This week in our serial covering the story of Holocaust Survivor Lydia Reich we enter her German childhood and the brief calm before the storm that was to burst upon all of European Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s.

Even in the brief sunshine of this period you can still sense the foreboding presence of the Nazi menace in the background, circling ever nearer and intent on ’seeking whom it may devour’.

Little did Lydia know as she played with friends - even German boys and girls among them, that all too quickly she’d be marched away to Auschwitz to be exploited as a slave and prepared for murder in the gas chambers like millions of other Jews. At the time such atrocities seemed utterly inconceivable.

In the last part of our serialisation of Lydia Reich’s book ‘Desperation’ we finished at the point where despite a somewhat guarded childhood of relative peace the writing was very definitely on the wall for Jews as the Nazis began to flex their muscles. Today we pick up the story and Lydia also introduces us to a notorious Nazi - Julius Streicher and reveals the fear he engendered among ordinary Jewry in Germany even then.