Gathering The Voices Scotland

Testimonies of Holocaust survivors who settled in Scotland

You are here: Home / Archives for Life Before The War

Life Before The War

Sonja Hancox – Life Before The War

Sonja talks about her family and the changes that she noticed once the Nazis came to power. She describes life in Germany before they became refugees.

INT: Today is the 24th of July 2013 and I’m here to interview Sonja Hancox. Sonja, could you tell me first when and where you were born and what was your name at birth? When were you born? And what was your name at birth?

M (Sonja’s daughter): Sonja Regina…

SH: My name is Sonja Regina Hancox.

SH: At birth…

M: Sonja Regina Goldman.

SH: Yes, I suppose so.

INT: What year were you born?

SH: 1925, 12th of November.

INT: Could you tell us a little of what you remember of your early years? Where were you? Where were you living?

SH: Not very beautiful surroundings. My mother married somebody in Czechoslovakia whom she met and they fell in love and I was conceived, at least, there. They soon found out they were most unsuitable. They went to Germany and wanted to divorce but the German government wouldn’t give them a divorce. By German law they weren’t married. So by German law they had to get married again before they could get a divorce. So I’m telling you that this is not a sort of ‘clean living’.

INT: No, not a simple story.

SH: No. Now my father had a cigar works in Westphalia, and cigarettes and tobacco and so forth, and he sent to my mother in Berlin to sell because she didn’t want to go back to the country. She wanted to stay in Berlin where she had been a nurse in her uncle’s hospital. So I was born, somewhere not very beautiful, in Berlin among tobacco etc… So I remember nothing at all about this but I know that they got divorced because I’ve got their divorce papers. And my mother went into business in a bigger way and even set up my father because he wasn’t very business like.

INT: Even after he was divorced from her?

SH: Oh yes, oh yes, I mean they had a child…

INT: Of course.

SH: And they might not have liked each other but they both fought over me. Now, what else can I tell you about that time? I used to visit him, go away with him at the weekend, and my mother worked very hard. That’s full stop at the moment, I don’t know where you want to go.

INT: Were her parents still alive? Were they in Berlin as well?

SH: Her parents?

INT: Yes.

SH: No. My grandfather was alive and my grandmother died and he married again. She was a second wife.

INT: So in the 1930s you were living with your mother in Berlin?

SH: Well in the 1930s, I was at boarding school.

SH: Just outside Berlin, can’t think of the name of it.

INT: It doesn’t matter. And when did you…? Because you must have been aware you were about 10…

SH: Oh sure

INT: When the Nazis came to power, did that affect you?

SH: Oh yes.

INT: Did you notice changes?

SH: Oh yes indeed.

INT: In what way?

SH: Well first of all we heard. We were on… my mother and I were on a rowing boat and we heard the announcement that Hitler was now our leader and that we should all be very pleased about that.

INT: And was you mother aware that things were going to be difficult?

SH: My mother was…my mother was politically active in Berlin. She was, I don’t know quite, but she certainly didn’t welcome Hitler in. And one of her cousins, who I was named after;

SH: Regina Rubin was a friend of the political…who was the political leader? [Rosa Luxemburg]

SH: in the late ‘20s.

SH: Yes, and my mother was neither religious nor politically correct, nor anything else. She, she was a sort of merry widow, and they had, what would have been called, ‘the salon’ with her cousin. [Her cousin was Else Kohbieter]. And they had a very good time. They knew all the actors and writers in Berlin…and life for her was very good.

INT: What was she doing?

SH: She had started a dry cleaning and… Aren’t you allowed your elbows up there? Dry cleaning, remaking old clothes, because the people were quite poor, but in the 30s they got richer.

INT: Right.

SH: And she was making quite a lot of money. In this, by this time she had three shops.

INT: I see.

SH: And things looked up for her. And their lifestyle was very nice.

SH: Something that happened, that I found most, most interesting, was that all the people who had been the pukka lawyers, teachers, professors and everything else lost their jobs immediately and lost their income immediately.

INT: Back in Germany?

SH: Yes. Yes, so on Saturday and Sunday we used to have open house and they all came in, either with their shoe cleaning stuff or their cookery, or they did my mother’s hair or feet or something or other. And it was a totally open day and they exchanged things and they sold things and my mother bought what she could because she had money you see. This was still in Berlin.

