The schoolgirl who survived the Holocaust by fooling the Nazis

Helga Weiss three days before her family were deported in December 1941

Helga Weiss, now an artist in Prague, escaped death at Auschwitz by lying to Josef Mengele about her age and saying she was fit to work

On an Auschwitz station platform in 1944, Helga Weiss and her mother fooled one of the most reviled men in modern history, Josef Mengele, and managed to save their lives. Not long into her teens, Weiss lied about her age, claiming she was old enough to work for her keep. Her mother persuaded the Nazis under Mengele's command that Helga was in fact her daughter's older sister, and she was sent to the forced labour barracks and not the gas chamber.

The story is one of many recorded in a concentration camp diary that was sold to publishers around the world at the Frankfurt book fair. The private journals of Helga Weiss are to be published in the UK for the first time next year by Viking Press, while foreign rights have been snapped up by publishing houses across the world.

Weiss, an artist in her early 80s who lives in Prague and is also known by her married name of Weissova-Hoskova, mentioned her journal during occasional public appearances, but until now public interest in her written story has always been overshadowed by her success as a postwar painter. The British publisher Venetia Butterfield heard of the diary's existence last summer when Weiss visited London for a concert at the Wigmore Hall commemorating fellow inmates at the Terezín camp in former Czechoslovakia.

"I heard about the event and called someone in north London who knew Helga. They told me she was just about to get on a plane back to Prague, but that she was coming round for a coffee first," said Butterfield. "I raced up to see her and we talked for no more than 10 or 15 minutes. She is an amazing woman with a great, feisty attitude."

Butterfield, who also publishes Anne Frank's diary, asked to see a sample of the writing in one of Weiss's surviving exercise books. "We had an academic report done, and once it was clear what the diaries were I went to Prague to see her. Accounts of the past are often shaped by the knowledge of what was to happen next. What is so important about the diary is that it is Helga's reality. You are there with her. It is a very different thing from a memoir."

Before Weiss was sent to the Nazi-controlled ghetto of Terezín as a child, she witnessed the insidious progress of the Holocaust in Prague. "One thing after another was forbidden: employees lost their jobs, we were banned from the parks, swimming pools, sports clubs. I was banned from going to school when I was 10," Weiss told the Observer at the time of the London concert. "I was always asking my parents, 'What's happening?', and became angry at them if I thought they were trying to hide something, to protect me."

The Weiss apartment was handed over to Germans and the family were transported to Terezín by rail. Known as Theresienstadt in German, the city on the north-west perimeter of Prague had become a transit hub where Czech Jews were put to work before being sent on to extermination camps. Her diary, which begins in 1939, records noises that still haunt her; the "thunderous steps, the roar of the ghetto guards, the banging of doors and hysterical weeping always sound – and foretell – the same".

"She was obviously very clever and quite mature," said Butterfield. "She was obsessed with school at first, like any child of that age. Then there are terrible goodbyes as her friends begin to be taken off to Terezín. At each point Helga thinks the worst thing has happened to her so you see how people become used to bad things. Eventually, when the family are sent to the camp they take some cake and eat a little every day."

Butterfield points out that memories of Terezín are not all painful. Weiss grew up there, fell in love for the first time, and spent time with both her parents, before her father was killed at Auschwitz. "My father told me that, whatever happens, we must remain human, so that we do not die like cattle," Weiss has said. "And I think that the will to create was an expression of the will to live, and survive, as human beings."

On 4 October 1944, Weiss and her mother were also transported to Auschwitz, where they faced Mengele, who was directing children and older women towards the gas chambers and fit adults towards the forced labour camp. Thanks to her subterfuge, she was one of only 150 to 1,500 children believed to have survived of the 15,000 sent to Terezín.

She was then transferred from Auschwitz to a labour camp at Flossenbürg where she escaped death a second time when she was forced to join a 16-day "death march" to the camp at Mauthausen. She remained there until the end of the war. "I asked Helga whether it had felt wonderful to be liberated," said Butterfield. "She said, no, it was not that special because by that point she was so ill and had seen so many terrible things it was hard to feel anything."

Helga's Diary will be published by Viking on 7 June next year

Observer

Anne Frank diary guardian Miep Gies dies

Miep Gies (left) with Otto Frank (centre) in October 1945

Miep Gies, the last surviving member of the group who helped protect Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis, has died in the Netherlands aged 100

She and other employees of Anne Frank's father Otto supplied food to the family as they hid in a secret annex above the business premises in Amsterdam. Anne's diary of their life in hiding, which ended in betrayal, is one of the most famous records of the Holocaust. It was rescued by Mrs Gies, who kept it safe until after the war.

