After surviving Auschwitz, my family found refuge and kindness in Britain. Now, with the toxic fallout from Oct 7 fuelling hatred of Jews once more, I fear they would not be so welcome today: ALEX BRUMMER

Soon after the horrific October 7 Hamas attacks on southern Israel exactly three years ago, I visited Kibbutz Kfar Aza, from where 30-year-old British hostage Emily Damari was snatched, and the site of the nearby Nova music festival.

Memories of the blood-stained walls of the modest homes of Israeli families dragged from their safe rooms and beds and ruthlessly mutilated, raped, murdered and captured still keep me awake at night.

The makeshift memorials to beautiful young people slaughtered like cattle at Nova, while they danced the night away at the joyous festival, still haunt me.

As we travelled into the area, we passed the burnt-out cars and the bus shelter where families, including young children, had sought refuge and were mowed down as they awaited rescue.

The senseless killing, the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, saw 1,200 people murdered.

In a country used to war, and which became the ultimate refuge to families who survived the Nazis, almost everyone knows someone among the dead – it's a small place of close familial ties. The drama and images of those events are indelibly tattooed on their hearts.

Even the United Nations, whose New York headquarters is so often the scene of anti-Israel propaganda, found graphic evidence of rape, gang rape, and sexualised torture inflicted on hostages taken on October 7 by Hamas.

Yet, in a gross inversion of this reality, Hamas and violent Iranian-backed Palestinian factions have since become heroes of the Left. Across the globe, Jews have been targeted from Bondi Beach to Andy Burnham's Manchester.

Noa Argamani reacts as she and her partner Avinatan Or, not pictured, are seized by members of the Hamas militant group on October 7, 2023

Emily Damari, a British-Israeli former hostage held by Hamas for over 15 months following her abduction during the October 7 Hamas attacks

Here in Britain, the Jewish community has never felt more under siege.

The resolution passed at the Green Party conference, that 'Zionism is

Racism' – this from a party with MPs at Westminster – is nothing short of an abomination which flies in the face of 78 years of Israeli independence.

It shows a profound ignorance of Britain's long involvement with the self-determination of the Jewish nation, which dates back to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. 

Where on earth do the Greens think that Israel's mosaic population of 10.3million people, including more than 2.1million voting Palestinian Israeli citizens, are going to disappear to?

The idea that Israel is a racist state, when up to 50 per cent of the physicians, pharmacists, nurses and care workers working in the health system are Arabs is errant rubbish.

Yet, our socialist Prime Minister Andy Burnham has decided – for shameless political advantage – that sanctions on Israel would reinforce his position among the party faithful and shore up the Muslim vote, and so he implemented them.

Whenever I spend time among my fellow members of the Jewish community now, there is an awareness of the fragility of existence here.

The contribution of our beleaguered community to British life on the High Street, in the art galleries, the cathedrals of theatre, music, the media and commerce have become unseen. 

It must have felt like this in the early days of Nazism in the 1930s. Ed Miliband's charges of 'ethnic cleansing' by Israel on the West Bank and 'horrific' policies in Gaza have unleashed unmitigated fury in Britain's Jewish community.

The Foreign Secretary's use of such language last month during the holiest season in the Jewish calendar is chilling even for fervent critics of Israel's Right-wing Netanyahu government.

My Aunt Sussie, who recently died at the age of 98, regarded the UK as the most tolerant nation on Earth.

She and her brother, my late father Michael, would have been devastated that Britain has become such a hostile environment for Jews and Israel.

My gentle late aunt's story could not be more important in a world where Jew hatred is flourishing, a world where the butchers and torturers of Hamas praise the British Foreign Secretary's use of the words 'ethnic cleansing' to describe Israel's actions in Gaza. She was a teenage survivor of the savagery of Auschwitz and Belsen.

She was among a generation of Holocaust survivors and refugees who regarded the British people with reverence for their bravery and stoicism in the Second World War in the face of the Blitz and seemingly insurmountable obstacles of Hitler's mighty armies.

But those words 'never again', engraved on the hearts of survivors and embraced by those exposed to the horrors of the death camps, are being gravely erased in this country. 

Left to right are Sheindy, Rosie and Sussie who endured Nazi camps before reaching Britain

The main gate of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz I, Poland, which was liberated by the Russians, January 1945

Auntie Sussie was the last Brummer sibling of a family torn asunder by the Nazi horror of the Holocaust. She was among a shrinking band of survivors in Britain able to offer first-hand testimony of the venal brutality and deprivation of the camps.

Margrit, Sussie to her family, was the youngest of nine children born to my paternal grandparents Farni and Sandor in the rural town of Tiszaujlak (Vylok) on the Hungarian border with Ukraine. The Second World War was to have a shattering impact on all their lives.

Those of them who survived Hitler, the march of fascism, murder, mayhem, the upheaval of war and the violent anti-Semitism of the age, ended up scattered across the globe.

My father escaped the Holocaust. In 1938, as the grip of Nazi Germany tightened across Europe, he decided to come to Britain and join his elder brother Philip, who was by then a rabbi in Merseyside.

Shortly before he left, he was beaten up by fascist thugs at the local railway station.