INT: But her business, I assume that her business was taken over by the Nazis in the end?

SH: Yes but none of this was terribly obvious. You know the shops were open. You see, when you have a dry cleaning and remaking thing, it goes on. And people were asked not to go into the shops but they got coats and hats and everything in there so I have no idea of how it just went on.

INT: So she, she must have managed.

SH: Yes she had managers in the shops.

INT: That’s prior to ’39?

SH: And that was quite a fascinating bit – that they all came to the house and…

M: You said Mutti used to feed them?

SH: Oh yes, oh yes. I mean there was food all day and all night.

INT: Was there? That is very interesting and she must have been quite unusual that she was still making money when they had lost their, their livelihoods.

SH: Oh she was, and you see she had, she earned money while they earned nothing. And it was unusual.

INT: It must have been.

SH: Very unusual.

INT: But then everything, I assume, changed once Hitler did become Chancellor?

SH: No.

INT: No?

SH: She had been married to a Pole and that… She always had a Polish flag in the back of her car and a Jewish car number on the back of her car, you see.

INT: Were there Jewish car numbers?

SH: Oh yes. Everything over 350, I think, then the number, was a Jewish car number but she also had a Polish flag in her car.

INT: That was quite provocative then at the time?

SH: Oh yes she was very provocative. And she got into trouble with the police quite often. And, the one time when she really fell out with me, the police had picked her up in the night and I never woke up. And she thought that was…

INT: Selfish?

SH: Really not, not the thing to do. Anyway, we got along very well and I got into the theatre and the cinema late at night, you know sort of, she took me along everywhere. And we enjoyed life and she didn’t want to leave Germany because she thought somebody would kill him [Hitler], but nobody did, you know.

INT: So, what happened? What, what forced you out of Germany? And when did you leave?

SH: Well our passports were coming to an end. I think it was the end of June, 1939, our Polish passports came up. And just before then was Kristallnacht, and they made rather a mess of the synagogues and they picked up my father and put him on a train. And they put them [Polish Jews who were expelled from Germany] between two stations, one German station and one Polish station and left the train there.

And if you had money you could make your own decisions, [i.e. the family had to pay to get him back] and if you had none, heaven help you.

INT: And was he able to escape? Was he left in no man’s land or…?

SH: He was left in no man’s land but he was quite an attractive looking man and he had met some woman who worked for the Thai embassy and she got him a passport or a visa or something and he was allowed back to Berlin for two days, or one day, two days but no longer. And he chartered a plane, I’ve got a photograph of it, he chartered a plane and took her, this woman; I don’t know whether she was Jewish or what she was, to take her, her mother, her son and somebody else… and they all flew off to Thailand. I don’t know where they changed petrol or whatever, I have no idea. I saw them off and it was a tiny little plane with about four seats or something. And it took all his money.

INT: I’m sure it did.

SH: You know, especially when, when everybody wanted to grab a bit of it. But they flew off and I went to the aerodrome and saw them off. My mother didn’t go.

INT: What were you on your birth certificate? Polish or…?

SH: I was Polish. I was never German. I was Polish till the last day there but it was going to be all gone. We made good use of it but it was no use after that.

INT: Sorry what was no use?

SH: My Polish passport.

INT: Oh your passport. So how did you get out, what happened?

SH: Now let me see… Eat some more raspberries, go on…

INT: Thank you

SH: If we’re not allowed tea yet, we must have raspberries. Now I’ll tell you we had to leave by the day the passport was up and we arrived in our car with our Polish flag in the back, at Hamburg, to get on a boat and unfortunately my mother, who was a bit skittish about facts, had packed her passport and her travel documents in one of these big trunks, you know. And we had the most delightful captain on this boat – a little, not a very big one, from Hamburg to London. And he let us just tip them up on deck and he said he would take us to Hull, where he was going, but if we couldn’t find them he’d have to bring us back to Germany.

INT: Oh.

SH: So we made good use of the time to look for the passports and of course they were wrapped with the writing paper and so forth.

INT: That must have been terrifying?

SH: Oh I mean I was terrified of my mother, and for my mother, because I felt so responsible for her. She was, she was a delightful woman, and everybody loved her, but she was totally irresponsible.

INT: Dear me.

SH: Did you have a good mother?

INT: Yes she was very responsible but luckily we were never tested as you were. Did your mother know where she was going in London? Once you arrived did you have somewhere to go?

