Kansas family trace grandmother’s Holocaust escape to England

In 1939, Ilse Camis was among a group of girls given refuge from the Holocaust by a Jewish community in the north-east of England. Nearly nine decades on, her American grandson and great-granddaughter have travelled 4,000 miles to pay homage to the strangers who gave her sanctuary.

Luciana Camis, from Kansas in the United States, is standing in one of the bedrooms of 55 Percy Park in Tynemouth, one of a row of Georgian houses in a terrace which sweeps graciously down to the North Sea.

“It’s pretty crazy,” the 13-year-old says. “I never thought I would come here and see the room where my great-grandma slept in when she was, like, 13.”

As she talks, Luciana fingers a gold pendant she has on a chain around her neck.

“She wore this when she was traveling,” she explains. “It has the national flower of Austria on it and when she was nervous she would bite on it, so her teeth marks are on the back.”