A woman who survived both Hitler and Stalin says the warning signs of totalitarianism are flashing in the West once again.

Erika Fabian was four years old when the Nazis came for her family in Budapest. Eight decades on, the Holocaust survivor and author says she recognises the early stages of authoritarianism – and fears Western democracies are repeating the mistakes Europe once paid for in blood.

“I feel like a canary in the coal mine,” she said. “What my latest book, Liars’ Paradise, describes is the slow occupation of entire nations and deprivation of freedom, including America today.”

Ms Fabian says her warning is grounded in lived experience – of how fear spreads, how people stop speaking up, and how democracies hollow out long before they collapse.

It is a message shaped by a lifetime under tyranny – and one she believes Britain should take seriously. Ms Fabian is the mother of world-renowned eye surgeon Professor Dan Reinstein, whose London practice has treated figures including former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

What alarms her now, she says, is not a single law or leader, but a growing pattern across Western democracies where speech is policed and fear does the work of the state.

“In America today people are afraid of saying something against President Trump in case someone knocks on their door,” she said.

Ms Fabian, who lives in California, says history shows people begin censoring themselves long before repression becomes obvious.

“That is how it starts,” she said. “And by the time people realise what is happening, it is often too late.”

She added: “Something is drastically wrong with the country now that you can no longer speak out against the regime. I would never imagine this could happen in a democracy like the US.”

Ms Fabian is particularly troubled by reports of migrants, students and activists being detained or investigated over political views, and by the expanding use of digital surveillance tools that track online behaviour.

“America was built on immigration,” she said. “But now families are getting arrested. Children are getting arrested at school and deported if they don’t have proper papers. If it goes too far, we will end up with a fascist-style government.”

Some commentators say her warning has echoes in Britain, where they see the UK drifting towards an authoritarian model. They point to an expanding body of laws regulating speech, protest and online expression, and warn this risks encouraging self-censorship – not because people are criminals, but because they fear the consequences of speaking freely.

Lord Young, General Secretary of the Free Speech Union said: “This is the most authoritarian government in my lifetime. This is the year in which the right to trial by jury is scrapped, elections are cancelled. More laws are passed fettering our right to free speech and the government starts removing its political opponents from Parliament.”

Alan Miller, founder of the Together Association, which campaigns for democratic freedoms, said: “We are all very concerned with the increase in authoritarianism, with attacks on free speech and protest.”

For Ms Fabian, whose first memory was fear and lies, believes these are not abstract debates.

In 1944, Nazi-aligned Hungarian forces began rounding up Jews in Budapest. Her father had already been taken to a forced labour camp.

“We were asleep in bed and heard banging and kicking on the door and being told to get out,” she recalled.

She was four. Her sister Judith was seven.

At the last moment, the family survived because a Christian neighbour lied to the Nazis, telling them they had already fled.

“He said, ‘I’m the one who told the Nazi that you had left already. That’s why they stopped banging on your door,’” Ms Fabian recalled. “So, he saved our lives.”

What followed was a childhood spent in hiding during the war.

Ms Fabian, her sister and their mother moved between safe houses, borrowed apartments and hospitals, often posing as Christians with forged birth certificates. Eventually, the girls were hidden in a Red Cross children’s hospital, pretending to be sick while their mother searched for new papers.

For a short time, it worked. Then the Nazis arrived.

The children in the hospital – some as young as three – were marched out and forced to walk through the city for hours, soaked by rain and starving.

It was during this march that Ms Fabian reached breaking point.

“I said to my sister, ‘I can’t carry my briefcase anymore. I’m just going to sit down over here and rest,’” she recalled.

Her sister’s response was immediate.

“She said, ‘Don’t you dare.’ She picked up my briefcase and said, ‘I’ll carry it for a while.’”

The reason was clear to every child in that line.

“We all figured that the kids who sat down – because we heard what sounded like gunshots – must have been shot,” she said.

The children were herded into a stone quarry building and left overnight. At dawn, a man in a Nazi uniform appeared at the door, calling out the Fabian sisters’ names.

Ms Fabian panicked.

“I said to my sister, ‘He’s wearing a Nazi uniform, he’s going to kill us. Let’s not go,’” she said.

But Judith realised something was different.

“The Nazi officer who came to get us was actually a Jewish doctor dressed as a Nazi officer,” Ms Fabian said.

He was part of an underground rescue network. Using forged authority, he marched the girls past real Nazi soldiers and reunited them with their mother.

The war ended in 1945 – but freedom did not arrive.

Hungary fell under communist rule, and Ms Fabian says fear once again governed daily life.

“Everybody in Hungary was lying to everybody about everything,” she said. “Living under communism, you could never tell the truth of how you really felt. One couldn’t say anything bad about the government without risking being jailed for it.”

An attempt by the family to flee failed. They were arrested at the border. Ms Fabian was sent to a juvenile detention home, while her mother and sister spent months in prison for trying to escape.

It was only after the 1956 Hungarian uprising that they finally fled – trudging through snowfields into Austria before emigrating to America.

Ms Fabian rebuilt her life in the West. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree, worked as an actress and photojournalist, and has authored 26 books. Her latest, ‘Liars’ Paradise’, draws directly on her experiences under Nazi occupation and Communist dictatorship.

“I see this government coming as I lived through it step by step,” she said.

Fear, she believes, is the most powerful weapon.

“Most people shut up and adjust,” Ms Fabian said.

And that silence, she warns, is where democracies die.

“Freedom does not vanish overnight,” she said. “It disappears when people convince themselves it can’t happen here.”