Anne was born in 1938 in Warsaw, Poland to loving parents, Hanna and Moses Jakub. At the age of three, as her family were being marched from their home by the Germans, her mother pushed her through a hedge to the waiting ‘milk woman’, who saved her life.
Anne spent the war years as a hidden child in the care of her Aunt Stefania who had converted to Catholicism long before the war.
After the war, she emigrated to South Africa, where she was able to fully realise her Jewish identity. She married Maurice in 1958 and they had three beautiful children and lived for some time in Namibia. After many wonderful and exciting years in southern Africa, the family emigrated to Manchester, where Anne set up an optician’s practice in Cheetham Hill. She has three children and eight grandchildren.
“The emptiness of not having my parents was always with me, but I knew life had to go on.”
“I was another mouth to feed in addition to their own children, and there was a big problem with feeding, believe me. We ate potatoes if we were lucky…”
“I had a terribly deprived childhood because nobody loved me, and nobody was mine. I had no mother, no father, no aunt.”