Remembering the terror of 1938, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, Alice Engel, who was only 13 at the time, cannot forget her encounter with the Storm Troopers – the Brown Shirts – after they targeted his house.

But she fears that younger generations are unaware of the horror of the murderous and anti-Semitic Nazi regime.

“I think it’s important that people are always aware of (what happened) and unfortunately the general public has no idea about the Holocaust,” she said.

“The anti-Semitism that is circulating in this country and other countries is horrible, and why do people get upset when they see that the Jewish people have contributed so much to humanity, to medicine, to art, to things that must be so important? everyone’s lives, and they just don’t want us to exist.

“We are just people, we want to get on with our lives, raise our children and make them realize that they can contribute to people’s lives, whatever country they live in and whatever life they live in. choose.”

The 99-year-old, born in Vienna, escaped the clutches of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party along with many other children during World War II.

But his father Julius Engel was sent to concentration camps, including Dachau and Buchenwald, for 50 weeks after being taken by the Nazis in May 1938.

Around 91 Jews were killed, 30,000 arrested, and 267 synagogues destroyed, while many other businesses were destroyed and looted during the Nazi hate campaign on the night of November 9.

She said: “What I remember about the night and those particular days was that people knocked on the door and two brown shirts came into the apartment and looked around and finished to enter 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 savings box that my dad gave me for my birthday.

“They found this box and opened it, took out all the money, which made me very angry since my father had given it to me and of course, at the time that this happened, my father was already in a concentration camp.

“When you’re a young girl and you’re walking and there’s something on the ground in the street, you try to see what it is and you pick it up and it was a swastika that for some reason or another, I had picked up.

“They found this in this cabinet and they were very angry and this guy was so angry he said you’re not allowed to have this and he slapped me and he slapped me violently and it hurt me.

“I thought no, I’m not going to cry, I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of showing that you hurt me.

“So that’s it, they just looked at everything and when they found out there was nothing to take from our apartment they finally left, but of course what happened after they left our apartment, they came down and opened the store.”

She added: “Our store was on the same block where we lived, we were on the third floor, the store was on the ground floor, we had a perfume store where we sold women’s makeup, products cleaning products, razors and others. for men.

“We were selling a lot of stuff, but what these brown shirts were particularly interested in was why they were walking through the store and going to the front of the store, breaking one of the big windows and opening the shutters on the front of the store store to be able to take away all the cleaning products we were selling.

“The reason they wanted cleaning supplies is because they took them and made the men kneel on the sidewalk and scrub the sidewalks with toothbrushes until they were clean. Of course at that point we weren’t really aware of what they were doing because they were upstairs the whole time but they emptied that section of the store then left and sure enough the store was in terrible condition and that’s it.

Initially, she thought she would be able to leave Austria on the Kindertransport to Holland, but following its cancellation, she instead headed for England on the day of her departure, December 10, 1938.

Alice originally lived in Lincoln, with her friend Lotta Heilpern, whose printer father helped them escape, before moving to the south of England and various parts of the United Kingdom.

He was offered the opportunity to move Israel at the age of 14 and the couple were separated as she agreed to do, but instead she remained in the UK and lived at Lord Balfour’s estate in Whittingehame.

Lord Balfour is said to have signed the Balfour Declaration of 1917, outlining British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and was said to have been signed in the library at Whittingehame House while he was then Foreign Secretary.

Her mother Renée and father eventually moved to Shanghai and the next time she saw her father was in 1947, having returned to Vienna to forge a new life after the Americans bombed the Chinese city and hit their next door neighbor’s house.

London-based Alice, who had three children with husband Monty Hubbard, first worked as a clipper (bus driver) before working as a dressmaker in the West End.

Alice found more details about her arrival in the UK through archives held by World Jewish Relief, which is a treasure trove of documents for Jewish refugees.

She said: “I haven’t had an easy life but I just feel great gratitude.

“I’m a British girl. Even though I wasn’t born here, this country has done a lot for me.