Miep Gies died in a nursing home after suffering a fall just before Christmas.

Speaking last year as she celebrated her 100th birthday, Mrs Gies played down her role, saying others had done far more to protect Jews in the Netherlands. She and her fellow employees kept Anne and the seven others supplied for two years, from 1942 to 1944. When the family were found by the authorities, they were deported, and Anne died of typhus in the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen.

It was Mrs Gies who collected up Anne's papers and locked them away, hoping that one day she would be able to give them back to the girl. In the event, she returned them to Otto Frank, who survived the war, and helped him compile them into a diary that was published in 1947. It went on to sell tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages.

Mrs Gies became a kind of ambassador for the diary, travelling to talk about Anne Frank and her experiences, campaigning against Holocaust denial and refuting allegations that the diary was a forgery. For her efforts to protect the Franks and to preserve their memory, Mrs Gies won many accolades.

In an interview from 1998, published on the annefrank website, Miep Gies says she thought it "perfectly natural" to help Anne and the seven others despite the penalties she could have suffered under the Nazi occupation.

"They were powerless, they didn't know where to turn..." she says. "We did our duty as human beings: helping people in need."

Her role was, she recalls, to fetch vegetables and meat while others supplied bread or books. Her memory of Anne is of having the feeling she was "speaking to an adult".

"I'd say to myself, 'My goodness, child, so young and talking like that already'," she says in the interview. She believes that she once came across Anne writing the diary.

"It was a very uncomfortable situation," she says. "I tried to decide what to do. Should I walk away or go to her? At that moment she glanced at me, with a look that I'll never forget. This wasn't the Anne I knew, that friendly, charming child. She looked at me with anger, rage. Then Anne stood up, slammed her diary shut and glared at me with great condescension. 'Yes,' she said, 'I'm writing about you, too.' I didn't know what to say. The only thing I could manage was: 'That ought to be interesting.'"

Mrs Gies also remembers the day the Franks were taken away and how she went up into the empty annex to find the pages of the diary lying on the floor. Removing the pages, she did not read them immediately, telling herself at the time: "These may belong to a child, but even children have a right to privacy."

BBC

Miep Gies

Anne Frank Museum

Plea to stop right wing march

Manchester council is to ask the Home Secretary to block a planned city-centre rally by a right-wing group.

The English Defence League claims only to oppose 'militant Islam' - but previous events have seen skinheads making Nazi salutes, and violent clashes with anti-fascist protestors. An EDL rally in Birmingham earlier this year ended with 90 people arrested during a busy shopping Saturday. Gangs hurled bottles at each other and pelted riot police with bricks. Now the EDL are planning to come to Manchester on Saturday, October 10.

And the city council, which is powerless to stop the event, is to appeal to Alan Johnson to intervene. Town hall bosses are writing to the Home Secretary calling on him to use whatever powers are necessary to block the event. They believe there is a serious risk of violence - and that the event will cause offence to moderate Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Their calls are being backed by church leaders and city-centre traders.

Jim Battle, deputy council leader, said: "Manchester has a long and rich tradition of protest and radicalism. We are incredibly proud of that history and to this day people regularly make their voice heard in demonstrations in the city. But we are also a welcoming and tolerant city. Wherever the so-called English Defence League have gone there has been violence and disruption to ordinary people who just want to go about their business.

"These people do not have a legitimate cause - they merely wish to vilify, insult, intimidate and provoke one section of our community. That isn't protest or legitimate democratic debate and it certainly is not welcome in Manchester. Manchester does not want the EDL, and we stand united against their poisonous, disruptive and unbritish outlook and actions."

Kate Harrison, chief executive of Cityco, which represents city traders, said: "Cityco works very hard with the council to facilitate freedom of speech by allowing the use of our public squares. However, there needs to be a balance and we need to consider the needs of visitors to the city and the businesses that trade here. We are concerned about recent events in Birmingham and want to ensure Manchester is a safe and pleasant place to visit."

