Dora Love was born on 21 May 1923 in the small town of Plunge in western Lithuania, the third of four children of Hirsch and Jetta Rabinowitz. Her father owned a successful porcelain and glass business, and in 1924 the family moved to nearby Memel (today Klaipėda) on the Baltic Sea. The Klaipėda region was a safe haven for Jews. However, four days after her graduation from the German lyceum in Memel, in March 1939, the German Wehrmacht occupied the Memelland, making it part of Hitler’s Greater German Empire. Dora, her sister and one of her brothers were hurriedly smuggled out of the Memelland into Lithuania where she was re-united with her parents in the little town of Šiauliai (Schaulen). Following the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939, Lithuania became part of the Soviet Union.

In June 1941, the Germans marched into Lithuania as part of their war against the Soviet Union. The SS quickly rounded up all Jews and crammed them into a Jewish ghetto set up in Schaulen. The ghetto inhabitants had to do forced labour, and in late 1943, when the ghetto was cleared, most of the inhabitants were transported, in cattle trains, to Stutthof Concentration Camp near Danzig. It was here that Dora experienced what she calls ‘the depth of inhumanity’ – her brother, her sister and her mother did not survive the inhuman and brutal conditions in the camp. Her father had been deported to Dachau, and Dora was reunited with him a few years after the end of the war, but she did not meet her other brother, who had sought refuge in the Soviet Union, until decades later.

In late April 1945, when Soviet troops closed in on Stutthof, Dora was one of the prisoners who were put on small motorless boats and left drifting westwards across the Baltic Sea. Many of the prisoners died; Dora was one of the few who reached the shores of Schleswig-Holstein after seven and a half days without food or water. She was found by British troops. Among them was her future husband, Frank Love, whom she married in January 1946.

After her recovery, Dora stayed in Germany until 1948, working first as a translator for the British Army, then for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and finally the American Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC), a Jewish relief agency, looking after concentration camp survivors who had nowhere to go. She soon became involved in a project to set up a home for Jewish child survivors in Blankenese, a suburb of Hamburg on the river Elbe.

In 1948, Dora moved with her husband to Britain where their first child, a daughter, was born. Because of her fragile health Dora was advised that it would be better if she moved to a warmer and drier climate, and the family moved to South Africa where her two other children were born and grew up. It was during this time, at the height of apartheid, that she began working as a teacher. Her daughter Janet joined the ANC underground and spent some years in exile; her son Seth left South Africa to avoid conscription into the apartheid army. Frank and Dora returned to Britain and settled in Colchester where she continued in her efforts to educate younger generations and started giving talks about the Holocaust and her experiences under the Nazi regime, visiting many schools, mainly in Essex and Suffolk, and participating in Holocaust memorial events.