Helga lived with Nettie and Max Glassman when she arrived on a kindertransport, but in 1949 she moved to be with her parents who had managed to reach Israel after years in Mauritius.

An only child born in 1934 to religious Zionists Fritz and Lizzi Hacker, Helga was not yet five when she left Vienna in June 1939.

She remembers little about the kindertransport journey except for the fact that an uncle boarded the train with her as far as the Hook of Holland from where he was able to telegram her parents to say their daughter had boarded a ship to England.

The young girl recalls arriving with many others at London's Woburn House, where children's names were being called out.

She said: "I saw that when a child's name was called, that child stood up. When my name was called I stood up. A woman was coming towards me with outstretched arms."

That woman was childless Nettie Glassman, whose husband Max was very involved with Liverpool Jewish communal affairs, acting as Greenbank Synagogue senior warden, JNF chairman and a Board of Deputies delegate. Nettie was active on WIZO.

Unable to adopt Helga, as British law did not then allow the adoption of children born abroad, the Glassmans insisted she call them 'Auntie' and 'Uncle'.

To this day Helga talks about her 'cousins' Janice Hyams, of Liverpool, and Pat Radam, of Southport, who are related to her through the late Glassmans, as though they were blood relatives.

When Nettie died in 1989, Helga came to Liverpool from Haifa to sit shiva for her.

Helga said: "Years afterwards the Glassmans celebrated the date of my arrival on June 16, 1939 as my anniversary."

Helga went to live with the Glassmans initially in their home in Fairfield.

But two months later in August 1939, Nettie became seriously ill and had to undergo an operation.

Helga went to stay with Max's brother Mo Glassman.

Although Helga was not attending Liverpool's Jewish school, through his Zionist connections, Max was able to arrange for her to be evacuated with its pupils to Chester on the outbreak of World War II.

She shared a room there with fellow Austrian refugee, Herta Kammerling, nee Plaschkes, whose story was recently featured in the Jewish Telegraph.

But Helga only stayed a short while in Chester.

She said: "I got whooping cough and went back to Liverpool to stay with Mo Glassman."

When the Glassman home in Fairfield was bombed Helga moved with Nettie and Max to Southport, where they lived for a short time between the Promenade and Lord Street before heading to Sinclair Drive, Mossley Hill, Liverpool.

Helga attended Mosspits Lane School, from where she gained a scholarship to Calder High School and went to Habonim.

She said: "I had a very good childhood."

Helga had been fortunate to have been able to keep in touch through the war with not only her parents, but also members of her extended family who had escaped to such far-flung places as Indochina (now Vietnam), Paris, America and then-Palestine.

Her parents had been able to leave Vienna in 1940 by sailing down the Danube on a Paraguayan visa to Romania's Constanta from where they embarked on an illegal ship to then-Palestine.

Their ship was one of three intercepted by the British troop ship Patria which was meant to deport those aboard to Mauritius.

In order to try to prevent the deportation the Haganah had planned to blow up the Patria's engine room.

However, the plan went wrong and the ship sank, killing some of the refugees.

Those on board who survived the bombing were allowed, following the intervention with the British government of Chaim Weizmann, to settle in then-Palestine.

However, Helga's parents had not yet boarded the Patria when the explosion took place.

They were taken with the other illegal immigrants who had not yet boarded to Atlit detention camp from where they were shipped to Mauritius.

Helga said: "My auntie Nettie was a very good letter writer. Before I left Vienna my mother had given my guardians' address to her family who were scattered all over the world after the Anschluss.

"My auntie not only received and wrote letters to Mauritius but also to Tel Aviv where my maternal grandfather was with his eldest son, Oscar Greiner, to Indochina, where his younger son, Willi Greiner, had fled after being released from Dachau after Kristallnacht, as well as to relatives in Holland and New York."

Helga's parents eventually reached then-Palestine in 1945.

But they were initially too poor and in bad health - her mother had been ailing since the birth of her only child - to provide for their daughter who was still in Liverpool.

Meanwhile Helga's Uncle Willi, who had been running a Hanoi paper mill, founded by Helga's great uncle in the 1880s, left Indonesia after the war for fear of local uprisings.

He moved to Paris and in late 1946 visited Liverpool on a visit to buy machinery.

Helga recalled: "I remember going with my guardians to Lime Street station to meet him. He was the first member of my family I had met since I had left Vienna.

"He stayed 24 hours with the Glassmans and I became very fond of him.

"My guardians invited him and his wife and son to come to Liverpool for their summer holidays in 1947.

"Instead they took me to visit them in Paris where we also met my Uncle Oscar from Tel Aviv.

"It was in Paris in the summer of 1947 that my two uncles told me it was time for me to return to my parents."

But that was easier said than done. The Arab violence which broke out following the United Nations vote in November in favour of the establishment of the state of Israel made Helga delay her departure for Haifa where her parents lived, until early 1949.

But even then she underwent what she described as a "traumatic" journey to the Holy Land.

And the journey was not only traumatic for Helga. When Nettie said 'goodbye' to her young protegee in London, she fainted at the railway station, only to be comforted by none other than Lorna Wingate, the widow of ardent Zionist Orde Wingate.

Travelling with a Youth Aliya group of teenage Holocaust survivors who had recuperated in England, Helga was delayed for two weeks in Marseilles.

When her ship docked in Haifa more trauma was to come.

Helga said: "I came with many refugees. But when I got off the boat everyone else had left and I was alone. I sat down on a bench and started to cry.

"Then a woman came and sat next to me and hugged me.

"It was my mother, but it was impossible to recognise her. She was nothing like her wedding photograph I had had in my room in Sinclair Drive."

She continued: "It was very hard to reconnect with my parents, especially my father who was treating me like a four-year-old, even though I was by then 14.

"I had arrived in the middle of the school term. It was hard for me to learn Hebrew and I didn't really want to.

"I was very homesick for Liverpool."

However, she added: "I was very fortunate that both my mother and Auntie Nellie were very sensible women. They got on very well together although there could have been jealousy."

The following year, in 1950, the Glassmans visited Israel to celebrate their silver wedding. From then on Helga kept in constant touch with them, regularly visiting Liverpool.

Meanwhile Helga was finding it difficult to settle into school in Haifa.

Her one glimmer of hope was a British-born classmate called Judy Gross. When Judy announced that she was transferring to the private Reali school, Helga insisted to her mother that she wanted to follow her.

Her parents, who only had menial jobs, had to scrimp and save to pay the fees until Helga gained a scholarship.

Then on the evening before her school leaving examinations, Helga became engaged to her future husband Raphael Brosh, whose grandparents had been founders of Zichron Yaakov and Petach Tikva.

The couple became engaged before Raphael left for America on a chemical engineering scholarship.

They were married in 1955 and had three children. But youngest child Eran died in a road accident at 10.

Daughter Nurit Gilon lives in Haifa near her mother, who has been widowed since 1986.

Son Yaakov (Cobi), now director of the Haifa Foundation and living in Herzliya, is on leave from the Israeli Foreign Office for whom he served in Cairo and Toronto as consul general.

Helga graduated in English from Haifa University as a mature student and subsequently taught the subject in local schools.

She currently tutors an Ethiopian pupil and is active in the reunion of the kindertransport, as well as being a soroptimist.

And she still keeps up her Liverpool connections, having brought each of her grandchildren to the city as a bar or batmitzvah present.