Gathering The Voices Scotland

Testimonies of Holocaust survivors who settled in Scotland

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Rita McNeill – Immigration

Rita describes her journey from Germany to Britain and her continuing belief that her mother would be arriving there too.

INT: You had escaped from the prisoner of…well the concentration camp, what happened then?

RM: I was taken by my aunt to her home and I stayed there a week or so with my cousin and then I was put on a train to come over here. And they kept saying, “Your mother will…” I said ‘No, I don’t want to go’. “Your mother will come straight behind you, you go”. So I left and I believed them, she never did.

INT: That is terrible.

RM: I never saw her again.

INT: What do you remember of the journey? Do you remember the journey?

RM: The journey? There were a lot of children; we had quite a lot of fun once we got going. I was all right but I kept wanting to see my mother.

INT: Of course you would. And then what happened, did you go via the Hook of Holland?

RM: Hook of Holland and then to London to the station there, Liverpool Station I think it was, and there my guardian, the person who said she would look after me, picked me up there up there and I went to her home then in Scotland.

Renate Mackay – Immigration

Renate explains that her father was in St Andrews in Scotland being interviewed for a job on the day the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. Renate then talks about Lawrie Wardale, the man she calls her “Scarlet Pimpernel,” who brought her and her family to safety in St Andrews in Scotland. 

INT: So, eventually you had to leave, of course, Czechoslovakia as well?

RM: Yes, well with the annexation of the Sudetenland.

INT: So they went into the Sudetenland in October ’38?

RM: I’ve no idea of, you know, of the date. But then the students rioted, sorry, at the Prague University, the Charles University, and my father was advised not to come and lecture in German. So he was without work, but his association with Einstein…he started writing to various people that he knew, and one of them was Sir Arthur Eddington. Both my father/uncle’s expeditions were clouded over, but Eddington was the first one to get a result, so they were in correspondence. In fact after the First World War when Eddington came to Germany to meet Einstein, my uncle/adoptive father was there as a ‘Dolmetscher’, you know, a translator.

So he wrote to various people he knew, Eddington amongst them, and Eddington said, strangely, there was a vacancy in St Andrews in Scotland and my father, my uncle… father/uncle, what do you want me to call him?

INT: I think call him your father; it’s easier.

RM: Call him my father, right. He said he was on a lecture tour in Holland so he could easily come over to be interviewed. So he was interviewed with, incidentally also the help of the Astronomer Royal, and that’s another story. He was interviewed by the Principal of St Andrews University on, literally, the day the Nazis rolled into Prague.

INT: Which was in March ’39?

RM: Yes, the 15th of March 1939. So my father said; “I’ll take your job if you can get my wife and children out”.

INT: He must have been very worried.

RM: He was, he was.

INT: So how did they manage that?

RM: Well, there was a lecturer in the Department of German, at St Andrews University, who happened, just happened to be in London doing his own research. So his wife sent a telegram. Sorry, I should mention this man, Lawrie Wardale, who I refer to as ‘My Scarlet Pimpernel’.

INT: Just like the Scarlet Pimpernel he managed to whisk you out of Prague, did he?

RM: Yes, well his wife sent him a telegram saying, “Can you fetch Family Freundlich, expenses paid?”. So my father went hot foot on the night train down to London armed with money and all sorts of addresses and things and there is a very amusing… well, may I digress again?

Through a strange set of circumstances – years and years later, I came across Wardale’s daughter who had been, believe it or not, interviewed by Margaret Drabble for a book that she was writing. I met Margaret Drabble and I was telling her this story, and she said, “Oh I interviewed Carol. She now lives in Cumbria”. And again, quite a few years elapsed, and I happened to open the book by Margaret Drabble and I looked at the back, the sort of…

INT: The appendix?

RM: Yes, so it just said’ Carol Dawbarn, Cumbria’. So I was, at that point; separated, footloose, fancy free, so I rang directory enquiries and said, “Can you give me a number for Dawbarn?” I said, “It’s all I have – Sedbergh or Cumbria”. And within seconds the man said, “Shall I put you through?” I said “No, no, no, just give me the number and I’ll do it”. So I rang Carol… “Renate”.