The Dean of Manchester, Rogers Govender, said: "Manchester Cathedral is currently hosting an exhibition commemorating Anne Frank, who, as a Jewish victim of the Holocaust experienced prejudice and racial hatred. The exhibition tackles contemporary issues such as bullying, racism and intolerance head on and we are proud to demonstrate our support for the values of tolerance and inclusion of which Manchester is rightly proud. The English Defence League's plans to march in Manchester are a direct threat to those values and we stand in solidarity with those who reject their agenda of division."

Manchester Evening News

David Mamet to make Anne Frank film

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Jewish writer David Mamet is to script a new film version of the diary of Anne Frank.

The film, produced by Walt Disney, will be closely based on the diary of 15-year-old Anne, who died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after hiding in Nazi-occupied Holland for two years with her family.

Mr Mamet won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Glengarry Glen Ross, which was later turned into film starring Al Pacino. More recently, Mr Mamet received Oscar nominations for his screenplays and The Verdict. He has written several books on Judaism and Jewish history, including The Old Religion about the lynching of Leo Frank, and The Wicked Son, a study of Jewish self-hatred and antisemitism.

Numerous film and adaptations have been made of Anne Frank’s diary, including a Japanese anime film, but the most critically acclaimed has been George Stevens’ 1959 film, which won three academy awards. The diary was recently made into BBC series in January 2009.

JC

The neo-Nazi 'asylum seekers'

Whittle and Sheppard - a pair of freaks by any standards

They looked like a pair of cranks straight out of a Louis Theroux documentary. One was an unrepentant woman hater whose racist and anti-Semitic views were too hard-line even for the British National Party. The other, his long-haired sidekick, sought the protection of a pseudonym that he used to make extremist rants.

Their hunger to stir up controversy saw them flee from justice in the north of England and stage an unlikely claim for political asylum in Los Angeles. But their journey has now ended with jail sentences in the UK.

Jurors at Leeds Crown Court decided neo-Nazis Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle were not just harmless oddballs, but dangerous propagandists dedicated to whipping up racism. On Friday, Sheppard was jailed for four years, 10 months and Whittle for two years, four months.

In a landmark case, they have become the first Britons to be convicted of inciting racial hatred online, having printed leaflets and controlled websites featuring racist material.

The court heard the investigation into the pair began when a complaint about an anti-Semitic comic book called Tales of the Holohoax was made to the police in 2004 after it was pushed through the door of a synagogue in Blackpool, Lancashire. It was traced back to a post office box in Hull registered to Sheppard, 51, a former BNP organiser kicked out of the far-right party after he was jailed in 2000 for distributing a racially inflammatory election leaflet.

The spotlight fell on the publishing activities of Sheppard, of Selby, North Yorkshire, a self-styled "scientific publisher", whose online ramblings took in a hatred of women and a morbid fixation with cannibalism. But a police investigation discovered that his prime motivation was racism and he dedicated himself to producing what prosecutors called "obnoxious and abhorrent'' books, pamphlets and web pages.

On his website, Sheppard employed Whittle, 41, of Preston, Lancashire, as a columnist under the pseudonym "Luke O'Farrell".

Although their vitriol was variously directed at black, Asian and other non-white people, most of the material shown to the jury was virulently anti-Semitic. The language and racial slurs used by the pair cannot be repeated here, but some of the excerpts presented to the court offered a flavour of their discourse. One leaflet claimed that Auschwitz had not really been the location of industrial mass murder but had been, instead, a holiday camp provided by a benevolent Nazi regime for Europe's Jewish population.

Jonathan Sandiford, prosecuting, told the jury that it held up survivors of the Holocaust to "ridicule and contempt", accusing them of lying about the genocide of six million Jews. Another story was illustrated with photographs of dead Jews. Sheppard also wrote that Holocaust victim Anne Frank's diary was "evil".

Reviewing lawyer Mari Reid, of the Crown Prosecution Service's counter-terrorism division, said members of the public were entitled under the law to hold racist and extreme views. But she added: "What they are not entitled to do is to publish or distribute those opinions to the public in a threatening, abusive or insulting manner either intending to stir up racial hatred or in circumstances where it is likely racial hatred will be stirred up."

The defence argued that the online material did not fall under the jurisdiction of UK law, because Sheppard's site was hosted on servers in California. But in a landmark ruling, the judge dismissed this - potentially paving the way for further prosecutions against the owners of other hate sites who believe they are exploiting a legal loophole. Jurors, too, rejected the defence's claim that the pair's writings were merely satirical.

