We are sisters and we owe our existence to the kindness of an English family of strangers who agreed to take in two little Jewish boys, our father and his brother, allowing them to escape Nazi persecution in Vienna on one of the Kindertransports.

We were also extraordinarily privileged to know our Jewish Viennese grandfather because of the extreme bravery of a few non-Jews living in Vienna during Nazi occupation who hid our grandparents and who were active members of the underground resistance. 

While our grandfather had no other surviving siblings when the war began, our grandmother was one of a large family, but sadly, like so many other families, we now have no extended family as virtually all were killed in the Holocaust.

Our grandparents survived the war in hiding, but the strain on our grandmother meant her health had suffered very badly and she died in 1950. Our father stayed in the UK to study and met our mother at university. Our uncle, who was two years younger, was sent back to his parents in Austria and a much more difficult life in a Vienna that was still riddled with antisemitism.

Growing up in a completely secular family in the UK we were nevertheless always subconsciously aware of our Jewish roots and the horrors that our grandparents, father and uncle had been subjected to, including our grandparents being forced to clean the street; the family flat in Vienna being raided by the SS on Kristallnacht while the family was asleep; an uncle brutalised and humiliated by the SS while the children looked on; uncles, aunts and cousins arrested and then released for no reason.

We were always somehow detached and different from our peers at school who viewed our family as being a little strange; we tended to have strong rebel instincts; and generally made our few friends among others who didn’t fit in with the norms of comfortable suburbia. Fighting evil and injustice seems to have been embedded in our psyche!