integration

Walter Gumprich – Integration Into Canada

Walter summarises his working life in Canada

INT:So when you were in Canada and people said, “Who are you? Are you German, Scottish – what were you?

W.G: They just assumed that I was Scottish.

Well I got a job. I got a job within a couple of days, not doing what I wanted, but after 3 months I did.

I was right into the feed business. I was posted to a place called Dauphin, Manitoba, for Canada Packers. They were the biggest in Canada. It was a nice company. Being accepted never came up. It was never a topic of conversation for sure.

INT: Because everybody is an immigrant.

W.G:Yes. There was one man in town, Mr Oliphant. He owned the hardware store. He came from Glasgow when he was six years old. He was an orphan.

When I got to Dauphin I was told to go and see old man Oliphant. He was an older man by then. Nobody could understand him.

So I went to the store, saw Mr Oliphant and spoke to him. He first greeted me. I could not understand a word he said.

I said I was from Glasgow. He spoke quite normal Canadian. He said “That is the reputation I have. Nobody can understand a word I say, except the price!” He was popular; he was a good guy.

He knew his stuff.

He spoke something that was not Glaswegian. It was just something. Anyone from Glasgow would realise this – he made it up on his own.

INT:So you had your job. Later on, was it when you retired that you started working for UNESCO?

W.G:Yea. I worked out of Winnipeg, then Dauphin for 3 years and Northern Manitoba for 3 years and then I moved to Saskatchewan on 19^thNovember 1962 and then worked for International Packers for 25 years and then I did International Consulting for United Nations International Culture Organisation, for the World Bank, CIDA – Canadian International Development Agency –

and they farmed me out to different people. I worked in six continents but I missed one.

INT: Which one was that?

W.G: Antarctica. There you go.

Susan Singerman – Integration

In this section Susan talks of going to Glasgow University and becoming a languages teacher. She was encouraged to go to Garnethill Synagogue.

Int : Did you decide after the year that you weren’t cut out to be a nurse?

Susan: No, I had two small children. They were going to be in my care for a long time so I wanted to have the same holidays.

Int : That was later. You didn’t have the children when you were nursing.

Susan : Pardon.

Int: You didn’t have the children when you were a nurse?

Susan: No.

Int : You got married after that and then had the children.

Susan: Well it was half way through.

Int : And later in Glasgow am I right in saying that you were quite involved in politics, in the Labour movement?

Susan : Yes I’m afraid so.

Int : I think that’s great actually. How was it that you became involved in politics?

Susan: Through Annie Feuerman. Did you know her?

Int : Who was she?

Susan: She was a cousin of Mr Kubie’s. She introduced me to the Carmichaels. Neil Carmichael, when I first got to know him he wasn’t an MP yet, but he became a Labour MP. He stood for Kelvin and I lived in the West End then.

Int : And you and Kay Carmichael became best friends?

Susan: Oh yes, that’s right. Yes, she died just very recently.

Int : Was it difficult for a Jewish, Hungarian refugee to be involved in Glasgow Labour politics?

Susan : Well, you know, it’s difficult to answer that. There were so many things, after I got… I wanted to go to University. Dr Banyai, he wasn’t you know (a relative), it was my aunt who was the relative – he was an in-law- said only about a few weeks after I arrived. “I suppose you must have thought we were still as rich as we were in Vienna, so that we would put you through University”. Well, that finished it for me.

Int : A subtle way of telling you, I think.

Susan: So I went into Glasgow and I spoke to Annie Feuerman and she looked at the wording of my visa and it said that I could take no jobs paid or unpaid except jobs of national importance and they were of two kinds – one was to be a domestic maid; the other…

Int: Nursing. That’s when you when you went to nursing; that was before you were married.

Susan: Yes.

Int : I’m sure you must be tired now, so my last question for you – I haven’t mentioned before or asked you anything about Judaism. Now, being Jewish caused you all that trouble in the past. Would you say it’s still significant in your life after you came to Scotland or did you just try and become an average Scottish Hungarian?

Susan : Well, I don’t know. If I’d married a Hungarian, it could have been different, but you know I didn’t, and it’s very difficult to say, and well, of course, there is the fact that although I have been to Israel, I think about three times, I stayed here. I never went to Israel [after the war.]

