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Edgar Lion had made it out of Occupied Vienna as a student, and enrolled in engineering at the University of Edinburgh.

He didn’t know who was paying for his studies — Jews could not get a schilling out of Austria without risking the death penalty — or what would happen to his parents back home.

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This was 1940, and in Nazi Europe, Jews were being herded into ghettos and shoved onto trains to unknown destinations.

But Lion was safe. Or so he thought.

On May 12, 1940, at the age of 20, he too was picked up and brought to a police station, his dorm mates left wondering for years what had happened to the towering young man with a passion for ping-pong and Fred Astaire.

Lion didn’t know what lay ahead either, as he and thousands of other Jewish detainees were taken first to the Isle of Man — where they were housed in luxury hotels hastily wrapped in barbed wire — then to Glasgow where they were told to choose between the boat on the right and the boat on the left.