Special resonance as One Life screened in Chichester for Holocaust Memorial Day

The film, starring Anthony Hopkins, tells the true story of Sir Nicholas ‘Nicky’ Winton, a young London broker who, in the months leading up to World War Two, rescued 669 predominantly Jewish children from the Nazis.

Among those children was Clare Apel’s cousin Helenka Eisinger: “She was five in 1938 and she passed away about two years ago. She was put on the train eating an apple, aged five. I think she was on train number four. She said goodbye to her family, and none of them survived. They all went to the gas chambers.

“There was a documentary made about Nicky Winton about 15 years ago and you see the children all walking along Liverpool Street station and in the bottom left-hand corner is Helenka. She was first placed in a family in Worthing and then she was all over the place. I knew about her and I met her on several occasions when she was an adult. She became a very, very brilliant oboist and through my brother she met her husband. They lived in Africa and then they emigrated to Canada and on January 27 2015 she did a broadcast on Canadian radio that went all over Canada.

“She and her husband had happened to be watching the documentary when she was about 75 and she didn't know what had happened to her. She looked at the film with her husband and she said ‘That's my coat! What am I doing in that film?’ She had blocked out all the horror from the age of five until she was 75. By then she had grown up children and they did a lot of research and found out that she had been one of Nicky Winton’s children.

“She never got over the pain and the horror. She went to Theresienstadt where all the German and Czech Jews went first of all, and her family had gone there. They've got a big memorial there and she did get to see all the names of the Eisinger family.”

Remarkably, Clare was able to provide more information: “(Clare’s husband) Ralph belongs to a big history group that meets once a month and there was a lovely professor coming down from Southampton University to talk about Kindertransport in Sussex, and at the end of the talk she asked were there any questions. And I said that my cousin was 75 when she realised what had happened to her. And the professor said that children aged five and under often found what happened so brutal that they buried the memory. She asked the name and when I said Helenka Eisinger she said ‘I have got a file this thick at Southampton University about her!’ I was just amazed because I've been so much involved with her and to find out more in this way. I asked Helenka would she like all this stuff sent to her or would it be too painful but she did say yes and I was able to send it to her before she died.”

But the coincidences didn't stop there. Clare sings in the Chichester Singers and a “lovely new singer from North Yorkshire joined in May this year and we got talking.” She and Clare discussed their shared North Yorkshire roots, both Ampleforth: “She then said your family were refugees? And I said yes.”

Clare’s parents – Frederick (who changed his name to Stephen after coming to England) and Margery Eisinger – were the first to receive false papers in Vienna from the remarkable Thomas Kendrick, a British spy who rescued more than 10,000 Jews.

“And then she said ‘My grandmother took in Helenka Eisinger!’ It was just extraordinary. I had lived with this story for all these years and then happened to meet the person whose grandmother actually took in Helenka Eisinger!”

Tickets from the New Park Cinema.