Hilda Schindler was born 1920 in Berlin to a liberal Jewish family. She went to the Heinrich Kleist Lyzeum and then to the Jewish school in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse. The family lived in Alt Moabit. Through a relation in Luxembourg, Hilda managed to get a Domestic Visa to the UK. Her first job was with a family in Muswell Hill who evacuated and she found another job. She had to go in front of a tribunal and was classed ‘C’. She was a fire-watcher during the war in Muswell Hill. She attended services at the New Liberal Jewish Liberal Congregation (later Belsize Square Synagogue) and became involved in Liberal and Progressive Judaism. Hilda became a dressmaker and later a teacher. She was very involved in Southgate Progressive Synagogue, which became her ‘family’. Her parents were deported to Theresienstadt where her father perished and her mother died in Auschwitz.