There are those who say they're fed up with hearing about the Holocaust. A strenuous effort is therefore required to remind them of what people suffered.
17. Didi (second name not known):
He (Herbert Lom) studied philosophy at Prague University, where he organised student theatre. In 1939, on the eve of the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, he arrived in Britain with his Jewish girlfriend, Didi, but she was sent back at Dover because she did not have the correct papers. Her subsequent death in a concentration camp haunted him all his life.
18. Helen Greenspun:
Each day she woke up to that blaring siren call, she'd drag herself up from a cement floor or a frozen solid ground and line up for [roll] call.
Another day of starvation and work. Another day in the filthy clothes she'd worn for months, lice toppling down her fragile shell of a body with one shake of her matted hair.
Another day of torture, but another day she was alive. She never missed a single siren call.
"The worst thing in life is starvation," Helen Greenspun said. "You don't think about anything; you only think when the piece of bread comes."
Greenspun, 86, has spent more than 30 years telling her story of how she was taken from her orthodox Jewish home in Poland in 1942 at just 15 years old... she'll never forget the noise of that siren each morning. That memory - of the ones who couldn't or wouldn't get up - has kept calling her.
19. Mary Elmes:
Two of the boys Mary Elmes rescued were René and Mario Freund. In September 1942 the young Jewish brothers were being held with their parents in a Vichy-French transit camp near the Spanish border. René was just two years old; his brother five.
The previous month they and their parents, Hans, a consultant engineer, and his doctor wife Eva, had tried to flee from France into Switzerland to avoid a round-up of Jews by the collaborationist Vichy authorities.
At the border the family was handed over to French police and taken to the notorious Rivesaltes holding centre near Perpignan in southwest France, from where a total of 2,551 Jews, including 440 children, were deported to Auschwitz.
Thanks to Mary Elmes the boys – as well as many other children and adults – escaped the fate of so many innocents.
.....
Conditions [at Rivesaltes] were barbaric, with starving prisoners wearing rags. Rats and lice overran the camp, which was freezing in winter and scorching in summer.
René recently described the scene: "Children even younger than me were being transported from Rivesaltes. At the very time we arrived convoys were departing weekly in railway wagons. Thus, Mary Elmes was instrumental in saving our lives at this critical period."
Children under 16 could be taken from the camp if their parents agreed. Mary and her colleagues organised children's colonies and hotels to house them - a ruse to get them to safety since many simply slipped over the border.
René and Mario were brought to a hotel in Vernet-les-Bains, 70km from Rivesaltes, and eventually made their escape.
The nature of Mary's work means it will never be known exactly how many lives she saved. She is said to have even smuggled children out in her car. She also arranged paperwork to allow adults on the run to "legally" leave France.
In January 1943 she was arrested on suspicion of helping Jews escape and spent six months in the infamous Fresnes Prison outside Paris. Once released she resumed her work.
20. Eugene Schlesinger:
Schlesinger, who was a teenager in his native Czechoslovakia when the country fell to the Nazis at the start of World War II, was a slave laborer for the German army.
To escape the... labor camp, where he was held captive in the 1940s, he disguised himself as a German soldier and made the five-month, 1,500-mile journey back to Czechoslovakia, where his family lived...
Schlesinger moved from village to village, hiding in farmhouses and working for food to sustain himself.
(For an index to the whole series, see here)