A little known part of the Holocaust explored in Leamington exhibition

And although it has been more than 15 years since Sheila Millward produced the collection, An Emotional Response to Terezin, she remains determined to share it with as many people as possible.

With Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27, soon approaching, Gallery 150 in Leamington is displaying the works this month.

After visiting synagogues and graveyards in the Jewish Quarter of Prague in 1994, Sheila found herself unexpectedly visiting Terezin, where she discovered there had been a Gestapo prison that had been hidden under the guise of a seemingly ‘normal’ town.

She said: “Hitler packed 80,000 Jews into there. They were taken there before they went to Auschwitz.

“He fooled the Red Cross by putting in a high percentage of musicians and artists to entertain audiences during the Red Cross visit. They saw all this and people drinking coffee in cafes so they thought everything was fine.”

Sheila was so appalled by what she sees as a failure to thousands of Jews on the Red Cross’s part that she wanted to study a PhD on the subject, but someone else - Caroline Moorehead - beat her to it.

She said: “I still produced my fine art Masters on it, which became this exhibition. Since I finished it in 1996, it has been shown all over the country.”

But she added: “For the past five to six years, I have had problems getting it accepted. I have got to believe that it’s because there is currently a hostility towards Jews because of the political situation in the Middle East.

“I am totally against what is happening to the Palestinians, but I still think the Holocaust is a salient part of the 20th century and I will not have it airbrushed out of our consciousness. This thing has been repeated in different ways all over the world.”

Sheila, who was born in 1935 and has vivid memories of her mother shedding tears as she told her about what was happening to the Jews when she was a child, now works from her garden studio in Kenilworth Road.

Her exhibition opens at Gallery 150 in the Regent Court shopping arcade tomorrow (Tuesday) and is on until Sunday January 29.