Int : You didn’t have much to do with Judaism at first, but then you met Dr Cosgrove, didn’t you?

Susan: Yeah, that’s right.

Int: What did he say?

Susan : I said – again, I must have been very stupid, I don’t know how I got through University – I said, “They can choose when they are older. I am not going to give them anything, any religion”. And, if you get nothing, if you don’t get a choice, then you can’t choose from nothing, so, Annie Feuerman got me to go to – I think it was the Purím do – to Garnethill (Synagogue) and I got a tap on my shoulder, “Are you Mrs Singerman?” “Yes” and then, “9 o’clock, Sunday morning”.

Int : For cheder… Int: Those two children, yeah – that was Dr Cosgrove.

Susan: After that, when Dr Cosgrove commandeered them into Sunday School, Howard then got Bar Mitzvahed at Garnethill (her grandson, Alex, thirty seven years later, also had his Bar Mitzvah at Garnethill). Of course, Garnethill wasn’t the way it is now.

Int: It was very busy at our time, wasn’t it?

Susan: Yes, in the first year I only got a seat at the window.

Int: Now you could have a choice of seats.

Int: Thank you very much, it was very interesting and I know you taught for a number of years as well. Was that schools in the West End or did you teach all over Glasgow?

Int: You taught at The Girls High – French and German then at Knightswood and then you were Head of Department at Allan Glen’s for many years before you retired.

Susan: For 15 years.

Int : Tell Angela what happened at your Graduation.

Susan: I used my maiden name because by then, right or wrong, I didn’t want to be any different from others, I wanted to be treated like everybody else.

Int : You didn’t want people making excuses for not doing essays because you had the children. You didn’t tell anyone you had children, did you?

Susan: Isobel Ferguson,

Int : Your best friend.

Susan : When I was doing Jordanhill teacher training you had to be five weeks in the college and five weeks out, and I was sent to Hyndland and this was Howard’s last year. There was this Jewish teacher at Hyndland so she said, “Oh, the next class is through to the primary,” and so we went along and lo and behold who comes down the stairs but Howard – “Hi Mum”. So she said nothing, like the good Scotsman she is: anybody can make a mistake.

The following week, again we went to the same routine, and who comes along, Shirley, and then “Hi Mum”. So, by this time the look on her face was – anybody can make one mistake, but two!

Int : So you explained to her?

Susan: Yes, I had no choice.

Int: At your graduation, two children appeared.

Susan: Yes, with the rest of my class.

Int: Nobody knew it, and they said, “Who are these”, and you said, “My children”. (Susan deliberately chose not to tell her lecturers and classmates during her course that she had children as she did not want any special concessions).

Susan: As if, you know, they had to be washed up.

Rita McNeill – Integration

Rita explains why she got a job in a bank despite her lack of knowledge of Scottish banking. She describes how she first met her dear husband through a Christian Youth Centre and their very romantic first encounter. She also explains how she finally discovered her mother’s fate.

INT: So tell me about your education. Did you stay on at school? Did you go to university? What happened?

RM: No I didn’t. No I wasn’t academic at all. I wasn’t very clever at all; I didn’t study, as I should have done.

INT: I’m sure the whole trauma of your experience would have made it more difficult to do that.

RM: It was very difficult, very difficult.

INT: So what did you do then when you left school?

RM: I worked in a bank. One of my friends said, “You should write a letter and ask if you can work in the bank” because the people I was staying with were not very wealthy and I felt I was there and they were looking after me. I wanted to go and get a job and they said, “Well why don’t you write to the bank?” because this friend of mine worked in the bank. So I wrote a letter and said, “Could I have a job with you?” So I had a letter back from them, from the manager, saying, “Why do you want to work? How old are you?” I told him and he said, “Why do you want to work?” I said, ‘I want, I need some money; I need to work and help this family that I’m living with.”

So I was asked to be interviewed and they sent me a letter to go to the bank. Well I thought there was one bank in Scotland; I didn’t know all the different banks. I went to the Clydesdale Bank on Buchanan Street with this letter and they said, “Oh no you’ll need to go…it’s the Bank of Scotland up in George Square”. So I went up there and the manager was very kind, and interviewed me and he said, “Why do you want the job?” “Because I need money. I am staying with these people and I feel that I want to pay them somehow. [The manager said] “It’s 17/6 a week.” So he said “Well, we’ll give you a job”. So I started there in the bank and I was there for…until I was married.

