THEA Gersten should have been getting ready to celebrate her 13th birthday.

She was asleep at the comfortable family home she shared with older brother Adi, mother Rosa and war hero father Lazar, a man who won the Iron Cross for bravery in the First World War. But then the telephone rang at 2am and signalled the start of a terrifying nightmare, one that is still hard to comprehend.

It was November 9, 1938 – the night Hitler's rampaging henchmen brought home the brutal truth about the Third Reich's murderous intentions to Germany's Jewish community.

Nazi thugs smashed and looted Jewish homes and shops in an orchestrated orgy of hatred and violence.

More than 1,300 synagogues were dest-royed and 30,000 Jews were taken away to concentration camps, many never to return.

Thea's young eyes saw it all.

That night became known as Kristallnacht – The Night of Broken Glass. So many windows had been smashed the pavements looked like a carpet of crystal.

"It was the end of my childhood," says 82-year-old Thea, who lives in Hebden Bridge.

"My home was des-troyed, our shop was destroyed and we had to leave Germany. I was only a young girl. How can a child understand?"

Thea grew up in Leipzig, Germany. Her family ran a successful fur and skins business.

But the nightmare she awoke to on that fateful night ensured life would never again be the same.

"The telephone rang to ask my father to come down to the shop because it had been smashed and burgled.

"He had a very bad stomach wound from in the war, which flared up from time to time, and he was in hospital that night.

"My mother went down and saw all the Jewish jewellery shops being demolished. People were running through the streets with pickaxes and spades. The Nazis were shouting 'The synagogues are burning'.

"We lived between two synagogues and Mother was terrified we would burn to death.

"She rang from the shop and told us to come immediately. You could hear people shouting anti-Jewish slogans as we walked.

"Whenever we saw soldiers, we ducked into a doorway and hid.

"When we got there, everything had been looted. My mother was standing among it all.

"She told us to go to my cousin's home and she would pick us up later.

"At 4am, there was a tremendous banging on the door. I could hear them shouting 'Open up, Gestapo.' They had weapons.

"They told my cousin he had to go with them. He said he had done nothing wrong but they replied 'Jews don't ask questions'. He was taken to a camp nearby. He went in a man of 23 and came out without teeth, with terrible bruises and broken. He was later taken to Auschwitz and murdered."

Her father came out of hospital and fled across the border to Poland.

Her brother Adi, who was 15, managed to escape on one of the kindertransports to England. Thea and her mother fled to Warsaw, promising to fetch him as soon as they could.

The Jewish quarter in Warsaw was already gripped by poverty. She and her mother went to England to get Adi. She and her mother went to England to get Adi. It was a decision that would save her life.

"That was when the war broke out. There was no way we could get back to Warsaw.

"I don't know if it was fate or just luck. All I know is I have a trem-endous feeling of guilt – why me, why did I live?"

Even after settling with her mother in Kilburn, London, danger was never far away. The house was bombed in the Blitz, burying both her and her mum under tons of debris. It took rescuers four hours to pull them out.

In 1944, she met her late husband, Gustav Hirschfeld in Manches-ter, a German refugee Jew who had volunteered for the British Army. He changed his name to Gerald Hurst in case he was captured by the Germans. They married in 1952.

On Sunday she will close her eyes and the memories of Kristall-nacht will burn as brightly as ever. "I see the flames, the huge flames that lit the sky. I see my mother standing in the middle of our beautiful shop with all the damage on the floor.

"Our lives were shattered. You don't forget. You can't."

A diary written by Thea, now a mother of two and grandmother of four, has been published in Germany and is used in schools. It is due to be published in the UK soon.

"I go back to Ger-many and talk to young people about Kristall-nacht and what it was like to be a Jew. That is the only way I can help to understand why I survived."

Her father, like millions of others, didn't survive. She found out he was gassed in Treblinka.

"I am 82 now and there is still so much terror in the world.

"On Sunday I'll pay homage to all the Jews who died, including my father.

"But I ask myself 'What did they die for?' and still I cannot find an answer."