Looking at photographs of Kurt Munzer and Simon Henig, it is striking how similar both men look. One is a German Jew who narrowly escaped from the Nazis with his wife in a daring sea voyage. The other is his grandson, the leader of Durham County Council. Gavin Havery reports

IF 32-year-old Kurt Munzer and his young wife, Elfrieda, 20, who was pregnant with their first child, has not boarded a small lifeboat to flee the Dutch resort of Scheveningen when they did, the course of their family history would have been very different.

It was May, 14, 1940, the day the Netherlands surrendered to Nazi Germany, and the couple had been forced to flee following the introduction of state sponsored anti-Semitism.

Kurt Munzer was born on August 1, 1908, in Beuthen, a town in Upper Silesia with a mixed German Polish population which had been part of Germany for centuries. His family were all traders, they ran shoe and draper shops, and, although quite well off, were not rich.

The young girl who would become his wife - Elfrieda Gurtz - was born in the small town of Hohenstein, sixty miles south east of Danzig in East Prussia, not far from the Russian frontier, on January 9, 1920, a month before the founding of the National Socialist German Workers Party (more commonly known as the Nazi party) in Munich.

Elfrieda was the second of four children. Her family had lived in Germany for three generations and moved to East Prussia around the turn of the century.

Both were forced to flee their homeland as Hitler’s rampant anti Jewish rhetoric intensified and life was made increasingly unbearable for a once proud people who were systematically stripped of their rights and turned into second class citizens.

Elfrieda had been desperate to leave, but Kurt was a little more reticent until Kristallnacht, The Night of the Broken Glass, when Nazi thugs smashed up Jewish properties and set fire to synagogues.

The couple met in 1938, at Enschede in the Netherlands, where Kurt ran a leather shop, they fell in love and married the following year.

The young family did not feel safe so close to the German border and decided to move to The Hague and Frieda started a new photographic business.

Despite a policy of studied neutrality, Germany invaded the Netherlands on the morning of May 10, 1940, without even making a formal declaration of war. The Luftwaffe craved access to Dutch airfields on the coast so its bombers could launch raids on the United Kingdom and the Wehrmacht was desperate to pre-empt a British invasion of Holland.

The Dutch military - starved of funds by a cash-strapped government - was no match for the German forces ranged against it. Luckily, the Army managed to foil a German parachute assault on The Hague on the first day - giving civilians, including Kurt and Elfrienda, time to escape. Their flight was not an easy dash for freedom. Foreigners were not allowed out at night and they were stopped several times at road blocks manned by Dutch soldiers but Kurt spoke perfect Dutch and they were allowed through.

The ten minute drive to Scheveningen took more than an hour.

They hoped to buy a place on a fishing boat to England, but nobody was willing to take them. Eventually, when they had almost given up hope the pair found three students who had hijacked a small lifeboat and were prepared to risk their lives to cross the North Sea.

There were 46 men and women, no conveniences, very few seats; the women sat and the men stood holding the rails and looking out at sea.

It was cold but the sea was calm.

Some passengers had brought poison to kill themselves if captured.

The following afternoon they spotted smoke on the horizon from a British destroyer, HMS Venomous.

They were taken aboard and given tea in the sailors mess, landing at Dover around midnight.

For a time, the couple spent time in prison as refugees. They were interned on the Isle of Wight, but eventually settled in Leicester and had two daughters and four grandsons, celebrating their golden wedding anniversary in 1988.

Kurt lived until the age of 100, dying in 2008, while his wife died aged 76 in 1996.

Yesterday, 70 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, the plight of Europe's Jews was remembered on Holocaust Memorial Day.

The sombre events were especially poignant for Simon Henig, the leader of Durham County Council who is the grandson of Kurt and Elfrieda Munzer.

Reflecting on what happened, the 45-year-old father of two, admits: “It's an extraordinary story; what I grew up with. I am very proud of my grandparents as they escaped from the Nazis, twice. They left with nothing at all and had to build everything up again, like so many other people did.”

Kurt and Elfrieda's wider family though were not so lucky. Many of their relatives - parents, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins - died in the Nazi death camps.

Seventy years later, memories of the holocaust are receding. The death camps have become the subject of study for students of history. First person accounts grow fewer every year.

But Simon says it is important never to forget how prejudice descended into mass extermination: “It is very important that these events are remembered; they happened only 70 years ago. It was a time when part of Europe turned to barbarism and yet it was within some people’s lifetimes.

“It is up to succeeding generations to talk about what happened and ensure that nothing like that ever happens again.”