INT: And how did you meet your husband?

RM: Again that was through a Christian Youth Centre. The C.Y.C it was called, the Christian Youth Centre. And we went to Bothwell Castle, an outing, and I was ‘out’; we were playing rounders and I was ‘out’. And I was standing, short hair and ankle socks and my husband passed and he said to his friend, “See that girl? I’m going to marry her.”

INT: Really? Oh that’s…

RM: Didn’t know me, had never spoken to me.

INT: …that’s very romantic.

RM: So he did, he did, he married me and…. we had 61 happy years.

INT: Oh that was, that was…

INT: And did you know once you met him that you were going to marry him?

RM: No I didn’t, no.

INT: He was more certain.

RM: He didn’t tell me.

INT: That’s amazing. And did you stop working once you got married?

RM: Yes. Once I was married I had to stop because he was in practice then and he needed me to answer the telephone, so I was his receptionist for a while.

INT: And you had a family?

RM: I had a boy and a girl, girl first and then a boy.

INT: And what was your husband’s medical specialty?

RM: Ear, Nose, and Throat.

INT: Right, right. And by that time you said you discovered, you realised, that your mother wasn’t coming back. Was that because somebody told you or because you faced that reality?

RM: No I had a little booklet, which said that they were sent to Riga. They had to walk to Riga and she didn’t make it, and if they fell, I think they shot them. So she was buried in Riga in a mass grave.

INT: And who sent you the booklet? How did you find that out?

RM: It was a little booklet; I don’t know where it came from. It told me that my mother had gone.

INT: That must have been a terrible shock to you.

RM: It was awful.

INT: And your husband knew that you’d come from Germany and your background?

RM: He knew, he knew and his mother wasn’t very happy about him being interested in a refugee girl. That was difficult for a wee while but she soon got to know me and love me and she said, “I know…” – once we were married – “…”I know he’ll always have a clean shirt”.

INT: You can’t take the German out of a German can you?

RM: No.

Renate Mackay – Integration

Renate talks about her career in nursing. She describes the coincidences that led to her meeting her first husband, Fred Goldschmidt.

INT: And at the end of school you decided to become a nurse, am I right in saying?

RM: Yes, well, my older brother, who had gone to University at a time when a lot of the ex-soldiers were coming back, anyway, for some reason or other what he wanted to study was engineering and you didn’t do that in St Andrews, it was in Dundee. And he spent most of the time on the train playing cards and so on so he didn’t do very well and my father was bitterly disappointed.

I wanted to be a nurse but my father said, nurses didn’t have a good reputation, in a way and he said, “No, no, no if you are interested in medicine you must study to be a doctor,” and I was actually very lazy and hated exams and I knew… five years… I’d met enough medical students by this time. Anyway, one of my teachers, luckily, said to me, “If you want to be a nurse you have to go to the Florence Nightingale Training School in London” [at St Thomas’ Hospital].

And strangely enough the daughter of the minister of the town church, who was head girl at St Leonards, she went to St. Thomas’. So, anyway, my father wrote to the Matron of St. Thomas’ and signed himself Erwin Finlay Freundlich. The double barrel seemed to have worked and so I was invited to St Thomas; I was enrolled, and everybody said afterwards it was quite an honour to be accepted.

INT: And by that time did you feel yourself as having properly integrated into Britain or did you still feel…?

RM: Oh no I still felt very European.

INT: Did you?

RM: Yes.

INT: Did you find people were more willing to befriend you by this time? Local people?

RM: No, I think, sadly…my mother didn’t settle well and my father, I think, didn’t, although the University was good in many ways, to him.

When he became sixty-five he was in the middle of a research project which he wanted to finish so they allowed him to stay on until he was 70. but as he also had gone to Germany to see what relatives were left and found a brother and several nieces, and, with restitution, he decided to go back to Germany in 1958, much to Fred’s, to my husband’s, chagrin.

INT: Yes so you studied Nursing in St Thomas’?

RM: No. I didn’t.

INT: You didn’t?