SH: Yes we did know. It started… She was in a private school in Germany and there was an English woman, I can’t remember her name, and she worked for some refugee organisation and… Have a raspberry…

SH: And she said she would find my mother a job and my mother found a job in a big house, an enormous house, ‘behind the kitchen door’, you know.

INT: As a maid?

Marianne Grant – Life Before the War

INT: Today is 25th of November 2015, and I’m here to speak with Geraldine Shenkin, who is going to tell me a little about her mother, Mrs Marianne Grant.

Geraldine describes her mother’s background in Czechoslovakia by reading from Marianne Grant’s autobiography. She goes on to talk about her mother’s great love for drawing and painting.

Geraldine, we want to begin by reading a little from your mother’s own story and in her own words.

GS: This is from her book.  She made a book called, “I Knew I Was Painting For My Life” which includes the Holocaust art works, by my mum, Marianne Grant.  She starts by saying her story.

“My name is Marianne Grant, nee Herman, nicknamed Mousie, from Prague, that’s in Czechoslovakia [Czech Republic].  My father came from a small village, Czirima, near Szadek in the Sudetenland, North Bohemia.  He was the son of hop farmers from a family of ten children.  From the age of eight he lodged with a cantor in Prague in order to get a proper education.  He became the foreign exchange manager of the Bohemian Union Bank in Prague.  He met my mother, the youngest of three sisters, when he was sent to a branch in Bielsko, which after the First World War became part of Poland.  She was the daughter of a cantor, Maurice Rosner, and his wife Cecilia from Moravia.  My mother, Anna, was a milliner and she married my father, in 1920.  They settled in Prague, and I was born in September 1921.

We lived in the centre of the town in a small flat for seven or eight years, then we moved to new flats built by the bank for their employees, near vast beautiful parks”.

INT: And, I gather from what you’ve read, that your mother had quite an easy life, before the war changed everything.

GS: Yes…she went to a primary school and after, when she went on to girls’ high school, she was sent to a private English grammar school.  And then later on after much persuasion by her father’s three sisters and her mother, her father relented and gave his permission for her to attend the famous Rote Schule of fashion and graphic design in Prague.

INT: So, your mother was always interested in drawing and art?

GS: She loved drawing, in her spare time, loved to do little sketches all the way through her childhood and in her teenage days with children, wherever she went, she liked to draw and she loved nature study.  All lovely things she liked to draw or paint.

INT: And why was her father not keen on her doing this, at first anyway; do you know?

GS: I’m not really very sure to be honest, why. He probably wanted her to go down a more educational route. I think she was pretty bright. She spoke six languages fluently later in life and he probably thought that she could do something, maybe become a lawyer or a doctor and not go into the art world.

Edith Forrester – Life Before The War

Edith describes her family background and how she felt when her mother told her she was leaving Germany. She explains that she was too young to realise that her parents were not coming with her. She tells the interviewer about the Gestapo’s visit to her home. She then speaks about the fate of her Jewish mother and her Christian father.

INT: Good afternoon. Today is the 6th of March 2014 and I’m here to interview Miss Edith Forrester. Good afternoon.

EF: Good afternoon Claire.

INT: Edith, could you begin by telling me when you were born?

EF: Yes I was born in Nordhausen in Harz, in Germany.

INT: And in what year was that?

EF: 1931.

INT: And what was your name at birth?

EF: Edith Twelkemeyer.

INT: Now can you tell us a little about your family life before you came here?

EF: Yes. I had been going to a school, a non-Jewish school, and I had a little girlfriend called Gretchen. We used to go to school together and whenever she discovered I was Jewish she stopped coming for me. That was a heartbreak for me but I had a wonderful teacher called Herr Krieghof and I can remember very vividly my mother saying that we were going away. I thought, ‘Oh good, a holiday!’ So we went shopping, I think in Hamburg, and visited friends and then one day my mother took me up to school to see Herr Krieghof and she was telling him that I would be going away, but I didn’t hear, just that I was just going myself, in my mind we were going as a family. And to my amazement I saw tears in Herr Krieghof’s eyes and I’d never seen a teacher with tears in his eyes and then he bent down and gave me a hug.

