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Leo was born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1930 into a poor Orthodox Jewish family who had fled the pogroms in Poland after the first world war. His father became a communist and was in and out of prison from 1932. Leo escaped Nazi Germany and arrived in the UK in September 1939 as part of Kindertransport, aged 8. Leo and his four sisters and brother were the only members of their family to survive the Holocaust. Leo was educated at Battersea Grammar School and won a scholarship to study medicine at Guy’s Hospital.