’t born here, this country has done a lot for me.”