Helen Topor was born in Vienna in 1915 of Jewish heritage. In the 1930s she was a young film star (a good friend of Hedy Lamarr). The day after Hitler marched into Vienna, her father had already been arrested and nobody in the film industry would talk to her. She managed to escape from Austria by marrying a gay Dutch friend and lived in Holland for a while. When she returned to Vienna to try and save her mother and sisters (in vain), she returned to Holland to find that all the gays had been arrested, and she immediately obtained passage to the UK by boat in 1934 I believe. In London she was employed at an antique dealership in Curzon St., Mayfair. During the Blitz, the owner 'flew' to New York leaving Helen in charge of the shop and still living in a flat in Curzon St. Helen became a fire warden who patrolled the roof of her block during bombing raids. One evening, in 1941 I believe, she had invited several acquaintances for dinner including Sir Robert Clement Witt, a well known art historian who with Samuel Courtauld set up the Courtauld Institute of Art in the 1920s and also became a trustee of the National Gallery. During dinner, air raid sirens started and she should have guided the guests to the bomb shelter in the basement before taking up her position on the roof, "but," she said, "for some reason I took everyone up to the roof." Just as they reached the roof up a rickety ladder, a bomb dropped on the building destroying half of it including the whole bomb shelter and the ladder leading down from the roof. They spent the night up there and then one guest (a Polish airman I believe) climbed down four floors via the drainpipe to get word to rescuers. They still had a difficult crawl across a ladder laid across roofs to escape. The event appeared in the press with regard to the survival of Sir Robert. Helen was not mentioned. The antique shop was also severely damaged. The shop owners said she could take any damaged antiques - these later populated the house where I grew up. Helen also took part in digging ...