“Renate?” So she said she wasn’t well, but I was footloose and fancy free so she said, “Come and see me”. So I came within a couple of days, drove down, and I was hardly inside the door when she gave me a rather grubby manila file in which was the entire correspondence between her father and her mother back in St Andrews – the telegrams – and she said, although she now had grandchildren, this wasn’t her story. She gave it to me and it’s…

INT: That’s lovely.

RM: …absolutely amazing, what’s in that.

INT: Absolutely amazing. So, what did he do? How did he get you out? Did he take a plane to Prague then to rescue you?

RM: Well first of all, obviously, he had to go, I think, to the German Embassy and get permission to go because my father didn’t dare go in. And Lawrie said, while he was sitting waiting, he could see my father pacing up and down because… say it was an ordinary sort of office with half obscured windows, well half glazed, you know, and all he could see was my father’s hat walking backwards and forwards. And, oh he’d been given a letter dated, I think, the 18th of March.

INT: That’s right.

RM: By the Principal of the University [Sir James Colquhoun Irvine] 18th March, saying… may I? “This is to certify that Professor Dr. Erwin Finlay Freundlich, formerly of Prague, has been appointed to be Napier Lecturer in Astronomy and Director of the Astronomical Observatory. The appointment is approved by the Home Office, which has given permission to Professor Freundlich together with his wife and two children to reside in Great Britain.

Doctor Freundlich is already in this country and it is requested that every facility be given to his wife and family to proceed to St Andrews to join him.”

So armed with that letter… (It was very unfortunate that both Lawrie Wardale and his wife would just write… they wouldn’t put dates on their letters, just ‘Tuesday’ or ‘Friday’. And he wrote a great big long letter.)

It took him quite several days until he got to Prague. I know he flew from Croydon to… I’d have to look it all up and tell you.

INT: It was certainly a very dangerous journey I think, and very brave.

RM: I know.

INT: And of course there weren’t passenger flights in those days.

RM: Well there were passenger flights until the very last minute. Once Lawrie had…

INT: Arrived

RM: …got to us, right? We just missed the last plane [out].

INT: Oh dear

RM: Yes, to come back [refer again] to Turkey. Some of Erwin’s problems in Turkey were – he wanted to get some of his equipment for his observatory from Britain and the Turks didn’t want this. The Turks had been in with the Germans but Atatürk was clever enough to entice, you know, the Jewish people that wanted to emigrate to them. But, anyway, Erwin went to the British Consul in Turkey and met ever such a nice man, Mr Hough, who was also musical, and you won’t believe it, but Mr Hough went to Prague at the same time as the Freundlich family in 1937.

So, we had met; we had been there for tea and, where does he live? But right opposite Prague Castle. Anyway, so he had said to my mother, “Give me your jewels; give me your money, I’ll send it out in the diplomatic bag” But in the end that didn’t happen. But he said,  “Right, while you [Renate’s aunt/mum] and Lawrie Wardale are busy trying to get the furniture packed…”

My father was going hairless; you know he just wanted…[to get them safely to Britain]

RM: But my mum, she packed a whole lift; all our furniture came. Anyway, Mr Hough said, “Send Nanny and the children to me.”

So we were… I thought it was the British Embassy but again in 1940, [Renate corrected the date – 1998] I was in Prague and went to, first of all to the Embassy, and they let me look out the window and I said, “No, no that’s not the place” and then, by sheer chance, I happened to find that he lived in literally a big tall building that was opposite the top end of the Hradchin [beside Hradcany Castle]and, this is something that horrifies my daughter – or rather, she keeps wanting me to tell this story.

We were having our elevenses, sitting sort of on the window looking over towards the castle, when a great big entourage came out and went down the side of the hill. Somebody was standing up and there was a flagpole beside the corner of this building and somebody was hoisting up a Czech flag, as this car with, I don’t know who it was, whether it was Hitler or Goering

INT: That was very provocative.

