Munich, 10th March 1933 Bea Green MBE's father, Dr Michael Siegel, goes to a police station to complain on behalf of a Jewish client whose shop had been damaged, is beaten up by the police and marched round Munich, and has his image captured in a famous photo by an American journalist:

I like talking. I seriously believe trying to protect your children by not telling them everything is a terrible thing. Because it makes them imagine things that could be worse than reality. So I told my children what it was like when they beat up my dad.

That was the first intimation of serious antisemitism. 10th March ’33, I remember everything. I was at home with a cold & my mum had gone out shopping. 

In a block of flats you have laundry facilities in the basement Our maid was down there. So I was alone in the flat. 

I heard the key of the door at the end of the corridor. I was at the other end in my bedroom. I expected whoever it was who had come back to see if I was all right. Nobody came. Funny. I waited a while. 

Then I got up. I walked out through my brother’s bedroom to the corridor that led down to the front door. My brother’s bedroom door was opposite the bathroom. Outside the bathroom door I saw my father’s– he used to hang his suit there. There was his suit & his shirt all blood-drenched.

What does a little girl of 8 feel? I was scared you know. It was as if I had been winded; I mean, I now think in retrospect that’s how I would describe it. 

I walked down the corridor. My parents’ bedroom was closed. I did something I had never done before: I knocked. Then I opened the door. I saw my father pull up his sheet so that I shouldn’t see his face. 

He said: 'Warte, bis deine Mutter heim kommt'—wait until your mother comes home. The word Mutter was never used, it was always Mutti. The use of that language, & seeing him pull up the sheet, the feather bed, to cover up his face.

I don’t remember walking back to bed, but I remember lying on my back on my bed feeling nothing, you know, nothing. It is hard to explain & it’s hard for me to recreate, even in myself. 

Then my mother came back & the maid came back & my brother came back from school. At that point I knew they were protecting me from knowing what had happened, they didn’t want to tell me. Somehow this idea must have formed in my head: if I ever have children I’ll never do that, I’ll tell them. I don’t think they told me, I must have found out something. But no detail.

The following day we were driven down by friends to our little house in Walchensee with our doctor. My father was very brave about it, so I knew he was all right. The fact that they protected me from the details didn’t matter so much at the time. I was 8. 

When I was 10 there was a polio epidemic in Munich. My parents sent me to an aunt in Luxembourg. It was that aunt who showed me the famous picture which had appeared by that time in the world press. An extraordinary thing went on in my head: I thought that she should not have shown it to me, it should have been my parents. So I learnt from it. You have to cope with whatever situation presents itself. No different from anybody else’s life. Children learn to cope with whatever their situation is. To a kid, whatever happens is normal.