PUPILS got to learn about history from a first-hand account.

Holocaust survivor Henri Obstfeld gave the Year 6 pupils at Richmond Avenue Primary School, in Southend, a moving account of a Jewish childhood during the Nazi occupation of Holland during the early 1940s.

Mr Obstfeld spoke of how his birth parents received call-up papers – despite him being just two-years-old. The family fled almost 100km, from Amsterdam to Arnhem, where a Dutch couple agreed to shelter Henri while his mother and father went o a separate place of hiding.

For the remaining years of the war Mr Obstfeld lived with his foster parents in Arnhem. Shortly after the end of the war, he was reunited with his birth parents and his foster parents were honoured for their bravery.