With Holocaust Remembrance Day having taken place on 27 January, one of our 91热爆 Volunteer Visitors sent in this article, written by one of her pensioner ‘visitees’, Michael Brown, in which he recounted arriving in England in 1939 as a nine-year-old on the penultimate Kinder transport train. Sadly, Michael died in September last year.
When I look back at my long life, I can reflect on how fortunate I am to be able to write about it now. However, I have twice borne tragic losses which have greatly saddened me.
In 1986 my wife, Jenny, and I moved to London because of a location change in my workplace. Jenny, who had enjoyed a part-time job in Trinity College, Cambridge University, was delighted to find further employment with the 91热爆 as secretary to the Head of Listener Research in White City. All went well until Jenny fell seriously ill and did not recover from an operation to save her life. I was heart-broken.
Many years had passed since I have arrived in 1939 in England with my six-year-old sister Hannah as refugees, travelling with the Kindertransport, a scheme authorised by the British Government to bring in 10,000 mainly Jewish children between the ages of four and 16 away from the Nazi persecution that prevailed in those times.
I was born in 1930 in Breslau, a city which now finds itself in Poland and is called Wroclaw. My father was a lawyer who was appointed district judge in a town called Oppeln (now Oppole) where we lived until 1938. He was dismissed from his job in 1937 as a result of the Nazi law which excluded Jews from holding positions in the German Civil Service. He left the family for over six months to gain a qualification as Hebrew teacher at a Berlin college. He found it hard to obtain a teaching post as so many members of the German Jewish community were emigrating. Fortunately the position of manager of the Hanover Palestine Office was offered to him and the family moved to that city in July 1938.
After some difficulties my parents found a suitable flat in a large villa owned by the single daughter of an eminent Jewish businessman who had died earlier in the year. Jews were only allowed to rent accommodation in properties owned by Jews so we were lucky to find this apartment.
My sister and I went to a Jewish school, as Jewish children were forbidden to attend non-Jewish schools. Jews were also not allowed to attend public performances in theatres, cinemas, concert halls or sports halls.
Nevertheless our family lived happily together in those times, and our parents shielded us from the terrible events that were happening around us. Our flat overlooked a large square where the SS stormtroopers would parade regularly and Nazi rallies were held. Being a keen listener to the radio, with the ambition one day to become a radio announcer or sports commentator, I would sometimes hear broadcasts, including Hitler’s ravings and rantings addressing his followers.
Life went on peacefully for us until the night of 9 November 1938, Kristallnacht. We heard about the savage attacks on Jewish properties, including synagogues, and the arrest of Jews following the assassination of a junior German diplomat in Paris by a young Jewish student. My parents were worried that my father would be taken away but fortunately that did not happen. However, my grandfather and my uncle were arrested, and my uncle did not return home. A few days after Kristallnacht my father took me to the site of our synagogue, which was in ruins and still smouldering from the flames that had set it alight.
Thereafter my parents did their utmost to find a way to emigrate. My father would have liked to go to Palestine, as he had always been a keen Zionist, but only immigrants with manual skills were welcome there, not lawyers. He found a guarantor in the USA, but the family was low down on the waiting list for visas. As manager of the Hanover Palestine Office, he had good contacts with the Jewish authorities in Berlin and was able to organise my and my sister’s emigration with the Kindertransport.
On 22 August 1939, my parents took Hannah and me to the Hanover train station and handed us over to the organisers of the Kindertransport. We were on the way to England, safely out of the way of the Nazi oppressors and murderers, where we found caring homes with two Jewish families in Liverpool, who looked after us, ensuring that we obtained a good education that would set us up for successful careers and happy marriages in Great Britain.
We heard little from our parents during the early part of the war apart from occasional brief messages via the Red Cross. These ceased to arrive at the end of 1941.
A few weeks after the end of the war, we learnt the tragic news that our parents had been deported with 1,000 other Hanover Jews to the Riga Ghetto in Latvia. Nothing more had been heard from them. They presumably died, either by being murdered or through disease or malnutrition. Although I had feared the worst for many months, the stark news of their death affected me palpably. It was the first really tragic blow I felt in my life, and the pain of it will never go away.