Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
STAR ALICE SHINES BRIGHT
As a 14-year-old child in Nazi Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933, Alice Fraser remembers her parents having to sell their furniture to pay the rent and buy food.
She dreamed of one day becoming a film star so she could buy her parents a house and make them proud.
That didn’t happen. Instead, Alice and her sister Hannah were shipped off to England by their father at the start of Second World War, where they got jobs as maids.
The girls never saw their mother and father again.
Their parents, along with other family members, were all murdered at Auschwitz concentration camp.
To this day, Alice doesn’t know where her parents’ ashes are buried.
Now 100 years old, she is one of the few remaining Holocaust survivors, and her vital work teaching future generations about the atrocities she witnessed has been recognised by the Home Group housing association which manages her retirement home. Alice says:
“Teaching children is the key to keeping memories alive. I don’t like all this attention but I’m very grateful. I didn’t become a film star, but I now have the star award!” Alice, from
Stanmore, Greater London, only recently retired from speaking at schools right across London, despite the emotional and physical toll reliving these terrible experiences took on her.
After being married for 71 years, she has a large family, but lost her beloved husband Ralph in 2014 and her sister Hannah before that.
Her 11 great-grandchildren were instrumental in bringing Alice into their schools to tell her story.
Manager of her home Michelle Keane says: “I’ve had the honour of knowing Alice for 13 years.
“She can be sassy and fiercely independent and very funny too – we have spent many hours laughing and putting the world to rights.
“If I can be half the person she is, then I will have achieved so much.”