RM: Wasn’t it?

INT: To do that when the Nazis were there. Very brave.

RM: So anyway, somehow we got onto the train and Lawrie sent a marvellous telegram to his wife, which is here.

The first one is, “Can you go Prague and fetch Family Freundlich, expenses paid. Please wire.” This one is dated St Andrews, 27th March: “Endlich Prague” – Finally arrived in Prague – after several flights and train journeys and crossing borders. I even have his passport, Lawrie’s passport.

INT: So tell us, he got you on the train, the whole family and the nanny?

RM: And, wait a minute, yes another one dated… oh, this is strangely dated the 3rd of April.

RM: “Bringing flock back, Wednesday”

INT: Oh now, that’s a wonderful telegram.

Moniek Garber – Immigration

Then in 1945, just two/three months after the war, the Polish government sent me to Oxford. So I was escorted to the commanding officer’s office and told to pack my kit bag and off to England.

INT: To go to Oxford University?

MG: Yes.

INT: Why you?

MG: This is a letter from my commanding officer who was the Colonel when we were… in the armoured cars, that sort of thing. But he was an older man, he was retired. So this is a letter from him: “My dear boy, with great pleasure and satisfaction, you have given me great pleasure and satisfaction with your letter in which you thank me for helping you to get your education. I’m quite sure that it was not so much my doing but your willingness and ambition. I have to admit to you that I have of late thought quite a bit about the bitter pills that you must have swallowed whilst you were in the army.”

And then it changes: “Before the war, in Warsaw, I had a great friend of mine who was Jewish”

He was one of the most intelligent and learned man that I have ever met in my life.”

This is why I want it in the archives-
“I have just now had information from France that the Germans got a hold of him and he was tortured and then killed. I feel that Poland has lost a great intellect in the loss of this man.”

Poland has lost. And then he tells me about if you are in Edinburgh come and see me and so on.

INT: And he was involved was he in ensuring that you went to Oxford?

MG: Ah now, I was sent to Oxford and I have never actually, until I found this, I never quite knew why it was that I was chosen. Mind you I wasn’t the only one, 70 of us were sent to Oxford.

INT: Right

MG: From the Polish army. I was one of them and it was quite a possibility that he may have had more influence than I have thought about it and maybe he was responsible. I had actually forgotten that I had written to him. But anyway the reason for having this faculty in Oxford was the fact that the Germans had systematically killed all the educated people in Poland and this was in fact an intention to replace the Polish diplomatic corps. So had things gone otherwise I would have been a Polish diplomat instead of living here. But things didn’t go that way because after my second year, during my second year

INT: When you were… sorry to interrupt you, what were you studying when you started studying there?

MG: Law and Politics.

INT: Which must have been a huge jump because you had stopped your education all those years before and then suddenly you’re in Oxford.

MG: Oxford.

INT: Yeah

MG: Yes now if you ask me how I learned my English. So I said to myself I’ll have to learn English, not just to talk to people. So I got a hold of the ‘Tale of Two Cities’ and started reading through it with great difficulty.

INT: I think most English people find it difficult as well.

MG: Yes and since I had to do philosophy amongst other things at Oxford I then went on to something that is difficult and that is Moore’s…He’s a Professor of Philosophy, he is a logician and it is so difficult to read that most people haven’t got through it but I have read ‘An Adventure of Ideas’ by Moore which is probably more than most people have attempted. But anyway I had acquired my English.

INT: While you were studying. Then what happened then?

MG: The faculty had to dissolve because of the money. Poland had a lot of money. The gold from the Bank of Poland was deposited in Britain, it was rescued from Poland and then it had to be handed over to the new Communist government in Poland by agreement.

INT: But that meant they couldn’t

MG: They only retained a certain amount of money for the upkeep of the Polish army but the rest was transferred so we simply ran out of money at the end of it. So then I worked. I did a variety of things poorly paid. I worked in Peebles in textiles for a while and at one stage I looked at my demob money, £70, and I said if I don’t get out of here and get a good job I won’t even have money for a bus ticket.

