Sir Winston Churchill portrayed in The Knight of Garter robes bronze statue sculptor Karin Churchill (1930 - 2018)

Approx. 39 cm height

Statue has some rubbing and couple of scratches on back photos 9,10,11,14,20 rough edge photo17

A SURVIVOR of the bombing of Dresden who went on to marry a D-Day hero.

German-born Karin Churchill’s family home in Dresden was bombed during the raids of 1945.

The nurse, who was also a commended artist, met war hero Patrick Churchill in Oxford and the pair married in 1964, showing love’s ability to conquer divisions.

Mrs Churchill (nee Busch) was born in Dresden on March 16, 1930, to parents Ernst and Margarethe.

During the Allied bombing campaign against the city during the Second World War, the family home was hit and her mother was killed. The family was separated. Her father and older brother went to help out in the chaos and she was left to look after her twin brother, who was blinded during the raids.

When the war ended, Mrs Churchill returned to Dresden and became a ‘Trümmerfrau’, helping to rebuild the city. She went on to attend the Leipzig Academy of Art, which had also been heavily bombed. She and other students helped rebuild the academy they then studied in.

Mrs Churchill and her brother settled in Munich, where she continued her art studies before working as a set designer for the Bavarian State Opera.

Eventually, however, Mrs Churchill decided to do something more useful and joined the Red Cross, retraining as a nurse at Heidelberg.

An interest in Eastern religions gave Mrs Churchill the desire to work for Mother Theresa as a missionary. She learned Hindi and Sanskrit and was offered a post.

She would later learn that English was also a required language. And so, on her voyage to India, she stopped in England.

It was while in the city that she met Mr Churchill, a survivor of the D-Day landings. The two fell in love and Mrs Churchill never made it to India.

The couple went on to marry in 1964.

 Mrs Karin Churchill worked as a nurse at Morris Motors in Cowley, where Mr Churchill worked and later as senior sister at the Rivermead Rehabilitation Hospital, a pioneering centre for treating brain injuries

She continued to create artwork, designing a nativity crib for Christ Church Cathedral in the German tradition and sculpting a figure of Sir Winston Churchill, one of which is now in the Queen's private collection.