And I was so overcome by this and I thought, ‘Why did he do that?’ You know? So these moments have come back to me again and again because I was happy at school and I played with other children and…But I can remember when the name-calling started because they started calling, ‘Jüdin!’ ‘Jüdin!’ when they discovered at school. And of course I asked what that meant, you know, and so on and my mother just said, ‘Oh don’t worry about that. That’s not anything to hurt you or anything.’ But I also remember very clearly each morning at school we had to stand in lines in the playground and of course the German flag was raised and then at the end we had to say, ‘Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil!’ and put your hand out and I felt just cold shivers going down my spine because, you know, we had many, many Jewish friends that came in to the house and they were all so demonstrative and loving and everything.

And I can remember my mother was making felt flowers and she had a whole group of ladies who came to do this but what I didn’t know at the time was they were really learning English together and in case the Gestapo came, they were making flowers and when I arrived I had one of these felt flowers in my coat and…yes, the Gestapo eventually came. And first of all they went upstairs to the top flat, took away the Jewish owner and he was never heard again, of again. And then the next flat it was all Jewish people and they were taken away, as well, and then they came to me and I can remember it was night time, seemed to me in the middle of the night, but one of them was very rough and my grandmother was in the next room.

I had a bed with the maid, Annalise, and they pulled my grandmother out of bed and she was actually known to be at that time dying of cancer and she was standing in a white nightdress with her hands clasped and praying, you know, and that has never, ever left me because I adored my grandmother. My father had his own business and my mother was in charge of the office so it was really, Annalise, the maid, and my Omi [grandmother] who were important to me. So whenever I came home from Kindergarten and school it was always Omi I ran to or Annalise and… you know. So…

INT: Was that in 1938?

EF: 1938 yes, yes, 1938 that was, yes.

INT: And did they take your grandmother away or…?

EF: No, no, they took my father away. But my father, being non-Jewish, he of course was able to come back two or three days later and, you know, we were relieved at that. But by this time, names were being sewn on things, my little nametags and everything on what I was going to take with me and it was just … preparing for a journey.

INT: And were you aware that you were Jewish before any of this happened? No?

EF: No, no. These were lovely Jewish people that came and I loved them but being Jewish was never something that was discussed – you know, you are a Jewish child and you must do this and you must do that. At Christmas time I went one year to my father’s relatives in Gütersloh and the next year I would go to Berlin to be with my Jewish Omi’s sister and family.

So it was the best of both worlds but a child accepts these things very much more and it’s only now when I think back that I think how could I not have guessed that things were not the way it should have been, you know?

INT: Your parents must have been good at protecting you.

EF: Yes very much so. And, you know, the agony of my father seeing us off, you know, to the station that morning to get to the train and it still didn’t dawn on me. Dad would be coming… “Papa, wann kommst du ja?” [When are you coming?] so to speak. “später, später, ja…” [later later, yes…] And then of course we got to the railway station and all the SS were lined up and we were standing there with the parents and then they told us to come forward and my mother was allowed to come and help me up, and the steps on a German train are very high, and lifted me up and then the door was closed.

I could not believe that my mother was not with me. Couldn’t believe it! And there were…standing in the corridor…I mean the train was packed full of only children and then suddenly the train started and I can remember screaming, “Mutti! Mutti!” [Mother! Mother!] And somebody lifted me up and pushed people aside so I could see out of a window and my last memory of my mother was she was frantically looking to see if she could see me and I saw her but she never saw me, these last minutes. But it was a terrible, painful, painful thing, you know.

INT: Do you know how they were able to get you on to the Kindertransport? Did you ever find out how they achieved that?

EF: No, no idea at all, no. But God meant it and that is, that is what it was.

INT: And what happened to your mother afterwards? Did you find out?

EF: Yes she was taken to a munitions factory and she… my father had to divorce her. He didn’t want to divorce her but she said, “It will be better for your safety and I will go”. So she agreed to that and she didn’t see him again. But it has been emphasised again and again by both sides of the family that my father wanted to stay with my mother and she would not allow it, so her child was going to be safe. And I think she had hoped she would get to Britain as a domestic because that was the only way they could get there, to be in service, but she never made it, so that is…that is it. In the records it said that she died of pneumonia but my cousin Kurt gave me that information.