INT: Oh dear. So how did you do it with your £70?

MG: I found out that they were digging tunnels for the hydroelectric schemes. That was 1948/9, ’48 or 9 and I joined the hydroelectric scheme.

INT: And was this you back in Scotland then?

MG: Yeah I was back in Scotland from London. From, actually from Peebles. I went from Peebles to the hydroelectric scheme, the one on Loch Lomond side. If you go along Loch Lomond you can actually see the pipes going down on it, it’s still there. And you were earning big money from those days- £20 a week.

INT: And was that actually a physical job you were doing there?

MG: Oh yeah very much a physical job.

INT: Right.

MG: Drilling rock.

INT: And you had no training apart from your wood chopping had you?

MG: It doesn’t require much training. It is not…

INT: Particularly skilled.

MG: It is not highly skilled. It was miserable and wet and damp with a load of muck going on you but never mind.

Click to view other testimonies from Moniek Garber

Karola Regent – Immigration

INT:     Tell us about coming to Britain then, how did you feel about your arrival in a strange country, did you have any English or did your sister speak any English?

KR:     I knew porridge and good morning and thank you and one or two other little expressions, but the point was that we, it was quite exciting because we came to my aunt and uncle and cousins who lived in Hampstead.  So we stayed with them to begin with, which was nice and not too traumatic, but then the war came and we were evacuated.

INT:     So was that everybody evacuated, the whole family?

KR:     No.

INT:     Just the…

KR:     The children.

INT:     Just the children.

INT:     And were there other children belonging to your aunt and uncle or just you and Lotte?

KR:     No, they were grown up.

INT:     And where were you evacuated to?

KR:     Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire.

INT:     And by that time was your English much better?

KR:     Oh yes [Laughter].  I had a strong accent, but yes it was fine.

PR:     Some of the teachers took great pains.

KR:     Oh, yes I had one teacher, a geography teacher who was awfully good, my books came back covered in red, but everything was corrected and I had to deal with that and he helped me a lot, yes.

INT:     And did people understand that you were a political refugee. It was during the war so was there a problem because you were German?R:     No, there was no, in England there was no anti.

KR:     No, there was no, in England there was no anti.

Judith Rosenberg – Immigration

Judith describes her arrival in Glasgow and the challenges of integration. She then talks about returning to Hungary, where she was finally reunited with her mother.

INT: And then you came to Glasgow after the war.

JR: After the war, after April the 14th, the 15th, we were on our way home to Glasgow. I came on the military trains.

INT: April the 15th 1946?

JR: April 1946, yes I’ll try to keep the dates correct. And we got home and there was great shortages at home, Oh God. I remember my father-in-law brought in 12 eggs – ‘I got these especially for you to come home’. It was such a big…he thought it was a treasure you know. It was such…In Britain they were fairly short. For quite a few years there was great food shortage. But as it happened Harold didn’t make much money, we couldn’t afford very much! Even food was short, yes.

INT: And did you start mixing in Glasgow with the Jewish community through Harold? What happened?

JR: Now it was first very difficult. We were Garnethill (Synagogue) members. Harold was a ‘West Ender’ – But he lived with his parents in the West End and my mother-in-law said ‘You must come to Shul’ and I went to Shul. But the Scottish people…it’s so much easier to talk to Claire (interviewer), as I know who your mother was. Here is somebody who is Hungarian, what do I ask her? My father is here…And nobody was interested in where my…So they didn’t talk to me, you know. So at first I could have been anybody. It was very difficult.

There was one family in Glasgow who overcame it right away and its funny, yesterday I spoke to her. It was called the Naftalin family, Suzie Naftalin’s mother Beulah, her dad, Leslie and (uncle) Sydney (and aunt, Marjorie) they came forward, said, ‘You are from Hungary, you must come and visit us.’ So they were my first contacts in Glasgow and then it takes a long time. I don’t blame the Glasgow people; I don’t know how I am with foreigners. You know how it’s very difficult to go over and ask, ‘How are you?’ you know.

