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Former GP Noemie Lopian is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. Writer and teacher Derek Niemann is the grandson of a Nazi war criminal and SS officer. Yet the two have forged a friendship. ....
Share Life for Jewish people like my mother’s family became more difficult. Restrictions were imposed and people started to vanish – rounded up for deportation to concentration camps. Whenever my grandparents heard the Nazis were about to search the village, they would rush to hide the children in barns, convents and even the cellar of a local chapel. Can you imagine how it felt, as a child of just eight, huddled in a dark attic, unable to make a sound? Even a creak in the rooms above or below meant the possibility of discovery. In 1944, my grandparents decided that the only way to save their three children – Mama, then aged ten, Helen, 13, and Joe, nine – was to get them to neutral Switzerland. Armed with false names and papers, it was arranged that the siblings would join a group of ‘non Jewish children’, as they travelled by train to a holiday camp over the border – so the story went – ‘to escape the bombing’. Near to the Swiss border, they were met ....