My father Oscar (Hebrew name Yeshaya, after whom my youngest son, and one of my grandsons is named) was born in the town of Auschwitz in 1911 before it became the horror camp of the Nazis. He went to live in Ostrava, on the Polish-Czech border with his parents, two brothers and three sisters, as a small boy.

As a young man he would travel to Poland daily on business. In March 1939 he was in Poland when Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia. A routine phonecall home resulted in his parents' anguished request that he get out of the country any way he could, "only don't come home!".

Together with nine other Czechs who believed what was happening was actually serious enough to act upon, they pooled their money, chartered a plane with a Danish pilot and flew to London's Croydon Airport (now no longer in existence.) Unfortunately the laws on refugees changed while they were in flight and they were told they couldn't stay in Britain. Amidst much screaming and wailing, they were forced back onto the plane to be flown back into the jaws of Hitler. The photo you see is from the Daily Mail of March 31st 1939(click on the picture to see a bigger image) and shows my father being carried back to the plane.

On board the weeping refugees threatened to jump out if the plane took off. The poor Danish pilot, caught in a war he did not understand, refused to fly. As a result, and after a lot of humming and hawing in Parliament, and guarantees from British Jews, the refugees were allowed to stay in England.

My father had only a few short months to raise funds to get the rest of his family out of Eastern Europe. He managed to get his two brothers out, but then in September 1939 war broke out, and his parents, sisters and little nieces, all perished in Auschwitz.

Click on the thumbnail for a full sized image. My father and I were very close. Despite the fact that I am an only daughter, and he never got the son he wanted, we were very tuned in, and thought the same, and could communicate on many levels. Here is a picture of how I remember him best, at his prime of life, enjoying himself at a wedding. He died of cancer in January 1978 aged almost 67. I was only 29 years old at the time, with five small children. I nursed him at my home for the last five weeks of his life. He was an incredibly brave, incredibly wonderful man and I miss him very much indeed. My mother Sylvia (Sasha Chaya, after whom I have three granddaughters and one great-grandaughter named) lived until October 2003, but suffered from many strokes for the last eleven years of her life. She also lived with us for those last eleven years. I lost my mother not in October 2003, but eleven years previous to that, when the terrible affliction of stroke took away the essence of who she was.