Ivan Shaw
Ivan was born in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia in 1939. Life was ‘pretty normal’ until the German invasion in May 1944. His parents were deported and he never saw them again. Five-year-old Ivan spent ten days in a transit camp and only escaped being sent to the camps by his aunt, who bravely rescued him and hid him for seven months and looked after him for three years. Life continued to be difficult as Yugoslavia became a Communist country. In 1947 Ivan was sent to England and adopted by a different aunt. Later in life Ivan would sit on Adoption Panels, keen to use his own experience to help others. (Amersham College, Leeds University)
I had a terrible fear, when my first child Andrew turned five, that something would happen to him, because that was the age that I was when my parents were transported to Auschwitz and I lost them. At that age, life had just turned upside down for me.
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