George explains how members of the family were traced in later years and how he made contact with some of them.
Read the transcript:
INT: And you have family?
G.T: Five children.
G.T: My oldest son died at 42 about 12 years ago. We had twin girls, another daughter and a son now in London.
INT: And when did you move to Hamilton?
G.T: 1986 when my wife died I moved to my daughter’s.
INT: Before that where did you live?
G.T: Before that I stayed in Kelvindale in Great Western Road.
INT: So you’re one of the examples of the Jews who came to Scotland and there’s a bit of your story on the wall in The Scottish Jewish Archives Centre and also there’s a little bit, I think, about you in the Kindertransport book, “The Book of Memories”.
G.T: Yes that’s the one.
INT: “The Book of Memories” that Rosa Sacharin put together.
G.T: And years later I tried to trace the family. I’ve got a son in London so I went to there to the Red Cross and I gave them all the information because during the war you got correspondence through the Red Cross.
You got an official Red Cross sheet of paper. My mother wrote to my uncle; she still had a brother, an older brother living in Germany. And my grandfather was still there and ended up in an old age home. Then the letter was sent, sent to whoever and it came back maybe weeks, months later with a reply on the other side. I could recognise my grandfather’s handwriting, and then things stopped obviously. Then my mother mentioned that, she had got word from her oldest brother (who also was in the German army); we don’t know what happened to the rest of the family except the oldest brother. He had three children; the oldest boy was two years older than me and he ended up in Argentina. They had lived only maybe an hour or so away on the train when we were in Germany. So my mother used to put me on the train up to the big town to see my uncle.
The boy was two years older than me, the girl was two years younger than me and their wee boy, wasn’t even at school. And they used to come over to my mother and visit as well on holidays. So I went to the Red Cross in London and gave them the dates, the ages roughly and the address and for two years they couldn’t trace anything. So I went to one of the meetings and a week later I saw a lady at the shopping centre in Giffnock and said, “I’m trying to trace some people” and she said, “Well go and speak to Mr So-and-so in the Maccabi.” So I did that and gave the old address. Within a month I got a letter from Argentina! They’d traced the oldest boy.
INT: Your cousin?
G.T: Yes. What happened was that he got married over there and he had twin girls and a son. The son got killed in a car accident. The twin girls, at that time were in their forties. The last time I was there was ten years ago. The reason they had been traced was that one of the twin girls never got married, she still had the maiden name Salomonsohn. So off I went to Argentina. My cousin died twenty odd years ago now but I met the two girls and a lot of friends and still correspond with them, you know.
INT: That’s good