Sheppard was found guilty of 11 offences and Whittle was found guilty of five offences in July 2008. Sheppard was found guilty of a further five charges in January 2009. But the pair were not in court to hear the verdicts against them. Before the jury in the first trial could return verdicts, both men fled to Los Angeles International airport and attempted to claim political asylum. But their bid was thrown out by an immigration judge, and they were held at Santa Ana prison in California until they were returned to the UK to serve their sentences.

The irony of two racists attempting to exploit the immigration and asylum system was lost on no-one who followed the case.

BBC

Anne Frank guardian reaches 100

The last surviving member of the group who helped hide the Jewish girl Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis in Amsterdam has turned 100 years old.

Miep Gies was planning a quiet celebration of her birthday with friends and relatives. She said she was not deserving of the attention, and others had done far more to protect Jews in the Netherlands. She paid tribute to "unnamed heroes", picking out her husband Jan for his courageous defiance of the Nazis.

"He was a resistance man who said nothing but did a lot. During the war he refused to say anything about his work, only that he might not come back one night. People like him existed in thousands but were never heard," Miep Gies said in an email to the Associated Press this week.

Mrs Gies was an employee of Anne Frank's father, Otto, who kept them and six others supplied during their two years in hiding in an attic in Amsterdam from 1942 to 1944. But the family were found by the authorities, and deported. Anne Frank died of typhus in the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen later.

It was Mrs Gies who collected up Anne Frank's papers, and locked them away, hoping that one day she would be able to give them back to the girl. In the event, she returned them to Otto Frank, and helped him compile them into a diary that was published in 1947. It went on to sell tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages.

She became a kind of ambassador for the diary, travelling to talk about Anne Frank and her experiences, campaigning against Holocaust denial and refuting allegations that the diary was a forgery.

For her efforts to protect the Franks and to preserve their memory, Mrs Gies won many accolades.

"This is very unfair," she told the Associated Press. "So many others have done the same or even far more dangerous work."

BBC

Diary of Anne Frank to be dramatised on BBC

BBC One will be showing a brand new adaptation of The Diary Of Anne Frank in the first week of January starring Tamsin Greig, Lesley Sharp, Ian Glen and Ellie Kendrick.

The drama will be in five parts stripped across a week at 7pm starting on January 5th.

It has been adapted by Deborah Moggach and has been made by Darlow Smithson. The BBC has liaised directlly with the Anne Frank Trust, the Anne Frank Fonds and the Anne Frank Museum to ensure absolute authenticity. All have highly praised the adaptation.

A BBC spokesperson noted: "The rights to the actual Diary only come up rarely — this is the first time in over 20 years. It is also the first adaptation to include the version of the diary that was updated a few years ago".

Jewish Chronicle

Holocaust denier convicted of trying to incite race hate online

A man who claims accounts of the Holocaust are "exaggerated" and describes Anne Frank's diary as "evil" has been convicted of putting articles on the internet that could stir up race hate.

A jury at Leeds Crown Court yesterday found Simon Sheppard, 51, guilty of nine counts of publishing racially inflammatory written material on his website between March 2005 and April 2006. The court heard Sheppard's website attracts 4,000 visitors a day.

Four of the articles were penned by Stephen Whittle [who writes as Luke O'Farrell], 41, who was yesterday convicted of four counts of publishing racially inflammatory written material. The others included a cartoon by the American cartoonist Robert Crumb and an article written during the 1960s by the leader of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell.

Prosecutor Jonathan Sandiford told the jury that Sheppard and Whittle were a pair of racists who held what they may regard as fairly extreme views about people who were Jewish, black, Asian, Chinese, Indian and, in reality, anyone who wasn't white.

"People in this country are entitled to be racist and they are entitled to hold unpleasant points of view, but what they aren't entitled to do is publish or distribute written material which is insulting, threatening or abusive and is intended to stir up racial hatred or is likely to do so."

Both Sheppard, of Brook Street, Selby, and Whittle, of Avenham Lane, Preston, told the jury that the articles were an attempt to "satirise" political correctness.

Sheppard said: "You can't blame a Jewish person for being a Jew, you can't blame a black person for being black, and you can't blame a Yorkshireman for being forthright, which I am."

The hearing will enter its seventh week on Monday, when the jury of six men and five women return to court to resume deliberations on further charges.

Sheppard is awaiting verdicts on nine charges relating to the publication, possession and distribution of written material which could stir up racial hatred. Whittle faces a charge of publishing racially inflammatory material.

