'I know now evil and good exists within all of us. The pain and horror of the Holocaust will never go.'.

Byline: By Hannah Davies

Sylvia Hurst's happy childhood memories in Germany ended with Nazism when, aged 17, she was separated from her family and put on a children's train to London. Hannah Davies speaks to the 84-year-old whose autobiography has just been published.

"I never had a nervous breakdown. Many did ( my sister Susan included. I immersed myself into religious studies ( I wanted to know how this, something so terrible, could happen.

"I know now evil and good exists within all of us. The pain and horror of the Holocaust will never go. I have had many sleepless nights."

Sylvia Hurst does not speak with empty meaning. When she says 'horror' and looks you in the eye, the word has its true impact.

This tiny woman cuts an impressive figure. Elegantly dressed in a blue and purple top and dark red velvet trousers, Sylvia, 84, is a remarkable person who has led a truly amazing life.

Her parents, she says, always told her never to depend on other people, something she has had to take to heart.

As a rich young Jewish girl living in southern Germany, Sylvia enjoyed an idyllic childhood until Nazism took hold.

But with the outbreak of the Second World War, she swiftly went from the comfort of an upper-middle class background to a lice-infested East End London home, to setting up her own fashion business.

Through the 1940s to the 1960s she designed for film stars, featured in Vogue and mixed with the intelligentsia in London. She then became head of design at Tameside College, near Manchester, before retiring at the age of 65 to run her own pub, The Oak Tree Inn in Tantobie, County Durham. She finally retired in 1975 and now designs stained glass windows.

Sylvia has lived several lives but it is her early years, from 1925 to 1939, she has put down on paper.

Her autobiography, Laugh or Cry, begins as an affectionate, beautifully written account of her childhood in Germany. This initial tranquility only serves to emphasise the terrors of Nazism as the idyllic swiftly turned into hellish as the moral degradation of society took place.

"People need to know, children need to know what happened and how it built up to become that situation," she explains.

CHILDHOOD

Sylvia grew up in a small industrial town in the Wuerttemberg area of South Germany.

She prefers not to say exactly where but her family, the Fleischers, were major employers in the area.

The Fleischer family had founded the corset manufacturing industry and invented crepe and tissue paper. The family's factories spread from Germany to France, Italy, England and across to America.

Sylvia's father Julius, in addition to being a factory owner, was a trained homeopathic doctor and pillar of the community.

Her mother Irma was a passionate devotee to fashion. Sylvia had two brothers, Arnold who was three years older, Richard, five years younger, and one sister, Susan, two years younger.

Sylvia had a privileged childhood with nannies and trips to the mountains.

As a child she remembers the scientist Albert Einstein, a distant cousin of her father, coming to stay. The two men would stay up for hours talking in the study.

"We were not allowed to disturb them," she recalls. "And we could not tell anyone he was visiting as he did not want to be stared at.

"He explained the theory of relativity to me. He said, 'If two lovers sit on a bench for one minute, that is a short time. However, if you sit on a stove for one minute that is a long time'."

THE RISE OF NAZISM

Soon life began to change as Nazism slowly wrestled control of society.

Yet in the early 1930s some people were still convinced it would not take hold.

Sylvia says: "My father said it was a fashion and people will soon get over it. But gradually it got into everyone's lives.

"Initially I even found myself collecting for the Nazis. They said it was for poor Germans who were mistreated abroad."

Sylvia explains that people at first tried to ignore Nazism. "But soon it was such a big thing. If you didn't have a party number you couldn't register at the labour exchange. Then people were afraid to say anything in case it got reported back to the party.

"You could see part of it made people feel euphoric, you could see it on their faces. The song Deutschland aber Alles sums up the feeling."

At first Sylvia did not identify with the horrific picture of Jews painted by the party in propaganda as anything to do with herself and her family.

"These weren't the people I knew, these portraits weren't real people, and I wondered who these terrible people could be."

But the actions of the Nazi party were becoming impossible to ignore, and after Reichskristallnacht ( the night of broken glass ( on November 9, 1938, and the destruction of Jewish shops and synagogues, normal life became impossible.

Sylvia had been training as a fashion designer in Berlin and Hamburg until the Nazis shut down her Jewish fashion school.

