THE life of a child refugee from Nazi persecution, who was cared for by a Wiltshire family, has been commemorated as part of a tree planting project.

Born in 1925, Berlin teenager Franziska Marion Lesser was brought to safety in 1939 on the Kindertransport.

She was then evacuated with her school to Lea, near Malmesbury where she was taken in by the Ford family and became a pupil at the village school.

Her descendants joined members of the Ford family, who they had never met, for the ceremony in Lea last week organised by the Association of Jewish Refugees for its 80 Trees for 80 Years project.

Association chief executive Michael Newman said: "The project enables the AJR to give back to and create a living legacy within the country that became home to the Jewish refugees.

"And we hope these 80 special trees will be appreciated by futures generations and provide natural habitats for other native species for many decades to come.”

Marion, whose parents were murdered in Auschwitz, stayed in Lea for two years before she returned to London and then volunteered for the Women's Land Army - one of few Jewish girls to do so.

The sudden shift to life in rural Wiltshire wasn't always easy for the evacuees.

In her testimony, recorded for ajrrefugeevoices.org.uk she said: "My headmaster was Mr Silverstone. It was a large school so we were divided, I think, into three villages.

"He was a very kind man, understanding man, but he had an impossible situation, because he had English Jewish children and continental Jewish children and the village people didn’t accept us very well.

"As far as they were concerned we were Germans, or we were Austrians, so we were the enemy, and I think there were 16 of us from Austria and Germany and we used to get together and gabble away in German until the headmaster separated us and put us into English speaking families, and we soon learned English."

The project marks places that were important to Jewish refugees who found sanctuary in Britain during and after the war and acts as tribute to the contribution they have made to British society. And it's a way of giving back to the places which became their home.

The scheme has also been recognised by the Queen’s Green Canopy initiative, marking Her Late Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee in 2022.