Marianne Elsley tells KATHERINE MacALISTER why she had to come to terms with her parents' atrocious deaths and speak out about a terrible period of history...

For German Jew Marianne Elsley, every day is Holocaust Day. Living in Berlin when the Nazis came to power, she was forced to flee to England in 1939. But her parents were sent to concentration camps and later died in Auschwitz.

Film director Steven Spielberg, who made the harrowing and moving film Schindler's List about the Holocaust, recently sent a film crew to Marianne's Deddington home to record her amazing story.

He is using the profits from the movie to try to record every Jewish survival story for a new archive.

Marianne, 75, has herself been touring Oxfordshire giving talks on her family history and the two books she has written about it. But however hard she tries, she cannot lay the ghosts to rest.

"It will always be with me. I will never forgive the Germans for what they did. I can talk about it now but it's still very painful," she says.

Even the recent news of a £1bn payment by Swiss banks to Jewish organisations for possessions "lost" in their vaults during the war comes as little consolation. Marianne will not be benefiting from it because the Nazis confiscated her family's money and possessions - "apart from their gold teeth".

As she explains: "The Jewish concentration camp victims had their teeth extracted and the gold melted down and made into ingots. No doubt some of these were sold to the Swiss."

For a long time Marianne pretended it never happened and bottled it up, until a few years ago she resolved to tell her parents' story. "Any survivors are getting old now and it will only be our accounts that remind people what happened once we are gone. I decided I owed it to my parents."

Marianne was born into a wealthy middle-class family. Her father, who fought in the First World War, was a judge and her mother a doctor.

"We were not religious and just considered ourselves German. I was an only child and had a wonderful childhood."

The first inkling she had that something was wrong was when her parents came to get her from school one day.

"There were people outside our house with signs saying 'Jews live here'. They didn't want me to come home to that, so came to fetch me. "From then on there were new laws made every day and our lives changed beyond belief."

Both her parents lost their jobs. They were banned from local shops and had to go to special Jewish ones. They had to wear badges and were rationed long before everyone else.

Marianne's lifelong friends suddenly blanked her. She was not allowed to talk or play with them and was moved to a Jewish school.

She recalls: "Every day when I left school, I wondered if my parents would be there when I got home."

One day the Nazis came to the family's home and asked for her father. Marianne's parents were out but the troops waited for two hours. Marianne managed to get a message out to her dad and he went into hiding for several days. "We just tried to keep our heads down," she says.

Other Jewish families were moved into their home and their money was confiscated. But somehow her parents managed to get Marianne on to the Kinder Transport programme, in which 10,000 Jewish children were allowed to leave for England. It was run and paid for by the Refugee Council in Britain, and because the Germans would not allow any refugee ships, they all had to be booked on liners or cargo ships. She says now: "It is the first and last time I went on a luxury cruiser."

When she arrived in England, she was sent to live with a Quaker family in Hampstead, London.

"They were lovely to me and very understanding. They even arranged for visas for my parents, but then the war broke out and no-one was allowed to leave the country."

She wrote to her parents until they were taken to a camp, and then she corresponded with them through a Swiss cousin.

One day her letter was sent back marked "Deported to Auschwitz" and she knew they were dead. "It was in 1944, when the Germans knew they were losing, so they were killing off as many Jews as possible. My parents didn't have a chance," she says bitterly. "I look back now and realise how much they sacrificed to put me on that boat. I was their only child and I'm sure they knew they would never see me again."

After the war their extermination was confirmed.

Marianne decided to get on with her life and trained as a nurse. She met a handsome porter, Ralph, a conscientious objector, and they married and had two children. He became an English teacher and she brought up the kids. They recently celebrated their golden wedding anniversary.

Now her books and talks provide her with a kind of therapy.

"People come up to me in tears after my talks and I know I've got through to them," she says. She has also been invited to America and spoke to students in Salt Lake City about her ordeal in May.

"It was always at the back of my mind and had to come out some time," she explains. "I used to keep it to myself, but now I have gone the other way."

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