RM: I was too young, unfortunately. The Matron accepted me but said – I think then I was sixteen and a half when I went for the interview – and she said, “No go to the Edinburgh School / College of Domestic Science where they have a pre-nursing course, which will get you through the first two exams” – the hygiene…anatomy, physiology, hygiene, dietetics.

But unfortunately the pre-nursing course first of all had a year of domestic science, where my father said all I learned was how to peel potatoes with mathematical precision. Or.. Did you know you should sweep a room from the window to the door? Oh and how to engage and dismiss a maid.

INT: Very useful.

RM: So we all, all of the ones that were on this [course], the pre-nursing ones, we all decided at the end of the first year we would just go and find ourselves another job and somebody in my class at school in St Andrews had gone to the City Fever Hospital. So she was a year ahead of me, so I just followed in her footsteps and did fever nursing.

INT : At Edinburgh City Hospital. And then how did you meet your husband?

RM: Ha! That’s another long story. Yes, all right, my father came from St Andrews to Glasgow as an external examiner and at the University had met a very nice man called Doctor Ornstein. I think, I can’t remember exactly what he was… I know he was in product engineering., but anyway, anyway.

One evening, the Goldschmidt family consisting of my [future] father-in-law, mother-in-law and sister-in-law, Liesl were on their way home from the factory they had established between Gallowgate and London Road just past Glasgow Cross. They were going home to Thornliebank and, however, they had borrowed a book… (The German Jews that came to Glasgow tended to congregate together, right?) And they sent Liesl upstairs to the Ornsteins to return the book and Liesl was an awfully long time coming back. So when she got back in the car she said the Ornsteins have the most fascinating visitor, so when my mother-in-law got home she phoned Mrs Ornstein and said, the next time you have this fascinating visitor please invite us as well.

RM: Fred, would be four years older than me, also, was away studying already in Leicester. When he came out of college he was full of ideas but his mother wouldn’t sort of, you know, let him bring these into the factory so Fred, disillusioned, went off to Canada for a while, where he was going to start his own little business but then his father died so he came back. Right. Oh at Liesl’s wedding my parents met another German Jewish family called Pauson anddiscovered they also had paintings by Lyonel Feininger, a quite well known…[artist]

INT: So you met your husband and…

RM: No, no it was through the Pausons that I met Fred. right?

INT: Ah, right.

RM: I’ll try and be very, very quick, OK?

At the wedding they met the Pausons and they said, “Come and see our paintings”. So one of the days when I came home to St Andrews on nights off or something, the Pausons were just leaving, getting on the train. (Oh my father was going to America to see another observatory, Mount Wilson, goodness knows what they had… yet a bigger telescope?) And so they said, “When your parents are away and you have nights off come and stay with us”. And that suited me very well because I had met another medical student. However, the long and short and tall was the first time I arrived Mrs Pauson said “You must go to bed because Fred Goldschmidt is coming to take you to the concert tonight and he’s just come back [from Canada). He’s living with his mum and he doesn’t know any nice Jewish girls”.

INT: Lovely and they…

RM: I said, “No, no, no I’m going out. I’m meeting Ian, the medical student, for tea” at theCa’ D’Oro. However, when Fred… Oh yes, apparently when Mrs Pauson phoned Fred, who was a dutiful son, he said, “All right I’ll take her to the concert on Saturday but I’m busy all day Sunday”. So anyway, when he came, actually I just fell for him straight away and at the concert we turned to each other and said exactly the same thing, and anyway, that was how I met Fred.

INT: That’s very nice

Lore Lucas – Integration

INT: I’m asking about your social life when you were in London?

LL: Yes, it was very pleasant.

INT: Mainly Jewish? Or non-Jewish?

LL: Mostly Jewish, there was the odd non-Jewish one. I wasn’t selective but it happened to be.

INT: So what kind of things did you do?

LL: We mainly went to each others’ houses. We went to the pictures. I mean, money was short with everybody and heating was expensive and everything. We lived a normal life, not like teenagers live now. We didn’t buy clothes or anything, which we didn’t need because you could bring a lot out of Germany. That was one thing you had, that was clothes. So shopping didn’t come into it.

INT: So your, your parents were in Germany?

LL: My parents by that time were already in a camp. They emigrated from Germany to Holland and they were taken to camps from Holland.

