DESPITE the intervening decades, tales of the Holocaust and the Stalinist purges have lost none of their grim power.

Potent examples of man’s inhumanity to man, they are kept alive as ‘a warning from history’ in the – apparently futile – hope that we will learn from their barbarity and behave more decently to each other.

The scale of the horror that occurred can make the atrocities seem removed from our lives, but for Dorchester poet Pam Hope they have a very personal resonance.

In verse across the pages of her latest book On Cigarette Papers, Pam recalls her German-born parents’ extraordinary love story. It began in Frankfurt and resulted in flight from the clutches of Hitler and Stalin and a battle to make a life for themselves in post-war Britain where they were still seen as ‘the enemy’.

After her mother’s death in 1990, Pam found a tiny cache of cigarette papers lined with faint pencilled writing in Russian. The jottings were recipes written by her German-born mother while she was interned in a Russian prison with her husband and the story that Pam uncovered is a heart-tearing tale of determined love and survival that would not appear out of place in a blockbuster novel or star-studded film.

Pam’s mother who she calls Lottie – the author found it too difficult to use her mother’s real name in the book – came from a well-to-do German family and her father Erich was a cavalry officer in the Prussian Army.

The man that Lottie fell in love with was Kurt, a clever German Jew who she helped with microbiological research ‘until he leaves flowers for me, violets and snowdrops, in the wrong hat in the vestibule’.

It was 1933 and the relationship was conducted in secrecy, as the political situation was dangerous and Hitler had just come to power. When the two sets of parents found out, their reaction was extreme.

Pam, who founded Poetry Dorchester and in 2010 was a prize-winner at the Strokestown International Poetry Competition, said: “In 1934 my mother had to elope because she had fallen in love with a German Jew and her father said he would rather see her in the grave than married to him. My father’s mother begged her on bended knees not to marry her son because she wanted to keep him close to her and my mother was not Jewish.

“So my parents left their homes in Frankfurt and travelled to Krakov and then to Kharkov in the Ukraine where they had friends.”

Kurt and Lottie married in Kharkov and initially led a ‘wonderful life’.

But it didn’t last. Despite being completely apolitical, the young lovers were arrested on trumped-up charges of spying and locked in Kiev prison for nine months.

It was here, in a cell that housed 110 people despite being designed for 25, that Lottie collected the recipes and wrote them down in Russian, a language learned after the move from Frankfurt.

“My mother didn’t speak of it because it gave her nightmares,” said Pam.

“But the women looked after each other and would quote Shakespeare. My mother collected the recipes that the women told her – they were Latvian, Greek, Russian.

“All they had to eat was black bread and cabbage so the women shared the recipes and would fantasise about feasts they would cook once they were free. It must have been a way of keeping sane for them.”

She added: “Sometimes they would be taken away for interrogation and would be kept in a row in wooden boxes that were too small for sitting or standing. They would be kept there for hours.

“But they kept their spirits up and would tap on the sides of the box to communicate in code, to let each other know who was there. There were spies of course but they could find out who they were and spread the news.”

After nine months Kurt and Lottie were suddenly released – the poems say she was bloated from malnutrition and he was skeletal.

They were due to be deported to Germany because Hitler wanted all his scientists back, but at the Polish border, Lottie sold her gold rings to the Red Cross for tickets to Warsaw.

In desperation, Kurt went to see the German consul and asked for a loan of $40 to see him and his wife to safety to Krakov, saying that his father would repay it. The consul gave him the money, shook his hand and wished him, a fleeing Jew, good luck.

Once in Krakov, Kurt’s uncle Marek, who would die in Auschwitz, and friend Franz Gugenheim, cared them until they could get safe passage to Britain in 1938 and once here, Pam’s father was offered a job as bacteriologist at Leeds University.

They were joined by Kurt’s parents Leah and Lazar in 1939 – while travelling Leah hid all her valuables in the bottom of her suitcase covered in pins and needles to deter any would-be thieves.

Throughout their exile, Lottie regularly wrote to her mother Hertha who never told her husband about their clandestine correspondence.

But their travails were not yet over. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Kurt and his parents were sent to an ‘enemy alien’ camp on the Isle of Man.

“I think my mother thought it was all happening all over again,” said Pam.

Mercifully the internment was relatively brief and afterwards the family moved to Leeds and Pam was born in 1945, the year the war ended.

She was Kurt and Lottie’s only child.

On Cigarette Papers details these punishing years in sparse, beautiful poetry. The book was launched in Dorchester earlier this month and its London launch is in May.

Pam hopes that one day it will be made into a play or radio broadcast.

She said: “I feel more German than Jewish and the words are a way of holding a conversation with my parents and grandparents. My father died in 1988 and my mother in 1990 and from the night she died I wanted to write their story.”

• On Cigarette Papers is published by Ward Wood Publishing.