My father’s family were Ashkenazi Jews, originally from Brody, which is now in the Ukraine, but formerly in Galicia, a province in the north-east of the Austrian empire. During the nineteenth century, the Fein family business, in common with many other Jewish businesses at the time, traded hides and skins. They travelled back and forth from Brody to Leipzig, an important centre of European fur trading, for the fairs which had operated there since the Middle Ages.

Changes to the laws in Saxony in the late 1830s paved the way for the establishment of Jewish settlements, and in March 1870, the Fein family officially became Saxon citizens, settling in Leipzig. The Feins fully integrated into German life. Well-educated and ambitious, they built up a successful fur trading business (established in 1904) in the Brühl, at the heart of the Jewish fur-trading quarter, and owned property. All of this was ultimately to be stolen by the Nazis.

My father became a Doctor of Law in 1931 and established his legal practice in the summer of 1932. On 30 June 1933, my father was banned from practising law in Germany because he was a Jew. He applied for positions all over Europe, but to no avail. Anti-Semitism was on the rise all across the continent. Having read Mein Kampf a few years earlier, my father was only too aware what danger a newly elected Hitler posed. Towards the end of 1933, he left Germany (his young wife, who was expecting their first child, following a few weeks later) on a temporary visa to enter England, a status that remained until he was finally granted citizenship in 1946. Until then, he had to apply annually to the Home Office to remain in the country. He was permitted to do so – without ever being interned – on the basis of providing evidence of the success of his business, and therefore his ability to support himself and his family financially.

Unqualified to practise English law, he set up the London branch of the family business, which dealt mainly in rabbit skins for hat-making. Once in England, at home and beyond, he and his family spoke only English and adopted all things British. In 1943 he was given permission to serve in the Home Guard; was elected onto the Executive Committee of the Export Group in London, working closely with the Board of Trade, an honour for a refugee from enemy Germany; and even made a wartime broadcast on BBC radio on the varied uses of rabbit skins. My father embraced English life absolutely and completely, grateful to the country that had given him shelter and enabled him to create a successful business and home for his family. From him, I learned to value liberty and freedom as the most precious of ideals, and to appreciate the paragon of democracy that was England.