Thea's diary

She escaped Nazi Germany and fled to England, all the while keeping a secret diary. Now, 60 years on, it has been published - and immediately compared to Anne Frank's. Thea Gersten talks to Gita Conn
Thea Gersten
Thea Gersten in Leipzig, 1931

Thea Gersten was seven years old when Hitler came to power in 1933, her brother Adi two years older. Their parents, Polish Jews, had moved to Leipzig before their marriage, and the children's early life was comfortable and secure. Their father was a successful fur trader whose adherence to strictly Orthodox Judaism sat easily alongside a taste for Leipzig's high-class culture.

The Nazis smashed this self-protective cocoon on Kristallnacht, November 10 1938. Synagogues were burned down, Jewish shops, schools and homes - including the Gerstens' - were destroyed, and the men dragged off to concentration camps.

Temporarily protected by his Polish citizenship, Thea's father fled to Warsaw to prepare the way for the family's emigration to America. Adi secured a precious place on the Kindertransport, the British child-rescue operation. And Thea Gersten began her diary.

"Such a lot has happened, I've got to tell someone. But I can't, and so I will confide everything to my diary. Also, I don't want to forget what is happening now. I hardly think I ever shall, but who knows how I will feel and think when I am really grown up."

For seven years she would write in her little book, the ordinary recollections of a young woman living through extraordinary times, before putting it away as she grew into adulthood. It would remain a private document for 60 years. Then, in 2000, she returned to Leipzig and offered some fragments of her memoirs to the city's Historical Museum. It was immediately picked up by German publishers and led to comparisons with Anne Frank. The dramatisation of the diaries starts today on Radio 4 to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day.

The first pages are filled, not with the sound of jackboots, but with the outpourings of a 13-and-a-half year old who has fallen in love for the first time. She writes about how she wanted to tell her best friend, Lolo, about Philip, a classmate for whom she had fallen, but Lolo had already left for London on the Kindertransport. So her diary - an exercise book covered with leftover curtain material from her bedroom - became her best friend and confidant.

Following her husband's instructions, Thea's mother had negotiated the tortuous Nazi bureaucracy and, with the maximum cash allowance of 10 marks (£2), taken Thea to Warsaw in July 1939. Before they left, Thea wrote: "I shall never, never forget this time. Philip is right when he says the most beautiful thing about a friendship is the parting. But he is wrong, too, because for us it is not a parting after which we can renew our friendship. It is most likely a parting for all times, for our whole lives." Hitler's army had already entered Prague, and occupied the Czech regions of Bohemia and Moravia.

A few days later she wrote: "When I think 'tomorrow I am leaving, perhaps I will never see Leipzig again,' I cannot believe it... I try to think of it as though we are going on holiday. But what is the use?"

Those first few weeks in Warsaw were wretched. "Yesterday we went to the cafe where all the emigrants meet... It is horrible to look at their faces. The people just sit there. Their faces say: 'What shall I eat tomorrow? How long will my money last?'"

On July 17, Thea and her mother left for England. "Papa" Gersten remained in Warsaw, awaiting a fur shipment he hoped would fund the family's emigration to America. He thought he had time. "I'll be with you by Rosh Hashanah," he told his wife. Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, two weeks before the Jewish new year.

"I wonder what my father is doing? He will be so worried about us," writes Thea, repeatedly.

Thea, Adi and her mother shared cramped accommodation with fellow refugees before renting a "shabby, pokey" semi in Hendon, north London. Adi had found work as a trainee furrier with an Austrian refugee. After six months in school, Thea, still only 14, took menial, ill-paid jobs and helped with the housework. Her mother prepared to sell her last ring to pay for Thea to study shorthand and typing.

The blitz persuaded Adi's boss, the furrier, to evacuate his factory and its workers to Harrogate. The very same day, the Gerstens were bombed out of their rented home. Mrs Gersten decided that they would all go to Harrogate with Adi.

There, the Yorkshire landlady was unwelcoming, and Thea's job as a fur finisher was tedious and badly paid. But she still had her diary.

"Harrogate is very beautiful but I feel a stranger here. I feel alien anywhere in England. Everywhere the word 'foreigner' seems to shout at me. This you must not learn, that job you cannot take - because you are a foreigner."

And there were other, more typical teenage frustrations: "I hate coming home; it does not feel like home any more. Mostly I go straight to bed. Mutti [her mother] tells me all her petty domestic events and moans and groans until I am furious. Why can't she leave me in peace and make our home pleasant instead? I am unable to help her. All this complaining and lamenting, I have heard so much of it, that I have become dulled and I cannot feel compassion any longer." And always, through the pages of the diary, the story of her first love, and the longing for her father.

When the war ended, the family searched everywhere for Papa. Failure confirmed their fears. Thea did not learn the circumstances of his death until after her mother died in 1964, when she found a letter from a prisoner, incarcerated in the Warsaw ghetto with her father, Chaim Lazar Gersten.

Today, there is only the faintest trace of an accent in Thea Hurst's soft voice that could hint at those distant early years. Now a small, elegant 77-year-old, she lives in a cottage near Hebden Bridge in North Yorkshire, and describes every day as a holiday. Her sharp intellect is welcomed at local book clubs, creative writing and speaking groups; she helps out at the Oxfam shop, and every day is enlivened by a visit from her grandchildren.

But her eyes fill with tears when she reads the letter that her mother had shielded from her. It reveals the unspeakable deprivations of the ghetto and her father's "transfer", on January 20 1943, to Treblinka. There, he was slaughtered.

"Dear Mrs Gersten," ends the letter, "I grieve with you for a noble and good man, a man whose goodness was greater than I have ever known."

Philip, meanwhile, had escaped Leipzig on the last train of the Kindertransport. He searched for, and found, Thea in London. Their paths would cross and re-cross over the years, but the relationship was never consummated. "It must be that common spark which keeps us together through the years," she told her diary in April 1946. "Whatever happens, whatever comes between us, the spark will remain."

So why did they never get together? "There was a sexual chemistry," says Thea today. "We were very attracted to each other. But our circumstances were against us. We had no security. He had nobody, his parents had been killed and he was studying. I felt responsibility to look after mother." Struggling to explain, she adds: "It was too precious to have an affair. In those days, you didn't just go somewhere and spend the night. It was a love that transmuted into a deep, lifelong friendship, begun at a time when all our certainties were ebbing away. We had shared the last days before the war. Those memories weave close threads between people."

In the 50s they both married other people, but the two families kept in touch. Then, in November last year, Philip's wife phoned. He was dying, and wanted to speak to Thea.

"His face showed it was good for him to have contact with me at this crucial moment in his life and it was equally good for me to be with him," says Thea. "Yes, I felt sad, but we were both old people and the memories were still there. They were always good memories and we both felt we were richer for having known each other. We both felt it at our last meeting. His eyes expressed it."

Thea ended her diary in May 1947. "I feel more and more clearly that I shall not find myself truly until I can love truly," she wrote in one of the last entries. "I can only find happiness and satisfaction in loving and aiding, listening and caring. My truest happiness will be when I have a child."

"I stopped writing the diary because I had found who I was in life. I had found my centre," she now says. She would go on to have two children with her husband, who died in 1995.

After more than 60 years' absence, she returns frequently to Germany, touring schools and telling the children what she feels their grandparents refuse to talk about. "The Holocaust is only worth remembering after so many years if we can do something positive," she insists, "if we who have been through the trauma are able to show the public what today's asylum seekers and refugees are experiencing."

· A 10-part dramatisation of the diary begins on Woman's Hour today at 10am on Radio 4.