WHEN Dora Love accepted her honorary doctorate from Essex University’s Chancellor, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, she also received a standing ovation from the congregation.

That’s the measure of regard with which she is held in.

On first impressions, this short, grey-haired woman could be anybody’s grandmother, kind and softly spoken, but Dora, now 86, packs quite an emotional punch when she talks about her early life as one of the survivors of the Holocaust.

She has lived and worked in Colchester for more than 30 years and has built-up a relationship with Essex University’s history department and schools in the area.

It was her multi-lingual skills which enabled her to find work as a teacher with Greyfriars Community College, and as a supply teacher at several Colchester schools.

When she retired in 2002, it was a natural progression for her to talk to children and adults about her wartime experiences.

Dora said: “I have lived in various countries and places, but the longest I have ever lived in any one place has been Colchester. Hence my affection and great admiration for the University of Essex and for its history department.

“As a Holocaust survivor, I have addressed schools, universities and other gatherings on this subject in the UK and Germany.”

Born and brought up in Memel, now Kleipeda, Lithuania, Dora was just 16 when SS troops invaded the country.

Dora and her family fled but were captured and imprisoned, first in Shaulen ghetto in northern Lithuania and then the Stutthof Concentration Camp near Gdansk, Poland, where her mother, sister and one of her brothers died.

Dora’s father, who was sent to Dachau, and her other brother, who had managed to get to Russia, both survived.

After the war, Dora married Frank Love, one of the English soldiers involved in the liberation and together they worked for the British Army, the United Nations and the American Joint Distribution Committee in reconstruction and resettlement projects.

One of these was the establishment of the home for Jewish children at Blankenese, a suburb of Hamburg on the Elbe, through which Dora tracked down the lost children of the Holocaust and re-united them with their families.

She said: “My main task after the war was to find the hidden children who had been given to friends in the dark of night, smuggled out of the ghettos, under wire fences, in sacks and had been kept alive in cellars and attics until after the war.

“I found most of them in Germany. They had been hidden there at great risk to the people who had protected them.

“The work has been very rewarding and 147 children are now called Dora’s Children. At the final reunion nine months ago in Jerusalem, we established that the immediate families of those 147 children now come to 968 members.”

In her acceptance speech, Dora thanked the American Joint Distribution Committee as well as her husband, who died in 2002, along with other members of the British Army who helped.

She added: “I also paid tribute to Dr Martin Schmidt and his organisation of 16 members in Hamburg, who throughout the years have raised the funds to make the reunions of the surviving children possible.”

It is a mark of the woman that even in a moment of honour, she should be thanking other people, so it is only right to repeat the words of the head of Essex University’s history department, Dr Rainer Schulze.

He said: “Dora Love’s achievement is not one single book, one great invention, or one important painting. Her lasting achievement is her whole life, her struggle to make a comprehensible story out of the incomprehensible atrocities she endured, her strength and determination to tell her story again and again.

“Dora’s belief in humanity was shaken to the core in the hell of Stutthof, but it was also ultimately confirmed and steeled in this very abyss: she managed to retain her dignity and humanity when so many would have turned to despair and hatred.”

“Dora’s belief in humanity was shaken to the core in the hell of Stutthof, but it was also ultimately confirmed and steeled in this very abyss.”

The last words are Dora’s. She said: “Never give up, is obviously something to remember. Also never lose hope. When I came out of the concentration camp, I did not think a single member of my family had survived.

“Ten months later, I found my father. 20 months later, I found my brother. Never give up and never lose hope.”