He can’t do anything else now; he’s really my mother’s cousin but he was twelve years younger than my mother and he’s about twelve/thirteen years older than me and he lives continually now in the past, you know. And he filled me in with a lot of information. He saw my father, when he went back as a GI. He escaped from [Germany]…now he…I think he…yes, his parents died in Auschwitz but his grandmother died in Theresienstadt and he had a letter applying to get out to America and he doubled the letter over and they thought it meant that he’d got permission to get out. And he said “Raus” [out of here]. And he escaped and he went to America to New York, to our family doctor, Johnny Stern, who delivered both of us and, you know, it was amazing. And from there he settled and became an American citizen.

INT: And your father, did he spend the rest of his life in Germany?

EF: Yes he did, yes, yes. So…yes.

Walter Gumprich – Life Before The War

Walter speaks about his birth in 1933 and his family. He describes how his Mother missed out on being an Olympian because she was Jewish.

INT: The date is the sixth of June 2014 we are talking to -WG: Walter Gumprich

INT: And when were you born?WG: The 1st of March 1933

INT: And where were you born?

WG: In Münster Westphalia, 15km from the Dutch border

INT: Tell us about your family

WG: Well, father, mother, sister one year older than me. She was born on the 25th of January, if that strikes a bell with anyone in Scotland?

INT: Burns Night?

WG: Yes and you want to know when I was born? I was born on the 1st of March, which is also an interesting date in Britain because that happened to be St David’s Day, the patron saint of Wales. So when I was at school and they asked me, ‘What’s your name’ and I said ‘Walter Gumprich’ and they said ‘don’t you have a middle name?’ and I said ‘no I don’t have a middle name’.

They said ‘well you have a middle name; you just don’t know what it is. Go home; ask your mother’. When I asked my mother what my middle name was she said, ‘You don’t have a middle name.’ So I figured if there’s one thing worse than having my teacher think my mother is stupid or too stupid to give me a middle name. So finally on the way to school, I thought, ‘Well my Hebrew name is David Ben Shlomo after my grandfather.

So when I got to school the teacher asked me and I said, ‘Yes, I have a middle name’. She said, ‘What is it?’ I said, ‘It’s David’. She said, ‘Oh I should have known, because you were born on St David’s day’ so I went home to my parents and asked if that was reason I was named…so that’s why I was named Walter David Gumprich.

INT: Did you have any brothers and sisters?

WG: One sister, one year older than me.

INT: What was she called?

WG: Brigitta, which became Bridget and my name was Walter all the time anyway. And she’s lived in Israel all her married life, since 1953. She is Gita.

INT: And what did your family do?

WG: Well my father was a grain merchant and imported grains and that’s why I was familiar with the Winnipeg Grain Exchange. Well, I’d heard of it after, not while I was in Germany, and it distributed in Westphalia, Rhineland and parts of Germany

INT: And did you go to school in Germany?

WG: No I didn’t because when I was due to go to school it was too dangerous to go to school. My sister got into school the year before but she didn’t go to school the year that I was due to start either.

INT: What happened in 1933 to your family?

WG: Well, of course, the outstanding result was that I was born – obviously the highlight of the year! But also the fact was that on 29th or 28th March was when Germany became a dictatorship and at that time things changed drastically and a lot of Jews realised that if this happened then life would become untenable because the party that came to power, took power, had outlined a programme of anti-Semitism that was quite extreme.

It was so extreme, it was unbelievable but it rapidly became known that it was believable because laws suddenly passed.

Jews that were born weren’t made Staat-Burgershaft, given citizenship, so I was one of ‘fortunate’ ones who wasn’t given citizenship, German citizenship, and so I was essentially stateless until 1948 when German Jews in Britain were allowed to apply for British citizenship and my parents did, and your parents probably did as well I’m sure, and became British subjects and citizens and so that was the first and so then all sorts of things happened.

My father, I think it was a couple of years after that, about 1936-37, but the idea was to isolate Jews so Jews weren’t allowed to do business

and non-Jews that did business with Jews were listed and publicised so Germans wouldn’t want to do business with them so it was completely impossible for Jews to do business with non-Jews and since the farming public were almost entirely non-Jewish, my father was basically out of business and so for the years for sure 1937/38 he did absolutely no business at all. He at least tried to leave and in fact one of his business associates left for Chile and that was how we eventually got business papers to emigrate to Chile.

INT: And how long did that take?

WG: I don’t know how long from when my father first applied because I wasn’t privy to that information – I was six years old when we left…I was born in 1933.

