Dear Sir,

It is with a deep sense of emotion that I read in today’s Royal Gazette (June 18) a conviction of a German guard, jailed for five years for his part in what the judge called “ ... a perfect functioning machine for eliminating human beings, primarily Jews from Auschwitz in Poland, and Germany”.

I was a young girl of 17, training to be a nurse at Guy’s Hospital in London. England, when I listened to the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, saying in 1941: “We will search you out. We will find you and pursue you for ever. We will never forget or give up in order to punish you for your monstrous crimes to humanity.”

We all heard of the death camps and the ovens. Walking in the evening with the rain falling on my head, I felt that the rain being swept by the wind from France to England would have been the tears of the Jews — and I wept.

My emotions today will no doubt be felt by thousands all over the world on reading this verdict and conviction, and that the words of a great man had been honoured.

We who remember and who lived through those terrible times have waited long and hard for justice.

Not revenge, as the Lord saith “revenge is mine”, but justice. That is what this is all about, and may it be so for ever more.

DIANA WILLIAMS