Terror descended as her family tried to get on with life in the midst of enforced property and business sales, and friends and relatives attempted to flee abroad.

ESCAPE

Arnold was the first to escape to London in 1939, followed by Sylvia and her 15-year-old sister Susan on designated children's trains organised by The Society of Friends, The Quakers and Jewish Board of Guardians, a few weeks later.

Sylvia's father saw her onto the train but her mother, who was supposed to meet up with her in Frankfurt, did not catch her connection. Sylvia never saw her parents again.

It was a bright day when she left Germany on July 25, 1939. Sylvia was placed in charge of a group of smaller children who she kept entertained with singing and stories.

Once in London, Sylvia was taken in by an East End Jewish family. She went to visit the rich aunt who had declined to guarantee her parents entry to the UK. The aunt was eventually shamed by her friends into letting Sylvia stay.

Sylvia received just one letter from her parents. After that there was a terrifying silence. She tried to forget her happy childhood and adjust to life as a "friendly enemy alien".

Susan also lived in London, but Arnold was quickly transferred to Canada.

A NEW LIFE

After getting a job with the American Red Cross, Sylvia again took up fashion design.

"I made a skirt and I walked the full length of Oxford Street asking to see the buyers," she says. "It wasn't until I'd got to the last shop, Hupperts in Regent's Street, that the gentleman there said he was interested.

"I made him 12 skirts and he asked if I could make some blouses, as all there was available was shirt-type ones."

Sylvia made some lacy tops using material she had found in a shop in Shepherd's Bush. "They sold out within an hour," Sylvia smiles.

Her new life had begun. Her fashion design business went from strength-to-strength and Sylvia was featured in Vogue and sold through Harrods.

She also met her husband at a dinner party in the early 1940s. "I was rather attractive then, and he asked to see me again. I said I was free the next Saturday but he came around the next day!"

The couple were married in November 1949 and had a daughter Amanda, a marine photographer, who lives next door to Sylvia in Tantobie.

But sadly the marriage did not last.

"He was a very good-looking man and took full advantage of that," Sylvia states simply.

A STORY TOLD

But it was Sylvia's ex-husband ( who she prefers not to name ( a writer and part of the Notting Hill artistic set, who indirectly encouraged his wife to write the story of her childhood 50 years ago.

"He told me I was amnesiac about my previous life as I would never discuss it with anyone," she explains.

"At that time psychoanalysis was the done thing. All the artists and writers had psychiatrists. I paid for my husband's but I couldn't talk about my background as I had a sort of voluntary amnesia about it.

"Also I had a very good design business which was very successful and I didn't have the time for, and neither did I want to spend the money on, psychoanalysis.

"I thought, 'I can talk to my book, I can write it down', and that is what I did."

After writing her memoirs, Sylvia put them aside and, as she describes it, "got on with my life".

But a few years ago she decided to dig them out and re-work them with the help of her daughter.

"I thought I owed it to my family that I write down my history.

"I was very encouraged by a number of people and also by the fact European history isn't really taught in English schools.

"People should know about what happened, they should have a proper understanding of history and the terrible things normal people are capable of."

POSTSCRIPT

Eventually Sylvia discovered what happened to her parents.

On November 26, 1939, they and her younger brother were arrested with 38 other Jewish people.

They were loaded onto cattle trucks and deported to concentration camps in Poland in deplorable conditions.

Her beloved father died from blood poisoning and gangrene from wounds. Her mother was gassed.

Richard was sent to a labour camp but survived, a living skeleton weighing just five stone when he was rescued by the Russian army.

He eventually recovered and moved to Canada where he met his wife and still lives. Sylvia states: "He was one of those living skeletons you see in films of the time. He was freed by the Russians and it took three months before he had enough strength to leave."

Of Sylvia's extended family, only the younger children survived, 27 others dying at the hands of the Nazis.

For years Sylvia would not talk to anybody about what had happened to her parents. Instead she preferred her amnesia. Now she has decided to tell so that no-one will forget.

* Laugh or Cry by Sylvia Hurst is published by Book Guild Publishing at pounds 17.99. Available from all good bookshops.