Selma Mills (1923-2011) née Klau was born into a Jewish family in Munich. The family leather goods business, Erlanger and Liste, was aryanised in 1937. Selma came to Great Britain aged 16 on one of the last Kindertransports before the outbreak of war. She lodged with a Quaker family in Birmingham where she trained to be a nurse. After the war she went to the USA, where she had an uncle. She became an American citizen. She returned to Great Britain in 1967 then met and married Cyril George Mills (1917-2007).

Her parents Sally Klau and Klara née Henle along with her uncle, Gustav Henle, and her aunt, Regina Mayer née Henle, all perished in the Holocaust.