INT: Did you go to school?

WG: No. No. I didn’t; it was too dangerous to go to school.

Walter’s mother, the athlete, and the ‘sale’ of her sports car

 

So my mother… it was 1936, I believe, that Jews had to sell their cars for one Mark. That was legal tender.

So my mother two weeks before, she had a nice BMW that’s still made, Three Series. It was first made in 1936 and that’s when she got it. My father bought it for her.

So she went to the citizen police chief who she went to school with and knew personally and said the police force were going to get this car and it was a nice car. And he didn’t have enough seniority to get it probably so my mother said, ‘You can have it right now on one condition: – that when you’re at work [I can drive it’], and the police station was only two blocks up the road on Grevener Strasse where we lived. And you can have it right now.

So he said fine. It helped him a little bit because he felt a little better because at least he’d be given it, even though, you know, it was still stealing but nevertheless my mother had the use of her car.

My mother had a ‘Sportabzeichen’ [German Sports Badge], (which was a precursor to the Olympic sports’ medal that’s usually just for professional athletes but my mother was an athlete and it was engraved and she made a point of wearing it.

She was driving the car in downtown Münster and she was stopped by a Nazi, who came out from the pavement. ‘Stop the car!’ He approached the car and my mother pre-empted and said, ‘What do you want?’ and he looked at my mother and he saw the Sportabzeichen and he said, ‘Oh I’m sorry. I made a mistake’.

So my mother looks to side and she saw hidden in the doorway a local Nazi who had told this guy, ‘She’s a Jew. Stop her! She’s illegally driving a car.’ But when this Nazi saw the Sportabzeichen, well, he said, ‘Every German knows that Jews aren’t athletes and haven’t a Sportabzeichen. You’re eligible for the Olympics so you can’t be Jewish’. He apologised profusely and let my mother go.

Well these are some of the things, so you’re wondering – if a Jew could walk downtown he would never know when he would be accosted and told, ‘You’re doing something wrong. You’re doing this wrong’ and they had no rights in the law at all. They just had no legal rights in Germany, period, being Jewish, you know.

INT:Can I ask what type of athlete she was?

WG: Decathlon, so she did swimming, high jump, cycling, long jump and sprinting. It was a mixture.

INT:And was she in the Olympics?

WG: No! She was Jewish! What do you want?

INT: So she wasn’t allowed?

WG: Okay, so she was a member of Preussischer Sport Club in Germany. In, I don’t know if it was 33 or 34, the government said, fine –

‘If you want to compete in athletics in any national events, receive any funding or anything at all, you are not allowed to have any Jewish members’.

So what are the Jewish members supposed to do?

INT:They formed their own clubs?

WG: Right, what could they do? In fact, my mother and father did form a Münster club but it was just for Jews so you had no competition of any consequence.

INT:So your mum is feeling pressure and your father’s feeling pressure and they’ve got the papers to go to Chile…

Walter describes the arrest and imprisonment of his father

 

WG: Not yet, so my father was interned and then in Münster prison

INT:  Is this after Kristallnacht?

WG: Yes Kristallnacht was November 1938. We are now in August of ‘39

INT:  So they were arrested in Kristallnacht?

120

WG: No, my Dad was arrested in early August of ‘39 and, you see my father had an Iron Cross 1st Class, 1916. In 1916 it was still worthwhile getting an Iron Cross 1st Class. At the end of the war, basically if you survived the war, you were given an Iron Cross.

My father made a point of it wherever he went. He wore it and that was respected. They couldn’t just throw everything out. You couldn’t just say that Jews were given a different Iron Cross from regular guys, you know.

So that’s maybe a reason that he used to get around town and he was fairly well known in town.

130

Anyway, my Dad’s in prison as I mentioned before. Periodically the SS would come and see if the prison was full, in which case they would take a load of men to the concentration camps so the German police used to say, ‘Oh no, there’s lots of room’ though the prisons were absolutely crammed.

The reason they did that was because the police knew very that going to concentration camp was not a good idea, was not a healthy situation, but there were people dying also of diseases and what not and there weren’t just Jews at that point, there were also political prisoners who were in there.