Yorkshire Post

Saving Anne Frank's chestnut: tree of hope or diseased threat?

For Anne Frank, the majestic chestnut tree she gazed on from the attic window was a source of comfort as she hid from the Nazis. For today's visitors to the elegant Amsterdam terrace house, it cuts a rather more forlorn figure.

The replica black-out curtains mean you cannot even see the tree as Anne did from the Secret Annex. The only public view from a room in the adjoining museum reveals a specimen past its prime, its crown heavily lopped and the remaining gnarled branches swinging precariously, buffeted by gusts off the North Sea. Everyone agrees the 150-year-old tree is dying, eaten away from the inside by two rapacious forms of fungus and attacked from the outside by a leaf-curling moth. Many people, including its private owner, wanted to put it out of its misery, but those lobbying for a stay of execution have won the day. Yesterday the Support Anne Frank Tree foundation (Saft) formally took custody of the tree and is now racing to erect a form of flora life support.

"The Anne Frank tree is not just a tree," said Professor Arnold Heertje, a leading member of the Saft foundation. "It's one of the symbols of the Holocaust, a reminder of the attempted destruction of the Jews."

The foundation's plan is to build a steel frame, which Professor Heertje likens to a corset, designed to prevent the 30-tonne, 22ft tree crashing to the ground or, more worryingly, into the Secret Annex. The construction, which consists of two metal rings attached to a firmly anchored tripod, is expected to cost around €70,000 (£53,000) to build and set up and then €10,000 to maintain every year after that. And the clock is ticking to secure the funding and get the frame in place. Amsterdam council has imposed an end-of-May deadline because by then, the tree will have blossomed and sprouted leaves, and the trunk might not be able to support the additional weight.

The saviours of the horse chestnut make much of the three occasions in her 336-page diary when Anne Frank mentions the tree. "I go to the attic almost every morning to get the stale air out of my lungs," she wrote on Wednesday 23 February 1944. "This morning when I went there, Peter was busy cleaning up... The two of us looked out at the blue sky, the bare chestnut tree glistening with dew, the seagulls and other birds glinting with silver as they swooped through the air, and we were so moved and entranced that we couldn't speak."

Anne's father, Otto – the only one of the eight residents at 263 Prinsengracht to survive the concentration camps where they eventually ended up – recalled his surprise at discovering his daughter's interest in nature after reading her diary for the first time.

"How could I have suspected that it meant so much to Anne to see a patch of blue sky, to observe the gulls during their flight and how important the chestnut tree was to her," he said in a speech in 1968. "But she longed for it during that time when she felt like a caged bird. She only found consolation in thinking about nature."

There is no doubting the tree's symbolism. Nor its global allure. Each day hundreds of visitors leave a message on a leaf in Anne's virtual tree on the official website. And people are willing to pay for a real-life piece of the history too. One enterprising neighbour decided to sell a chestnut, billing it as a last chance to "Grow your own Anne Frank tree anywhere" and after a four-day bidding war on eBay, it sold for about £5,000.

But despite the universal appeal of the horse chestnut, there are those who would say its defenders are barking up the wrong tree.

Even with the new steel frame, the tree is only expected to stand for another 15 years at most, by which time it will have run up costs of more than €200,000 . Its leaves already turn prematurely brown in summer because of the leaf miner moth. And although some optimistic protectors still talk hopefully of being able to find a permanent cure for the tinder polypore and honey mushroom fungi gobbling away at the trunk, sonar images taken over the years suggest otherwise.

The blue tint of the dead wood has rapidly gained ground, and at the last count, only 29 per cent of the tree was living wood. Normally trees in the Netherlands are cut down when this level hits 33 per cent.

"The tree in its old form, if it could have been kept alive, would have been fantastic," said Hans Westra, the director of the Anne Frank House, who has seen the tree almost every day for the 30 years he has worked for the museum. "But that's not possible. What we will have in a couple of years is a tree that has been cut so much that it's unrecognisable as her tree."

And it's not as if the alternative to extending the life of the tree is simply to leave a gaping hole. Six genetically identical specimens, grown from grafts from the mother tree, are being nurtured in northern Holland and are already 7ft high, ready to replace the original if it should ever be felled.

What's keeping Mr Westra awake at night though is the possibility of an unplanned fall. "The most important thing is that the tree cannot be allowed to be a danger to the Secret Annex," he said. "I don't feel 100 per cent safe but I have to accept the word of the experts."

