Mirjam and Ludwik were both born into prosperous families. Both had happy early childhoods. Like millions of others, both had their lives shattered by the second world war. Mirjam was caught with her mother and sisters in the occupied Netherlands, living under increasingly oppressive Nazi rule before being moved to the Dutch holding camp for Jews at Westerbork, and then Belsen. Ludwik, who grew up in Poland, was exiled to eastern Kazakhstan by the Soviets with his mother, where they lived through a Siberian winter with little food and no shelter. Both somehow survived through a combination of willpower, help from distant family and moments of miraculous luck in a sea of misfortune. They ended up, through circuitous means, in Britain, met, married and lived a blissfully quiet life in Hendon.
Like many survivors, neither wrote their story. They did not want to be defined by the worst of their experiences. As Mirjam said: “I think of myself as a person, a wife and mother first, and a survivor last.” Nor did they realise how incredible their journeys would seem to the rest of us.