INT: Yes, of course.

JR: But even Dr Cosgrove (the minister of Garnethill Synagogue) – do you know when I was in Glasgow, the Chief Rabbi was called Brodie and Brodie came to visit Cosgrove and Cosgrove said,

‘I hope Judith you would like to meet him’

and I said ‘Very nice’.

Do you know I was invited to Cosgrove’s in the afternoon, Brodie couldn’t care less, couldn’t care less. It didn’t matter to him. You see British people never realised what it was, the war. Did your mother ever say that? No?

INT: I don’t remember her talking about that, no.

INT: Did any of your family come out of Hungary and join you?

JR: When Harold decided to marry me in September and I said I will have to go home with my mother because we were looking for my father. My father disappeared in Auschwitz and mother hoped that no doubt that he will be alive, you know. So mother wanted to go home and Harold says

‘Please leave your daughter back, I will marry her.’

And my mother says ‘How can I rely on that?’

Harold says ‘I promise you I will marry your daughter.’

And I had this job in the military government and they wanted to keep me. And my mother went home with my sister. It was a very complicated journey. They could only get onto a train that went east and Harold from all the officer friends and everything collected coffee, cigarettes, chocolates…And my mother had nothing in her bag but goodies and that’s how she paid her way home. It’d taken over a week; I think it was even longer because you couldn’t get on a train, you know. And she got home and of course she had no house. In Hungary they said, ‘Hitler didn’t do a good job’. ‘What are you coming back for?’ People who were in your house didn’t want you.

INT: So what happened? What happened to her?

JR: Eventually… My mother had two brothers in Budapest and she went to Budapest and she stayed with the brothers until eventually I think one of the brothers got her a flat. It was a very poky little flat but it didn’t really matter. But…And my sister went home with my mother and they had a very difficult time. So I have not managed to talk to my mother. I didn’t know where she was; she didn’t have a telephone. There was no post; there was no way to finding out. Until one day my mother must have gone… In Budapest there was a ?- how do you say that? …?… is a…Do you know any Hungarian?

INT: No.

JR: It’s the Jewish Centre.

INT: Right

INT: Oh yes.

JR: And there was tables and tables of letters from everybody looking for relatives and my mother, by sheer mistake, picked up a letter, who was one of my father’s brother’s sons from Vienna, sent it over. “I am looking for my family; they are called Weinberger” you know. And my mother found that letter and somehow this cousin…I don’t know how. Through some…I think it was called…It was a Jewish organisation and it came to me. How did I get it? I don’t, I really don’t know the detail.

But that was, I married in ’46, that was not until ’48. I have not known if my mother got home; if they live or don’t live. There was no way of finding out because my mother didn’t know my address; I didn’t know hers.

INT: Once you found that out did you try and go back?

JR: I’m just trying to think. Do you know that I’m not absolutely sure. I think Harold eventually got in touch with the Jewish Centre in Hungary and how did he…? Because he knew, we knew that mother went home and the Jewish Centre was in Budapest, you know. After the war there must have been lots of groups of people who got together.

I can’t tell you for sure that I know, you know. And somehow we got in touch with my mother. And in ’49, I think the first planes started to fly; until then there was absolutely no contact. I didn’t… And by that time my mother contacted us or Harold contacted her, I really don’t know. And all that I wanted to do is maybe we could go home if there’s a plane. Now, I didn’t know where my mother lived in very poor circumstances and I think it was 1949 or 1951 – now I’m not sure of the date, we couldn’t afford even to get an air ticket and my in-laws helped us to get a ticket. I think to go to Hungary and have the hotel and everything all together cost about twenty odd pounds, you know, and we did not have the 20-odd pounds.