Independent

Hatewatch - for the week of May 30th 2007

Skinheads Sentenced For Stomping Murder
Samuel Compton, 27, and Christopher Whitley, 25, were sentenced to more than 20 years in prison for stomping a man to death outside a Phoenix pool hall in 2002...

Child Porn Charges Against Neo-Nazi Leader Detailed
A new court filing reveals sordid details of the federal government's child pornography case against disgraced National Vanguard leader Kevin Strom...

Idaho Shooter Was Aryan Nations Member
Jason Kenneth Hamilton, a card-carrying member of Aryan Nations, killed his wife, a church sexton and a police officer in a shooting spree that wounded three others...

KKK Group Holds Anti-Immigration Rally
More than 150 people gathered to hear a dozen robed members of the Alabama Order of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan hurl racial slurs and epithets at Mexican immigrants...

Anne Frank Memorial Vandalized
A memorial to Holocaust victim Anne Frank was toppled and damaged by vandals two months after being plastered with neo-Nazi stickers...

SPLC

Escape from the Holocaust: The Secret life of Britain's Anne Frank

When her parents were sent to the Nazi concentration camps, a six-year-old from Newcastle was hidden away in Paris. Now she is retracing her path to freedom

The fragments of the story were there all along, bundled into a shoebox which lay, unopened, in a spare room at Suzanne Rappoport's apartment in Leeds. There were the postcards her father had sent, asking after her but providing no word of her mother; the studio photograph of the three of them taken a few weeks before they were separated; and the immaculate, handwritten note she had penned, aged no more than nine, telling how she longed to see them both again. "Je serai bien contente de revoir ma chere petite maman et mon cher petit papa," reads the letter. She never did.

Ms Rappoport was born of an immigrant British mother and has spent her entire adult life in England. But its defining event occurred on a warm August afternoon in German-occupied Paris, in 1942. The French police were collaborating with the Nazis in the round up of non-French Jews - those who had come to France but were not born there - for deportation. Among them were her parents, taken from their small flat at Belleville, in the attractive 20th arrondissement.

Ms Rappoport would have been taken, too, were it not for the courage and sheer audacity of the woman across the third floor landing, Mme Yvonne Collomb, who removed the child from the flat - even as French police waited for her parents to pack a case each - and then helped conceal her from the Nazis and their collaborators for over three years. Though other British Jews are known to have been among France's 30,000 Hidden Children, who escaped the Nazis in circumstances captured by Sebastian Faulks's novel Charlotte Gray, Ms Rappoport will become the first to tell her story this week, in a BBC Timewatch documentary which takes her back to the apartment block where, 65 years ago, she was concealed in a makeshift bed under her neighbour's kitchen table.

There would have been no story to tell had not Ms Rappoport's mother, Millie Spadik, whose own parents first arrived in Liverpool by passenger ship in the early 1900s to escape the Russian pogroms, decided to leave her home in Newcastle upon Tyne for France after an unhappy marriage. She settled in Paris where she had met Josek Rappoport, a Polish tailor, though she and her daughter returned to north-east England several times before the war. With Millie's income as a garment finisher supplementing Josek's salary, they enjoyed theatre and cinema and were able to indulge their daughter in her favourite treat - grenadine and lemonade with a straw at a café on Rue de Belleville. The last family photograph, taken at the Studio Jean Guy, marked their daughter's sixth birthday - 23 July 1942.

What occurred next remained firmly in the past until Ms Rappoport, now 70, concluded it was time to revisit it. Her decision to go back stemmed from a chance conversation about her parents with one of her neighbours in Leeds, Barbara Govan, whose Screenhouse Productions company has produced the Timewatch documentary, which airs on BBC2 on Friday. "I felt that I needed, while I still could, to find out what had happened to my parents - and to my grandparents, who were also taken that summer," Ms Rappoport said. "There were so many fragments of memory. That's how it must be with an experience like that."

