The Testimony of Edith Birkin (née Hofmann)

Edith Hofmann was born in Prague in 1927; in 1941, aged 14, she was sent with her family to the Lodz ghetto in Poland. Her parents died within their first year there. When the Lodz ghetto was liquidated in 1944, Birkin was sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz where she spent the rest of her time there working in an underground munitions factory.

After the war she moved to the UK. She went to Belfast by boat to visit her sister; attended high school in Derry. There was a Jewish community there. She followed a teachers’ training course in London. After that she worked in Hendon and Edgware. She married in 1962 to a non-Jewish man,they were unable to have children so they adopted two boys, and a girl. In the 1970s she studied A-level History of Modern Art and went on to take a course in fine art.