Harold was working for his uncle – it was the family business of shoes; it was his grandpa’s and…But the grandpa was 90-odd years old and I think up until now he had a monthly salary and then they put it over to weekly and we got another £10 and I think with the £30 we went. We went home and met my mother. It was, she was really poorly off but we’d taken her presents. We couldn’t leave her money. I didn’t have any money. We’d taken her presents and that was very valuable in Hungary. I never knew – a 200 pack of cigarettes…And that was a fortune.

INT: Right.

JR: And coffee and you know, what you could get here. And I think we were home for a week. I’m not sure about the things, you know. If you say to me it was 2 weeks – it feels like, now like a week. And then we came back, and my in-laws, my mother and father-in-law, they thought we would never come back. There was no train; you know, there was no communication.

John Subak Sharpe – Immigration

INT: Good. When did you arrive here in Scotland and how old were you when you came?

JSS: Well, first of all I did not arrive initially in Scotland but in England on the Kindertransport. I had been working for quite some time in agriculture as a farm labourer or farm pupil, whatever you like. I can enlarge that later if you want me to. In Scotland, the first time I came to Scotland was in 1944 in June, early in June 1944, after I had been called up. I say called up because I had volunteered in May, I had some problems in volunteering in May simply because I was in the reserved occupation and I had to say that I was a hay carter that was apparently not enough reserved and so I got in. So I came here, the first time in 1944, I spent 6 weeks being in general training in Maryhill Barracks and from there then after 6 weeks I went to Colchester and joined the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry, Light Infantry. If you want me to continue this aspect very quickly?

INT: Yes sure

JSS: And I after a short time in there, the best of 3 or 4 months, the opportunity came to volunteer for special services. I volunteered both for commandos and the parachute regiment. The parachute regiment needed people at that time because they had just lost a lot of people in Arnhem I guess? But in any case they called me first and I became a paratrooper there.

INT: Goodness and did you ever have to go out of the plane and battle? Did you have a chance of showing off your skills?

JSS: Not really because the war was coming towards an end at that time and we were standing by, standing by, we were not used at that time. And then there came the, the European theatre would disappear. I had an opportunity initially, or I thought I had one but it didn’t work out, to drop onto Norway at that time but it didn’t work out. I was with the intelligence office, I was in the intelligence section of the para’s at that time and then we put aside, the battalion it was moved aside, moved our camp amongst other things and then we were going to go… to fly east. The seaborne part, they had already gone to the far east at that time and then the Japanese war came to an end and for a short time I was trying to learn enough Japanese to make sense of any maps that I could find and instead of that they decided to send us into the one theatre that I did not want, particularly want to go, to Palestine. So we were sent to Palestine and first up in the Gaza area and then to Tel Letwinsky.

INT: I was trying to find what (Tel Letwinsky) was called now because we couldn’t find it on the map and actually we couldn’t find it on old maps either.

JSS: Well that was the name that I had, I was not there very long but it was I will say a British…barracks is too good.

INT: An outpost?

JSS: It’s not an outpost. The outpost would be Gaza because nothing much happened there. From there they went into Tel Aviv for example, on one occasion, I was getting very angry at them but that’s beside the point. I didn’t go on this but they were all in favour. Bevan’s policy was anti Jewish and pro Arab. You probably know that as well as I do. In fact he made a statement at some stage to say that he would solve the problem but he didn’t solve the problem and he handed them… he evacuated, he evacuated. There were lots of things but Israelis would be able to tell you much more of the anti Jewish policy and it was only after they used to hang Irgun or fighters that they had caught and so on. And then Irgun got two British sergeants, they were actually intelligence sergeants, caught them. And they threatened that they would retaliate, which they did, and they hung these two which was a pity. But after that the hanging of Jewish Irgun or other fighters stopped. There were a few Jewish boys in there and when it became very obvious… and the British powers, that they were really much more interested in siding with the Arabs there. The Jewish boys were taken out of the unit and sent to Egypt to work in POW camps and so the rest of my work was really in POW camps again on interpreting and intelligence work and identifying potential war criminals and so on. But it was all a waste of time; Britain had lost its interest in the war criminals. Their main interest was what was happening in Greece where the communists, there was a big communist problem going on there. It was really largely a waste of time.

