There are many things that irritate us during our mainly hum-drum lives, the car won’t start, the combi  boiler has packed in yet again and somebody’s just spilt a glass of red wine on our brand new beige lounge carpet. We grimace, we curse and we rage against the cruel injustice of it all. For a short while we really do feel that sometimes life is just a wicked conspiracy against us. Then something puts it all into perspective.

Last night, BBC television screened a programme about a Jewish lady called Henia Bryer who lived through the Holocaust.  This lady, now well into her 80s and living with her family in South Africa, told the incredible and harrowing story of how she survived internment in four concentration camps, lost her father, her brother and her sister and witnessed the cruel torture and extermination of countless victims of Nazi oppression in the 1940s. She endured a time of such horror that few can imagine in spite of the now familiar black and white film footage of death camps like Auschwitz and Belsen.

The pain must live with the poor lady every waking moment yet, throughout the interview, her courage, strength, humility and dignity shone through like a beacon. No viewer could fail to have been deeply moved by what they saw. To say that it was humbling would be a gross understatement. Maybe sometimes we need to see something like this to make us realise just how unbelievably lucky most of us really are.