My friend Ernest Simon, who has died aged 92, was an Austrian Jew who avoided the Holocaust by coming to the UK as a child on the Kindertransport in 1939. He went on to work for ICI right across mainland Europe.
Born in Eisenstadt, Austria, to Karoline and Ludwig, a shoe factory worker, he spent his early years in Vienna, where from his bedroom window, in 1938, as an eight-year-old, he watched prayer books and Torah scrolls being burned at the synagogue on his street as Nazi paramilitaries attacked Jewish people and their property in what became known as Kristallnacht.
