T WO years ago, Liesbeth Langford visited Auschwitz in search of the young Jewish woman her parents hid from the Nazis during the war.

She knew that Rosa had died in a concentration camp, but which one? Because 70 years on, she wanted to ‘tell’ Rosa something that would finally allow her soul to rest in peace.

Liesbeth has already published a book, Written in Candlelight (available from Cogito Books in Hexham), based on her mother’s account of those years. But she is re-telling her story now to highlight an event at Hexham Abbey next week that she wants everyone to take note of.

For Wednesday, January 27, is Holocaust Memorial Day, and the Abbey is asking members of the public to contribute to a special event being arranged.

The centrepiece will be an installation fanning out from the seventh century Frith Stool, comprising as many pairs of second-hand shoes as the team can muster. The shoes need to be of a good quality, because they will be donated to charity afterwards.

‘Frith’, an Anglo-Saxon word, variously means ‘peace’, ‘security’ and ‘freedom from molestation’ and the stool was traditionally the point from which the Abbey’s area of sanctuary was measured, a mile in each direction.

Toni Bush, the Abbey’s education officer, said: “We’re calling our event Don’t Stand By and part of the pledge for people donating shoes is that they won’t stand by in the face of discrimination.”

People who want to take part can pop into the Abbey between now and Wednesday to place their shoes. The day itself will be punctuated by readings and there will be a special choral evensong at 6.30pm.

Liesbeth Langford will certainly be there. “It is so very important we all remember what happened back then and appreciate the freedom we have today.

“We are able to speak our thoughts, vote for whoever we want to, choose what job we want to do and walk about without fear. We must never lose that again.”

Dutch by birth, the life she has enjoyed with her husband, Roger, in peaceful Humshaugh is a far cry from her childhood in occupied Apeldoorn, 25 km north of Arnhem.

Her father, Anton, was a member of the Dutch Resistance and one of the activities closest to his heart was getting Jewish children to safety.

First, he moved to protect his own son. Liesbeth’s brother was mentally disabled and therefore at grave risk from Hitler’s take on eugenics, so he was sent into the care of his old nursery teacher in Rotterdam. “What’s the best way to hide a child?” said Liesbeth. “Among other children.”

Anton was in a concentration camp when his wife, Janet, was asked by the Resistance network to take Rosa in and, brave woman that she herself was, she welcomed the 18-year-old with open arms.

Rosa had to stay indoors at all times and when danger loomed – if German soldiers were in the street outside – she was hidden in a priest’s hole behind a panel in a cupboard.

The day the occupying force, anticipating an Allied invasion from the west, decided to move its civil servants from The Hague further inland was a disastrous one for those hiding Jewish children.

The civil servants were to be billeted with local families and while they were Dutch, their masters were German and there was many a collaborator among the ranks. Rosa had to be moved.

The solution Janet came up with was to ask her mother-in-law to hide her in the retirement home she lived in. Liesbeth said: “My Dutch grandmother lived in the same town, but in a home for the elderly that was a hive of resistance!

“The residents discussed the problem, agreed to take her in and then everybody in the house had to learn the same story - that Rosa was my father’s niece, that she had TB and that she’d come west to get better.

“They all knew, though, that absolutely anybody seeing Rosa would know she was Jewish, so she could never, ever go out.”

But Rosa did go out, in the name of love. She’d fallen for the grandson of another elderly resident and wanted to buy him a gift. She was arrested within minutes of stepping into the street.

Not only was Rosa’s fate uncertain, but also that of everybody who had helped her. A member of staff at the home rushed to tell Liesbeth’s grandmother that a German officer and a known Dutch collaborator were coming up the path.

Liesbeth said: “My grandmother was a very devout woman and she prayed. In her prayer she said ‘I can’t lie to these men, so tell me what to say’.

“When they arrived, she followed her heart and told them in no uncertain terms that what they were doing was wrong and totally against God’s will.

“The Dutch collaborator replied ‘madam, my grandmother would have said exactly the same thing – you won’t hear any more about this’, and they never did. It was a miracle.”

Liesbeth still has a copy of the letter Rosa managed to get smuggled out to her grandmother and she knows that, sadly, Rosa went to the gas chambers guilt-ridden about the people she’d endangered.

Not knowing which concentration camp she was in meant there was no way of getting word back to her that they were safe.

A couple of years ago, Liesbeth and Roger took two of their grandsons to Auschwitz and the memorial museum it has become.

Rosa had said in her letter she was being sent to the Westerbork transit camp on the Dutch/German border, one of the main dispatch points for Auschwitz.

“People were taken there on those awful trains,” said Liesbeth. “The whole time we were in Auschwitz, each room I went into, I was thinking ‘did you stand here?’ and in the camp blocks, ‘was this where you slept?’

“And inside myself, I kept speaking to her, saying ‘You don’t need to worry any more. We’re all alright. There was a miracle.”