INT: Ok we’ll maybe go back over that later. I want to continue with life in London. So, you worked

LL: Yes

INT: In this one job

LL: Yes

INT: Really for a good 5 or 6 years

LL: Yes, yes until ‘46

INT: And you were living..?

LL: And I lived together with my aunt in a flat which we had rented. We had no real… the landlord didn’t live in the house so we had the top floor

Karola Regent – Integration

INT: So when you were evacuated, did you all stay in a big school together or did you stay with people?

KR: No, we were, my whole class were loaded into a lorry and …

PR: You went by train and then lorry.

KR: Pardon?

PR: You went by train and then from the station, is that right?

KR: No, into a lorry and then the lorry stopped in the street and people came to select, they had to take evacuees you see and selected the evacuees and quite a lot of people wanted my sister who was a very neat little thing, but my father had said you must not allow yourselves to be separated. So I always said no, we are together [laughter].

INT: You get one and you get to take the other too.

INT: So did you eventually persuade somebody to take the set?

KE: Well, eventually we were still left and a nice young girl said a woman couldn’t come, but she asked me to find her some evacuees and so she really wanted one, but I said well, so she took both of us. And then she was all right, but then we were delivered to our so-called foster parents and they thought we were, he examined us as though we were Germans in disguise and …

INT: Well, you were German, I suppose [laughter].

KR: Yes, we were kind of and they were horrible, they were really horrible.

INT: Because you were German?

KR: Yes and they really only wanted one, but the girl had brought us both, so it was a single bed and it was impossible to both lie on the same side, so one slept top and one bottom. But we had to change quickly in the mornings before they came in because they didn’t allow that and then when the air raid came they used to take Lotte who was still, you know, younger, into bed with them and I had to stand against the wall during the air raid.

INT: How much younger was she than you?

KR: Three and a half years.

INT: You must have felt a bit angry about that I would imagine?

KR: Oh, I was furious yes, but I mean, what could I do?

PR: Didn’t he command you to pray?

KR: Oh yes.

INT: Was that the way to protect yourself then?

KR: Presumably.

INT: And did they know you were Jewish as well as German?

KR: I can’t remember, yes, well, I don’t know, I can’t remember that.

PR: It certainly didn’t

KR: It didn’t matter, no.

PR: I think they fed you sausages and [laughter].

KR: Oh, God, yes. The dripping toast we used to get in the morning, fried toast.

INT: You’d never seen anything like that I suppose in Germany?

KR: And some funny sausages, which I hated and I used to put them in my knickers with the elastic and used to put them in there and then get rid of it.

INT: So how long did you live there, do you remember?

KR: How

INT: How long were you there for?

KR: Well, wait a minute now. Well, we didn’t, no, we didn’t stay with that family long because I went to the headmistress and said and complained, you know.

INT: Good for you.

KR: She was very good, she was a very good headmistress.

PR: You also took Lotte to the doctor I think?

KR: Oh, yes, that’s right. She had a terrible cough and this woman sent her to school, she wouldn’t let her stay in bed or anything. So I, I got into trouble for it, but I skipped school and instead took her to the doctor who was amazed to see two little girls come to see him, you know. But he was very good and he said that she has to stay in bed, so the woman was very cross with me for having taken her to the doctor, but she had to do that. Oh yes, and all this sort of tension, excitement, I started wetting my pants and then I used to lock myself in the bathroom and wash them and they were these awful pants in those days, all woolly hard to dry. And she used to bang on the door, [shouting] What are you doing? What are you doing? as though I was planning some underground escape or something.

INT: And did you get away quite soon from this family? What happened, were you sent back to London?

KR: Yeah, we told the headmistress, I told the headmistress and then an awfully nice lady came to see us and saw to it that we were moved and then we came to the doctor’s family, the Salmons who become really a second home. I had a big garden, a big house and the daughter was grown up and the mother said.., Oh yes, she’d had to escape from Spain or something where she had her fiancé and she was at loose ends. So the mother said then, ‘…okay you look after them’, so she did and we had a very, very nice time. I mean they were very good and there was a maid who I think resented having the extra work.

INT: Were you then sent back to your aunt and uncle in London during the war or did you spend the whole of the war as an evacuee?

KR: Yes, as an evacuee.

INT: Right.

KR: In the meantime my uncle died and we never went there to live again.

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