Dorothy Bohm came alone to Britain from Memel, Lithuania, in June 1939. Her parents and younger sister were forced into exile in Siberia:

My sister was one when I left. 22 years later I saw her again. We had no language in common. Hers is Russian. No memories in common, no childhood. Nothing. She’s a wonderful person. But it’s been very strange.

In 1957 I heard the news about my parents & sister being alive, that they still were together. The Red Cross, I don’t know how they found me, because I’d changed my name. 

My father was allowed out of his Siberian camp, after Stalin’s death, but had to stay in that area with that dreadful climate, & had to report to the police every day. The stories he had were amazing. Solzhenitsyn’s book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich came out. My father read it & said to me could he be in touch with Solzhenitsyn? I said ‘Why Papa?' He said 'I would like to tell him it was so much worse'. I didn’t of course.

Once my husband & I knew the three of them were alive we started to help. They survived mainly because of the parcels we sent. If you saw pictures of what my parents looked like then. My sister worked in the most terrible conditions as an economist. 

I saw my parents again in 1961. I went to Riga. Before I was called to the Foreign Office. They explained that if I went & anything happened to me there, they couldn’t help. But we went. We took our daughter. I thought having a child with me would somehow soften… 

I was 14 when I left them. I came back as a married woman with a child. As we sat in the car, my husband turned around and said ‘You look so much like your father’. You see. He had obviously changed a lot.

I have a photo of our reunion. The picture looks quite normal, the conditions were not normal. Fear & anxiety the whole time we were there. We were being shadowed & followed. When we came back to our hotel one night we saw somebody with a torch looking through our things. 

But my father had a tremendous sense of recovery. He still believed in life, that there is good. Even some things in Communism. He said sometimes they made him change quarters: they said that things were too good for him, & the young official who took him apologised. Small things like this helped him survive.

And he built his own house in Riga, & he was as proud of that as of having built his own factory. It’s that sort of survival sense he had. My mother took it in quite a different way.

What was it like to see them again? Let me explain it like this: when I was in Manchester there was a family that was very nice to me, a Jewish family, used to invite me, I was at college with their daughter, when I went there, she was calling them Mummy & Daddy, I just couldn’t bear it, I stopped going there. I only mixed with people like myself who didn’t have a family. 

So my relationship in many ways changed. Instead of being the child with parents, I became the parent. I had to look after them. And I did. 

We worked for ten years trying to get permission to get them to come out. Eventually we had the chance to get a letter to Wilson, who was meeting Khrushchev. Within 3 days permission was granted for them to come to Britain. I had to go on TV. The press besieged the house. But they survived & had a few years of life, they managed to live. 

I took my father to see various specialists, they said he has no right to be as well as he is. He’s got a hole in his lung, etc. He wanted to live. He started to paint.

There’s an interesting story. In Siberia, one of the chaps was somebody who could tell fortunes. Father told me that at the worst time, he went snow-blind, all sorts of terrible things happened. This man told him he'd survive, he'd see his family again, he'd travel by aeroplane across the world. It all came true. Extraordinary thing. I don’t believe in these things myself.