After making his way through a Europe already at war he eventually arrived at London's Victoria station – and, by accident, found himself in the women's waiting room. There, he was befriended by an 'elegant English lady' who helped him across the city and put him on a train for Liverpool.

From that single act, he developed a lifelong admiration for British kindness.

Back in Hungary, as war spread across Europe, my grandfather Sandor's dairy business at least ensured there was food on the table and a small chicken for the Friday night eve-of-Sabbath meal.

An orthodox Jew with a distinctive red beard, he was a gregarious figure who held pre-war drink-and-card evenings at the family home.

The younger girls in the family worked with the dairy cattle. Sussie was tasked with carrying milk urns to the centre of the village where supplies would be dispensed in exchange for payment.

In 1944, though, this increasingly hardscrabble life ended abruptly. Hitler's war of conquest may have been increasingly doomed to failure but the impatience of the Fuhrer and his henchman to rid Europe of its Jews knew no bounds. Adolf Eichmann was dispatched to Hungary to empty the country of its Jewish population of more than 700,000.

On a fateful June day, the quiet of the pastoral town of Tiszaujlak was shattered. Hungarian Arrow Cross militias, acting on Nazi orders, rounded up the town's Jews, marched them to the local synagogue and locked them inside.

My grandparents, my uncle Martin, aunts Rosie and Sussie and cousin Sheindy who had been brought up as a daughter, all of them were caught up in the most horrific events of the 20th century.

Child survivors behind barbed wire at the Auschwitz concentration camp during its liberation by Soviet troops in January 1945

A few days later my paternal family were loaded on to a cattle truck for the Nazi death camps. Friends and neighbours, who had been sustained by the Brummer milk round, were now hostile. As the train left the small station my family begged for water; they were offered salt.

After several days in the cattle truck, with no sanitation, they were disembarked on the platform of Auschwitz to be greeted by Nazi guards and snarling hounds. 

My grandfather Sandor (after whom I am named) and grandmother were separated from the three girls. (My uncle, Martin, had been shipped to the camp of Theresienstadt in what is now the Czech Republic.)

My grandmother squeezed the hands of the two youngest girls, Sussie and Sheindy, and told them: 'If they ask your age, say you are 16 years old.' It was a last heroic act by a very special woman.

At Sussie's recent funeral in Hertfordshire, her daughter Fiona recalled that her mother regarded it as the decisive moment which saved their lives – children younger than 16 were sent to the gas chambers.

My grandparents were marched off the platform, stripped of their clothes and dignity, and themselves brusquely herded into the gas chambers. Their bodies were burned in one of the giant crematoria. 

Sussie, Sheindy and Rosie were stripped of clothes and meagre possessions, and provided with thin, rough cotton shifts and no underwear. Just a day later, they were shipped off to Kivioli in Estonia to work in a factory producing iron rods for building works. They were fed watery soup with maggots floating on the surface.

As the Russian army advanced on Estonia, they were moved, eventually to Stutthof concentration camp in Poland.

There, Sheindy, because she was small, was separated from the other two girls and selected to be killed. She was placed in a toilet block but escaped by jumping out of a window and became reunited with the other two. Sussie would recall that their togetherness and quietness earned them a sobriquet, the 'three quiet mice.'

Soon they were all shipped to another camp and then, malnourished, bald and bedraggled, on a three-day rail journey to Bergen-Belsen.

They found themselves surrounded by skeletal people and rotting bodies piled high. 

At Belsen, the Brummer girls were recognised by a woman from their home town who was suffering from typhus. She gave them cleaning fluid, to help protect them from disease, and soup.

The sound of gunfire was all around as allied troops advanced. The three teenage women's nightmare ended when they were put on a train to Copenhagen to be met by members of the Swedish Red Cross.

Severely emaciated, and suffering physical damage which would affect their later lives, they were cared for by young doctors and transferred to the Swedish city of Malmo.

The three young women would later describe the time in Sweden, when they were well fed, given ice cream and looked after – and learned to ski – as some of the best days of their lives.

Sussie, Rosie and Sheindy – the 'three quiet mice' – survived but their lives were forever scarred by their horrendous experiences.

Two older siblings were snatched from their homes and families in 1942 by Hungary's thuggish Arrow Cross, allies of the Nazis.

For a year or so it was possible to send letters, food parcels, and winter clothing. Then a deadly silence. They were never heard from again.

In Sweden, the three young women informed the Red Cross that they had family in Brighton, England where their older brother Philip was minister in a synagogue. A telegram was dispatched, and the first thrilling news of survival reached the Brighton-based Brummers.

Until then it had been assumed that they had died, alongside their parents, in Auschwitz.

The women were dispatched on a civilian Dakota aircraft to RAF Northolt in Middlesex, and then on to Victoria coach station. There they were met by my father Michael.

Over time, every one of the three mice found her feet again in a Britain that welcomed them in and treated them with huge compassion. They each married here and went on to spread the family far and wide.

All the relatives who survived those horrors retained a tremendous affection for Britain and could not have been more thankful for the sanity and safety it brought to their lives.

Would they receive that welcome in today's Britain? Would they find that sanity and safety?