The day his father was murdered by the Nazis...

Since retirement Steven has realised that part of the reason he didn't perish was so that he could live to tell the tale – a story he feels it is his responsibility to pass on to successive generations. Steven joins the Festival of Chichester this year to offer Steven Frank, Child Survivor Of The Holocaust in Graylingwell Chapel from 6pm on Weds, June 21 (date changed from June 15). He will also tell of the brutal murder of his Dutch resistance member father in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943.

“I was born in Amsterdam in 1935 to a Dutch father and an English mother. My mother had left the UK to study in Amsterdam. Young ladies were sent off to learn how to be domesticated so that their man would have someone he could rely on and be kept by. That's what they did in the 1930s! And so my mother found herself in Amsterdam though both her parents had originally come from Holland.

“Having left England as an 18 or 19-year-old she never returned until after the war. My father was an eminent lawyer destined for the top of the judicial tree. He was a very humanitarian person and he and a group of lawyers set up a group in Amsterdam that was what we would call in this country legal aid. With the arrival of Hitler in Germany many German Jews fled over the border into Holland bearing in mind that Holland was neutral in World War One. They thought that they would be safe there and my father was asked by the Dutch government to set up a welfare organisation for them. He was very much involved in their plight but when the Germans invaded Holland obviously the funding stopped. My father joined the Dutch resistance and wrote a lot for an underground newspaper and he helped find hiding places for Jews. We had Jews in our own house. My mother and father were secular Jews and here we had Jews hiding Jews. My father was also involved in organising help for Jews who were desperate to get out of Holland. But he was betrayed. Every morning when he left to go for work and walk into the city centre he kissed us all and said goodbye and then one day in October 1942 he went to work and then at 11 o'clock that morning his office door burst open and he was taken to the SS headquarters where he was beaten and tortured and from there he was sent to prison where he was tortured and beaten. About Christmas time 1942 he was transferred and taken eastward. He was sent to Auschwitz where on arrival he was sent straight to the gas chambers.

“My mother obviously was in a great panic when my father didn't return from work but like him she was quite an extraordinary person. She managed to keep going, and when my father was in prison she managed to visit him. She found out who the cleaners were and went into the prison disguised as a man. She found my father. He told her he had been tortured but had given nothing away.”

Ultimately Steven, his mother and his brothers were sent to three camps ending up in Theresienstadt, They were liberated in May 1945. Tickets on https://festivalofchichester.co.uk/

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