When mum Katherine Horkheimer-Wolfe moved to Leicester to escape anti-Semitism in her London neighbourhood, she thought she had no connection to her new home city.
But three years after arriving here, the death of her mother led to a surprising discovery – that her father had fought in the Leicestershire Tigers Regiment during the Second World War.
Katherine, who lives in Braunstone with her 12-year-old son, Max, said: "I knew my father had been in the war and I recently showed my son a tribute to fallen soldiers from the Tigers Regiment at the Neve Shalom Shul synagogue, in Leicester, telling him how his grandfather fought in the same war.
"What I had no idea about was that my father was actually in the Tigers regiment."
Katherine's mother died in December last year and it was only this year she managed to get into an old safe in which she found a pile of papers, medals and cap badges from the Second World War.
"Imagine my shock when out dropped my father's cap badges with a tiger on and underneath the inscription 'Leicestershire'," she said.
"I was dumbfounded."
Katherine's father, Max Wolfe, fled from Germany to England in 1939 when Adolf Hitler's persecution of Jews was reaching its height. His own father, Otto, was killed at Sobibor extermination camp, in Poland.
Max was about 19 when he arrived in England and after initially being classed as an "enemy alien" and locked up, he was put to work on a farm and then into the Auxiliary Pioneer Corps.
He was later transferred to the Somerset Light Infantry and joined the Leicestershire Tigers Regiment in September 1944.
It is likely he served in the infantry in Western Europe during the last year of the war. He left the regiment in 1947.
Katherine, who was born in 1960, never heard much about her father's past as a soldier. He died in May 1997.
After her divorce, Katherine's life took a harrowing turn as she found herself the target of racists in Hackney.
She said: "There was a lot of gang violence in Hackney. Someone engraved a swastika on our door and later the words 'white slut' were engraved under the swastika."
She said: "In the end it became clear we could no longer live there."
In July, 2009 Katherine moved to Leicester because her ex-husband had moved here previously. Now she knows about her connection to the Tigers, she is looking forward to marking Armistice Day on November 11.
"This is the first year at Armistice Day that I will know my father fought in the regiment of the place I now live," said Katherine, who hopes to have a bench in Leicester inscribed as a memorial to her father to further strengthen the family connection to the city she now calls home.
