An extraordinary woman who escaped Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia as a nine-year-old child has helped launch a powerful new Holocaust exhibition in Huddersfield.
Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines MBE travelled to safety in Britain with her younger sister Eva in the summer of 1939 on one of the Kindertransport trains organised by Sir Nicholas Winton.
Now, aged 96, she was at Holocaust Centre North at the University of Huddersfield to help open Between Life and Death: Stories of Rescue during the Holocaust, which runs throughout October.
Lady Milena was just nine when she and Eva left Prague on July 31 1939, arriving in Britain two days later.
They were taken in by the Radcliffe family in Ashton-under-Lyne before eventually being reunited with their parents.
She has spent close to 20 years visiting schools and speaking to young people about her experiences, and told Huddersfield Hub that she hoped the new exhibition would encourage another generation to think about the choices people make.
She said: “I think the hope is that these things will never happen again. They might find it quite unbelievable. I mean, it’s there for them to see.
“One of the things that Nicholas Winton left is for them to remember to try and do something.
“It’s no good being good by not being bad. Try and do something every day, even if you’re helping a lady across the road.
“Remember to stop any bullying, remember to stop any unpleasant happenings that are going on around you.
“If you help one person, you’re helping the world.”
Lady Milena said children continue to respond strongly to her visits, with younger pupils often full of questions and older students discussing what they have heard afterwards in class.
And she has no intention of stopping – she is due to speak in the German town of Weimar soon and has another visit planned in Cheltenham.
Between Life and Death brings together personal accounts of rescuers and survivors from 15 European countries, showing the very different circumstances in which people tried to survive or chose to help Jews facing persecution and murder.
The British section includes the story of Lady Milena and her sister Eva Paddock, as well as Ida and Louise Cook, two London sisters who used trips to the opera in Europe as cover while helping Jewish people escape persecution and smuggling valuables out so refugees could rebuild their lives in Britain.
The exhibition was first shown at the European Commission headquarters in Brussels in 2018 and has since travelled widely across Europe, Japan and the United States. Earlier this year it was displayed at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
Holocaust Centre North, based in the Schwann Building at the University of Huddersfield, tells the wider history of the Holocaust through the experiences of survivors and refugees who later made their homes in the North of England.
The Between Life and Death exhibition runs at the centre until Thursday October 29.
It is open Monday to Thursday from 10am to 5pm, with last entry at 4.45pm.
Admission is free.