INT: And what happened in the end to these people, the prisoners of war?

JSS: They were sent back. Nothing happened.

INT: Nothing happened.

JSS: I took one group, OK, you asked… So later when we were stationed… forget them for now. I took one group to Port Said and the reason was these were all German spies, now I mean spies. Most of them had been captured in Iran or what was then Persia. Some of them were apparently civilians, German civilians, others were from the… Abwehr was the army.

INT: Was it the regular army?

JSS: Yes but there was the SS and the Gestapo and so on and the Abwehr was the military side that had been captured. So there were all sorts of individuals that were there and it’s really incredible. I had the job to take them in the lorry, ten or twelve of them, with a couple of squaddies with me, through a lot of desert to Port Said to be sent back to the UK initially but actually to be employed in Berlin which at that time was the last thing I wanted. The first people to be repatriated to the best of my knowledge from there were people that I would have thought should have been hung. However, that was the job, I had my pistol there and I don’t think they had any intention of escaping at all, they knew then what was going to happen. They were going to be used for intelligence work against the Russians. I mean all I did was make sure that they arrived at the other side with my two squaddies.

INT: So say again, they were going to be used in intelligence…

INT: Against the Russians.

INT: …against the Russians.

JSS: In Berlin, I think that’s where they were finally, but I lost all further contact. I’m pretty sure that’s where they were used. It was interesting to some extent. And then I was, my time was up, I was released in 1947, September 1947 with having reached the dizzy heights of war Substantive Sergeant.

INT: And what age were you then?

JSS: In 1947 I was 23.

INT: And you say you were a Substantive Sergeant, is that right? Is there a word substantive Sergeant?

JSS: War Substantive.

INT: What’s…?

JSS: In other words the regulars didn’t have the war substantive. It meant that as soon as the war finished as far as they were concerned the rank could be reused or changed because of money.

INT: Ah right.

JSS: But it was nice at least to have the war substantive which means whilst there was a war on… but that was irrelevant. That rank was arrived at…on extra regimental duties, I hope you have got there, because it was extra regimental duties in prisoner of war camps. The prisoners of war were German prisoners of war who had been captured mainly in the Aegean area. Some, there were allsorts, and if you want me to I’ll enlarge slightly on that.

INT: Yes please.

JSS: There were hardliners, that was ‘hardline’ Nazis. They had already been identified by the time we got the majority of them. Then there were people that were involved but in some cases involved in war crimes which were of various different types that had been elucidated by other people who had earlier interrogated them but it couldn’t easily be proved so they were all a category. So they were ‘C’s’ or ‘B’s’ ‘C+’ was the real hard core. The ‘B’s’ were non political almost and the ‘A’s’ were really totally non political. And they were usually quite young and some of the clerks that we employed were mainly, at least that I employed, were all ‘A’s’. And they were nearly my age or very close to it. And there was no clear political…

I should enlarge a bit more on that. I served in two different prisoner of war camps. That was because the Jewish people in the parachute regiment were sent out of Palestine. The majority, except those who protested and wanted to serve there and there were very few. I don’t know, they could say they wanted to stay with the regiment which there always were, I didn’t have much choice and it never even occurred. So they were sent out, there were, in my unit, there were maybe between 6 and 10 out of the four or five hundred people that were there, a small group. And earlier, before we went to Palestine and so on, I was in the ‘I section’, that was the intelligence section of the unit. There I was a private, again if you want me to say a bit more I’m very happy to but it may not be relevant because eventually I left the ‘I section’ when the war had finished and we were, or just before the war had finished. We were due to drop probably on the Japanese mainland, the whole unit, and I learned for a very short time, learned is the wrong word because I’ve forgotten most of it, to identify Japanese regiment units from maps. If we got some maps we were meant to read… A total waste of time I couldn’t do anything of this sort.