She was at her father's shoulder, as he sat watching the pigeons in the sunshine through the window of their third-floor apartment, when they both heard the sound of the French policemen on the wooden staircase at 58 Rue de Belleville. The child was not immediately anxious: there had been a curfew for her that summer and the yellow star she and other Jewish children wore made her uncomfortable, but her parents had been assiduous about keeping the family's true predicament from her. It was as her parents locked the front door and quickly ushered her into the small family bedroom with them, bundling her under the bed, that it became clear something was seriously wrong. "Mother was sobbing, pacing backwards and forwards and tearing her hair out," Ms Rappoport recalled. "From under the bed, I saw clumps of it falling to the floor. She knew what was coming." After the front door was broken in, the Rappoports were ordered into their sparse little kitchen and were packing bags in front of the small Salamander stove, under the eye of the policemen, when Mme Collomb rushed in. "She said: 'What's my child doing in this apartment? I've been looking everywhere for her. She dragged me out by the arm before I could react," Ms Rappoport said. "She got away with it. The police left the building with my parents but never came looking for me."

Ms Rappoport now believes that her parents and their neighbour had rehearsed this script in readiness for the moment. "Mme Colomb had sent her daughter out to play at the Butte de Chaumont park that day," she said. "I also found my parents' sideboard in her apartment, and items like their Japanese tea set, which puzzled me. I now think it might have been their advance payment to her for the task she was prepared to undertake."

The days which followed brought the same bewildering existence which the two young Jewish brothers experience when hidden in an upstairs room in Charlotte Gray. Mme Collomb made her new child a bed under the kitchen table, protected from view by a long, thick chenille table cloth, and she occupied her with a pair of slippers made from old dusters. It was Suzanne's job to polish the floor with them. "I loved skating around the slippery kitchen on them," Ms Rappoport recalled. "She knew how to distract me."

But it soon became unsafe for a child, whose existence was well known, to be confined so close to home. Mme Collomb tapped into a network which was hiding children in rural France and sent her to the village of Mondoubleau in the Loire Valley, whose role in hiding children has been documented. It was here that the reality of her parents' absence and her own grim existence - with hours hidden from view in a cellar - began to dawn on her. Though she did not know it, those into whose care she had been entrusted did not share Mme Collomb's empathy. A letter, written from a family in Mondoubleau to Mme Collomb and recently recovered from the Leeds shoebox, reads: "Je regrette de vous mettre en embarras pour [Suzanne] mais je ne peux pas la garder. Je ne peux pas m'attacher a la maison pour un enfant." ("I'm sorry to put you in a difficult position over Suzanne but I can't look after her. I can't be stuck at home for a child.")

Suzanne was moved to a farmhouse in the Auvergne, where her yearning to see Ms Collomb, as well as her parents, was evident in an emotional a letter to Ms Collomb which concluded: "Je vais vous quittaient en vous embrasant de tout mon petit coeur."

Correspondence from southern Poland told Mme Collomb that the prospects for the child's parents were grim. Several postcards from Suzanne's father confirmed he was in the Auschwitz camp at Birkenau, where at least 1.1 million Jews and 75,000 Poles perished. His prisoner number - Birkenau 3776 - is at the top of the cards (translated into German at the camp) in which he reports: "I'm digging coal. I'm in good health. How is my child? Of my wife, I've heard nothing."

Young Suzanne, like dozens of France's hidden children, received no word of her parents' fate. She wept when a child, Fernandres, who had shared her predicament in the Auvergne, was suddenly taken home to Marseilles by her parents. Her years in hiding brought several close escapes - she was caught in the crossfire of a resistance attack on a German munitions train on one occasion - but eventually, after the war had ended, she returned to Mme Collomb, only to find herself within days on a ship to her maternal grandparents in Newcastle. "After everything, it wasn't what I wanted," she said. "I was returning to a strange country where I didn't speak the language. As soon as I was old enough, I left my family for London."

"Forget what happened," her grandparents told her, leaving her to reach her own conclusions about her parents' fate. And to this day, the precise details about them are unclear. Though Ms Rappoport has located them both at the Shoah Memorial in Paris, where 76,000 Jews deported from France are remembered, the dates and places of their deaths are still unknown. Discussions are currently under way in Europe on how to speed up the unlocking of a vast archive of Nazi documents, including an index of 17.5 million names, controlled by a commission on which 11 countries, including Britain, are represented. This may also reveal more about her paternal grandmother, who died at Auschwitz, and her grandfather, who died at a holding camp.

Mme Collomb's collection of evidence - passed to Ms Rappoport in 1969 when she went to France in search of documentation to assist her application for a British passport - has helped her to discover more than she hoped to learn and prompted her to ensure the Frenchwoman, who died in 1992, is remembered for her heroism. Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, has already agreed to name Mme Collomb as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust, and her name is also to be placed on France's Mur des Justes, which acknowledges those who defied the Nazis. It is now known that Mme Collomb saved others including a M. Hubermann, another neighbour, who hid in her broom cupboard.

