Recalling the terror of 1938 on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, Alice Engel, who was just 13 at the time, is unable to forget her encounter with the Storm Troopers – the brown shirts – after they targeted her home.
But she fears that younger generations are unaware of the horror of the murderous antisemetic Nazi regime.
“I think it’s important people are still aware of (what happened) and unfortunately the general public do not have a clue about the Holocaust,” she said.
“The anti-Semitism that is travelling in this country and other countries is horrific, and why is it that people get aggravated when they see that the Jewish people have contributed so much to mankind, to medicine, to art, to things that are to everybody’s life, and they just don’t want us to exist.
“We’re just people, we want to get on with our lives and raise our children and make them aware that they can contribute to whichever country they live in and whichever life they choose, that they can contribute to people’s lives.”
The Vienna-born 99-year-old escaped the clutches of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party with scores of other children during the Second World War.
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.
Around 91 Jews were killed, 30,000 arrested and 267 synagogues destroyed, while many other businesses were ruined and looted in the Nazis campaign of hatred on the night of November 9.
She said: “What I remember of the night and of those particular days is that people knocked on the door and two brown shirts came into the flat and looked round and they finished 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 saving box that my father gave me for my birthday.
“They found that box and they opened it up, took all the money out which made me very angry seeing that my father had given it to me and of course by the time that happened my father was in a concentration camp already.
“When you’re a young girl and you walk along and there’s something in the street on the floor you try and see what’s this and you pick it up and as it was it was a swastika which for some reason or other I had picked up.
“They found that in this wardrobe and they were very angry and this one guy got so angry said you’ve got no right to have that and he slapped me and he slapped me badly and it hurt.
“I thought no I’m not going to cry, I’m not going to give you the satisfaction to show that you hurt me.
“So that was that, they just looked at everything and when they found that there was nothing to take from our apartment eventually they left but then of course what happened after they left our apartment they went downstairs and opened the shop.”
She added: “Our shop was in 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 ladies makeup and household cleaning stuff and stuff for razors and things for men.
“We sold a lot of things but what these brown shirts were particularly interested in was why they went through the shop into the front and broke one of the big windows and opened the shutters to the front of the business so that they could take out all the cleaning materials that we were selling.
“The reason they wanted cleaning material is because they took them and made particularly the men kneel on the pavement and scrub the pavements with toothbrushes until they are clean. Now of course at that particular time we were not quite aware having been upstairs all the time what they were doing but they emptied that department of the shop and then left and of course the shop was in a terrible state and that was that.”
She originally thought she would be able to leave Austria on the Kindertransport to Holland but following its cancellation she was England bound instead on her departure day of December 10, 1938.
Alice originally lived in Lincoln, along with her friend Lotta Heilpern, whose printer father helped them escape, before moving to the south of England and various parts of the UK.
She was offered the option to move to Israel at the age of 14 and the pair were separated as she agreed to do so but instead she remained in the UK and lived on Lord Balfour’s estate of Whittingehame.
Lord Balfour is reported to have signed the 1917 Balfour Declaration, outlining British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, was reputedly signed in Whittingehame House’s library as he was then foreign secretary.
Her mother Renee and her father ended up moving to Shanghai and the next time she would see her father was in 1947 after returning to Vienna to forge a new life after the Americans bombed the Chinese city and struck their next-door neighbour’s home.
London-based Alice, who had three children with her husband Monty Hubbard, originally worked as a clipper (a bus conductress) before working as a dressmaker in the West End.
Alice was reunited with further details of her arrival to the UK through the archive information held by World Jewish Relief, which acts as treasure trove of documents for Jewish refugees.
She said: “I didn’t have an easy life but I just feel, I’m very grateful.
“I’m a British girl. Although I’m not born here, this country has done a lot for me.”