Now our seaborne party, that means the party to accept the regiment and prepare things for it, had already gone out to India. We were still training in Britain but the war had then finished, that was after the Japanese surrendered. So Bevan decided to send the unit to Palestine where there were real problems, that was the last place I wanted to go to. I actually spoke to Captain Pengelly, he had been a Captain in the para’s, the name Pengelly is Cornish I think. Anyway he persuaded me that I, being in the unit and… he would be prepared to try to help me to look for my parents but I really should show some esprit de corps. I decided I’d been part of the unit for some time so I didn’t insist on trying to get to Europe after the war.

INT: So when you were 23 and released did you come back to Scotland or stay in England at that point?

JSS: I went to England, I went to Birmingham, I had decided for some time that I ought to do something positive rather than pretty negative things and that I needed to get back to the educational level that I expected, or I should say that my parents would have expected me to reach. When we were demobbed my brother and I were together and came together again at that time. He incidentally had been earlier and he was sent to ‘OxU’ Officer’s Training Corps and he just made that at the end of ’45. So neither of us actually…he was in the Royal Warwicks and neither of us actually did anything really useful during our army careers.

INT: But I was under the impression that you had to be in a Jewish Brigade as somebody coming from abroad, you were allowed to serve?

JSS: At that time, yes absolutely.

INT: Because it was later in the war then?

JSS: It was later in the war, it was ’44, and there was no question about that.

INT: That’s interesting. Then after the war ended what happened?

JSS: When we came out both of us wanted to get our university education. My brother who had been doing his matriculation and his Highers in Coventry, because we had been separated, whereas I was on the farm, he got an FETS grant, Further Education and Training Grant. In my case it was refused because I had been in farming and I had not been studying apparently at that time. So I got nothing from that. However, my brother and I for the first year shared actually his grant but then he went to University College London whereas I had my… sat my matriculation, my mature matriculation, both of us had to sit mature matriculation, into Birmingham University . So they had to offer me a place, so after the first year I got a grant from Birmingham itself. I also had some help from the family, Mr and Mrs Peskin, who are dead now, who had actually guaranteed for us children when we first came over as children, aged at that time 14 and 13. So I got a grant from Birmingham, not from the university but from the city, and from then onwards we went slightly separate ways. There were two things that I should say; first of all going back early to when we first came over to England we were both going to be interviewed by an educational psychologist. We had of course done no educational work at all for the last year in Vienna, after Hitler had came we were thrown out of our school and this was nearly a year later. And this man had obviously been educated beyond his intellectual capacity and he decided we were not worth educating. That is how I actually was interested in farming although I was not sent to a farming college but to work as a pupil on a… for a pretty dreadful farmer.

INT: How did he decide you weren’t worthy of educating?

JSS: He tried to interview me in Latin, he said “I see you’ve done Latin for at least a couple of years” and so on. Now I don’t know whether you have done Latin at all.

INT: No.

JSS: But certainly not colloquial Latin.

INT: No.

JSS: I obviously could not possibly hold an interview in Latin. That’s the way it goes. A second time almost the same thing happened to us when we got into Birmingham University, potentially into Birmingham University, because we had taken this mature matriculation into the university itself. There was a man, the admissions tutor, I don’t know if I should mention his name. But OK, his name was Dr. Ibbs at that time, Major Ibbs he called himself because he was something in the Territorial Army but he had not done very much elsewhere. He was an awful lecturer, he lectured in heat, however, he interviewed us. He offered me mining engineering in which I’d absolutely no interest whatsoever and he offered Gerhard, my brother, a year below what he could already enter in because Gerhard had taken an intermediate just before joining, the London Intermediate. I had learned matric but that didn’t make… We both didn’t accept this, eventually he had to offer something else so he offered me botany and biology and from then onward it went on. But he said “You would have been better off if both of you had failed”. He obviously didn’t like refugees or at least like… Don’t forget, we weren’t young men then and we were experienced, we had been living for quite a long time in the army and had made reasonable progress there.