A Holocaust survivor has stressed the importance of being tolerant towards minority groups, saying all people “come from the same family”.
Janine Webber BEM, 92, hid under a wardrobe with her family before working as a shepherdess and living in a convent under a false identity to avoid Nazi persecution during the Second World War.
She also lost both of her parents within months of each other by the age of nine.
Now an experienced public speaker, Ms Webber, who lives in north-east London, said she was unable to talk about her story for 50 years and only decided to share her experience after encouragement from her own children.
Ms Webber (Jonathan Brady/PA)
She told the PA news agency: “In 1996, my son said my story ought to be known. I was interviewed and filmed for a foundation.
“When I was interviewed for the first time I told my story in total. I could not stop crying.”
Born in Lviv, Poland, now in modern-day Ukraine, in 1932, Ms Webber was living in the city when Germany invaded the region, then occupied by the USSR, in June 1941.
Thousands of people were murdered within weeks of the invasion as Jewish communities in the city were immediately targeted.
Ms Webber said: “My first experience seeing the Nazis, what we used to call the Gestapo, was when I was in our flat with my mother and brother.
“They were rounding up the Jewish men and my father came running in. He said ‘The German’s after me’, and he jumped from our second floor balcony to escape being taken.
“I saw these armed police and I became very frightened.”
Ms Webber and her family were initially forced from their home to live in a single small room on the edge of Lviv, where she said they “hid in the closet in this hole under the ground” during German raids.
They were then moved into a ghetto where her mother fell ill and died of typhus at just 29.
After a series of failed attempts to lay low and hide with farming families in the Polish countryside, Ms Webber returned to Lviv and took refuge with her aunt, uncle and a group of other Jewish people in a convent.
Reflecting on the time, she said: “My story is a little different because I was never in a camp.
“I was moving because I wanted to improve my life.”
Ms Webber regularly gives testimonies to school children about her experience (Jane Barlow/PA Archive)
With the situation becoming more dangerous and the group now staying in an underground bunker, Ms Webber obtained false identity papers from her aunt and was sent to a second convent in Krakow, where she lived with a priest.
“The nuns prayed several times a day. I did not know the prayers, so I was worried they would find out [my true identity],” she said.
“It seemed very easy to lie because I wanted to live. When it is a question of life and death, one can lie.”
Ms Webber remained in Krakow until the city was liberated in early 1945, going on to work as a maid while living with an elderly couple.
She said a Nazi officer had spent the night at their home in the days before the liberation.
Reunited with her aunt after the war, they moved to Paris where Ms Webber was put in a children’s home.
“They didn’t want us to talk about the war.
“The people in charge (of the home) were Jews, but they wanted us to forget.”
In 1956 Ms Webber came to the UK to improve her English, before she met her husband in a “very banal story”.
She went on to marry a second time and have two sons and two grandsons.
Ms Webber has now been giving talks on her experiences to schools and businesses for more than 20 years with the Holocaust Educational Trust, in an effort to ensure the events of the Holocaust are never repeated and to remember her family and other Jewish people caught up in the atrocities.
She is due to speak at the Israeli Embassy, Foreign Office and Southampton University on Holocaust Memorial Day on Monday, with this year marking the 80th anniversary of the event.
Asked what the day means to her, Ms Webber said: “It means to respect people.
“My message is always to be tolerant towards the minorities, to respect and be kind to people even if they look different, speak differently or have a different religion or different colour of skin.
“I hope that people will give this message.”
She added: “We are all human beings. We all come from the same family.”