Trude Silman MBE

Interview Summary

Trude Silman was born in 1929 in Bratislava, then part of Czechoslovakia. In March 1939, as Nazi control tightened, her parents arranged for her to travel to England aged nine with an aunt and young cousin. After a long, difficult journey across Europe she arrived in Britain where she lived briefly with a foster family, was evacuated, and eventually ended up at boarding school. Trude won a scholarship to study biochemistry at the University of Leeds and later pursued a varied career in research before becoming a college lecturer. After the war she learned her father had been killed at Auschwitz and, despite intensive searching, she never discovered her mother’s fate. She was awarded an MBE for her work in Holocaust education.