A WOMAN who has told thousands of York schoolchildren how she escaped the Nazis with her family when she was a little girl in Austria received recognition in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.

Edith Jayne, 85, of Hartrigg Oaks, New Earswick, has been awarded the MBE for services to education about the Holocaust.

Edith said she had been to scores of primary and secondary schools in the York area over the past decade, telling pupils about her experiences in the 1930s and 1940s.

She said she was born in 1936 in Vienna, Austria, the daughter of a Jewish doctor, Rudolph Kurcz, and Roman Catholic mother, Maria Rixner.

In 1938, on the day when the Nazis invaded Austria, her father’s practice and the family home was seized by the state, and he became unemployed and the family homeless. “We had to get out,” she said. “We had no income and nowhere to live.”

The family initially fled to Portugal, where her father found work with a Jewish welfare agency treating other refugees who had fled the Nazis.

Then in 1941, the American consul told her father it was becoming too dangerous for Jews to continue living in Lisbon and the family was able to travel to America, where it settled in New York.

“Everyone was very kind to us there and I grew up in America,” she said.

But in the 1960s, her late husband’s George’s work took them to Brussels, where Edith wasn’t happy, feeling like a refugee again, and they moved to London, where Edith worked for the education authority before retiring and moving to York a decade ago.

She says her experiences are very relevant to today’s world, where many people are seeking refuge, to whom she wants kindness shown.