The French government has awarded Ms Rappoport a small annual compensation - for which she must attend a Leeds police station each year to prove she is still alive. A class action suit co-ordinated in New York against the French railway, SNCF, for transporting her parents and many others continues - though a regional court verdict in their favour has recently been overturned.

"The police never came looking for me at Mme Collomb's house that day and whether I was on the arrest list is a mystery I shall never know the answer to," Ms Rappoport said. The horror that she was spared is perhaps best understood by the letters written by other Parisian children before they were herded away on trains, that summer. "My heart is heavy and I can't tell you all I am feeling," said 15-year-old Jacques Befelor before departing Paris on what was known as Convoy 15 to Auschwitz. "We are rushing to prepare for a long, sad journey and it drives us mad that we are to be separated. This is the end."

Independent

Spectre of fascism grows as neo-Nazis go on trial for burning Anne Frank’s diary

Ceremonial book-burning offers grim reminder of country’s dark past

Germany's growing neo-Nazi threat hit home last week when suspected radical right-wingers went on trial for burning a copy of Anne Frank's diary and an American flag.

Seven men, aged between 24 and 29, are accused of inciting racial hatred, denying the Holocaust and glorifying the Nazis. If found guilty, they face five years behind bars, a sentence that director of the Anne Frank Centre in Berlin, Thomas Heppner, believes should be meted out in full.

He said: "I felt ill during the case: the way five of the accused remained silent and Lars Konrad admitted burning the famous book. But I just felt so ill when he claimed that he did it to free himself of the burden of Germany's past'."

Heppner asked: "If that were the case, then why didn't they burn Hitler's Mein Kampf?"

In its statement, the state prosecutors' office said that "by using clear-cut neo-Nazi and Nazi terminology, the men had not just mocked Anne Frank, who died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945 at the age of 16, but also all the other millions of Nazi victims".

The book-burning took place in Pretzien, a picturesque little town in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. Its mayor, Friedrich Harwig, says his community has been torn apart by the the trial. Last June a summer solstice party in the town turned ugly when the accused men allegedly threw the flag and then the book into the ceremonial bonfire while shouting chants reminiscent of the 1933 Nazi book-burnings, which were organised across the country to rid the Third Reich of all "degenerate books"

As a key witness, Harwig gave his evidence on Wednesday. He was at the party along with around 100 townsfolk. Following allegations from his Social Democratic Party (SPD) that the burnings were an "assault on human culture" and that Harwig should have attempted to stop them, he resigned from the SPD. He says he will stand for mayor again next year as an independent.

"It was an awful night, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone to experience something of that kind. The answer is to speak openly about things: without dialogue, we can't hope for an improvement in the radical right-wing situation," he said.

But this incident is just "the tip of an iceberg", argues Bernd Wagner from Exit-Germany, the organisation which works at rehabilitating right-wingers so they can get back into "normal" society. Wagner works closely on grassroots projects with a number of people from Pretzien, together with the mayor and community groups to find a "democratic way out of the mess".

The problem, according to Wagner, is that there is a slow but growing trend towards radicalism. The perpetrators are not always unemployed, socially marginalised individuals. "Many in Pretzien have good, well-paid jobs," he added.

Many Germans believe such cases serve only to throw small insignificant groupings into the limelight. Wagner said: "If one tries to use community service as punishment, this is also a problem, because many of the neo-Nazis are fantastic with their social involvement - whether it's organising a festival or being the first to be on hand to assist during the flooding of the Elbe. Social help just gives them another way of propagating their Nazi beliefs."

Thomas Heppner argues that while the law can't change society, he hopes that the publicity will help Germans to see what's allowed and what's not. "Families and teachers must realise the threat of the neo-Nazis," he said.

The case, presided over by Judge Hans-EIke Bruns, is due to end by mid-March. State prosecutor Uwe Hornburg, who has been in his job for 20 years, said he has never been so shocked by a case, despite the state of Brandenburg, which borders Saxony-Anhalt, having the highest rate of right-wing radicalism in Germany. Last week's publication of Germany's constitutional protection report for 2006 showed that the number of crimes with right-wing backgrounds has grown over the past year to a total of 1399.

Sunday Herald