My story of oppression began in 1932, as soon as I was born. By the time I was two, my father had already been dismissed from his job and blacklisted—not initially for being a Jew, but for being a socialist.

I hardly knew my mother: as more and more anti-Jewish laws came, she became the family’s only breadwinner, working in every waking hour, while professionally qualified men of our extended family were forced into unemployment. As the only Jewish child in our block, I found my playmates not among other children, but among my forcibly idle uncles.

I was eight when Hungary entered the war on Hitler’s side. My beloved uncles were conscripted, and fell victims of the Holocaust, murdered by fellow soldiers of their own army.

In March 1944, the Germans occupied Hungary. In less than two months, 440,000 Jews from the provinces were deported to Auschwitz. Our train, too, was headed there, but was diverted to Austria. That diversion is nowadays referred to as a ‘quirk of history’, and was one of the miracles of my survival. As a result, instead of instant death, I was sent into slavery—first on a state-owned farm, later in the German armaments industry. I was eleven years old.

I only survived due to a sense of responsibility. The official working age was 14 to 65, and only workers were given food. Of the 11 members of my extended family, three were too old and three too young to work. Other than me, the children included my little cousins aged 2 and 3. To earn a portion of food for my family, I lied that I was 14, to be included in the workforce. Hunger, fear, and deadly tiredness became normal. All 11 of us were severely damaged, but we all survived.

When the Soviet army liberated our camp, we were skeletons, barely alive. Liberation brought no food, no medicine, not a kind word. Sick, starved, and broken, it took us a month to stagger ‘home’, only to find that our menfolk were dead, our home taken, and us Jews hated just as before. The war had ended, but the hostility had not. Soon a Stalinist regime was established, replacing Nazi tyranny by communist tyranny.

School became my refuge. As the only Jew in my class, I was ostracised, but I loved learning and did well. The communist regime forced me to study engineering against my will, but I grew to love this beautiful, positive problem-solving profession.

The Hungarian revolution of 1956 gave me and my husband a chance to leave the country that had always rejected me. We arrived in Britain with labour permits, ready to work in the growing computer industry. The challenges of exile were immense: loss of our loved ones, a sense of dislocation, bewilderment in a new culture.

As a woman engineer, I was even an outsider in my own profession. Yet here, too, learning became my ladder. My discipline was advancing fast, and I found my role as researcher, educator and innovator. We became established as citizens of Britain, and our children and grandchildren were born here.

Since the start of the 20th century, 13 million people fell victim to genocides, murdered in various ways by intentional acts to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. In World War II, 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust by industrial means. In the same period, a comparable number of lives were destroyed in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

We have not learned from the past, because genocides and crimes continue today. But to avoid repeating the past, we must study history diligently, and learn its lessons thoroughly.

This is the most important thing I have learnt from my experience. This is what shaped my view of the world. This is what I try to teach people today.

At the end of that summer, I moved cross-country to start a new job, hoping it might be a chance to have a fresh start. However, I had no family or friends to support me as I entered a two-year civil lawsuit.