140

Willy Brandt, who became Mayor of Berlin, escaped, because he was a Socialist, to Norway. Now he didn’t go just for the sheer hell and delight, he went because it was dangerous to stay in Germany and he left well before 1939. My father had initiated getting the papers to Chile through a friend of his who was there already and my mother finalised this when she came to prison with the papers.

Click to view other testimonies from Walter Gumprich

Suzanne Ullman – Life Before The War

INT: Good morning Suzanne, today is the 31st may 2013 and we are here to interview Suzanne Ullmann, and generally what we do is we ask what your name is at birth and where you where born.

SU : I was born in Budapest in 1935, 8th of December and my name….Hungarian name is Ullmann Zsuzsanna Louisa, Susan Louise Ullmann.

INT: And are you an only child, or ?

SU : No I have twin brothers who are two years younger than myself, and a twin brother and sister who were actually born in London during the war.

INT: So are you the eldest?

SU : Yes I am the eldest.

INT: Would you like to tell us a little about where you grew up in Budapest? Was it a typical Jewish community?

SU : My father went on business to London in 39 and my mother went to visit him and she was unable to return. She went to visit him in 1940, during the war when the war had already broken out. We got stranded in Hungary when I was 4 and my brothers were 2, my parents had been living with our paternal grandmother in a flat, with a nanny.

INT: Was your father still in London?

SU : Yes throughout the war my parents were in London and we were separated for 7 and a half years. And the younger twins, a boy and a girl, were born in England during the blitz. I don’t know when the blitz was, 1942 they were born.

INT: So where you able to keep in contact or?

SU : Well I have just finished translating my grandmother’s letters from 1940 to 1942 and then correspondence stopped. And the letters went via Geneva, the Red Cross, Thomas Cook, some she sent to New York and they were posted on from New York to London; some she sent to relatives in Los Angeles, and as not all the letters arrived she started numbering them after a while so that she knew…And some didn’t arrive at all, and then correspondence stopped in 1942.

INT: It must have been very traumatic for you at the age of 4…

SU : Well…. a child accepts whatever comes, she (Suzanne’s little grandma) says we talked about my parents every day, and in one of the letters she quotes me as saying I am really embittered that they are not here and not coming back, and I said why, and she said because the war is on, and I said well they could take an airplane, or they can walk, suggesting ways, so I missed them terribly

INT: So what age did you start school in Budapest?

SU : In Hungary I went to nursery school for a while and I loved school but there wasn’t much money, because my parents weren’t there to earn the money. I went to primary school later on but the war disrupted education…

INT: Was your grandmother working?

SU : No my paternal grandmother was rather a helpless figure, she was actually German but in 45 years in Hungary she never learned to speak Hungarian. But it was my maternal grandmother who really did all the work and she lived elsewhere. My mother came from a poor family and my father from a rich family, so there was a great tension. They didn’t want the marriage to take place so my father courted my mother for six years and it wasn’t until his father died that he was able to marry

INT: How did they meet?

SU : They met in a sort of Academy of Economics, because there was something called the numerus clausus, because only 20% of Jews were allowed to go to university; there was a restriction on Jewish attendance, so they couldn’t go to university so they went to this Commercial Academy and they met there.

INT: Did you have a Jewish life?

SU : Well I remember my maternal grandmother we called ‘little grandma’ because she was very small and when they introduced me to my grandmother I said, she isn’t grand she is small, and the other we called ‘old grandmother’. She was older and more set in her ways, I remember every morning she would read her prayer book and she would sort of bless us, but we didn’t really have anything else.

INT: So you were obviously quite young while living there, living with a generation that were much older, so did you make friends at nursery school?

SU : Well I was only allowed to go there for 6 weeks initially, I get this from the letters I have just found and translated, and I just loved being there with the children, otherwise no. The nannies would take us to the park, if it pleased them but in fact we were quite ill treated according to my maternal grandmother, especially later on, you know when the Nazis came in, things got very bad like when food was short we weren’t fed enough because they where feeding their sweethearts and own children with the food available, no I just had my brothers, so we fought a lot, because we were very restricted in space.

INT: Do you remember much of your life or do you find reading the letters they remind you?

SU : No I remember it vividly because the things that happened impress themselves on your consciousness because they where so unusual, I remember the various nannies and the way they treated us. I learned things from the letters which where not clear to me, the fact that they brought their lovers up and had orgies in my parents’ bedrooms for instance, I was conscious of people being there but I didn’t know what, I was protected by my ignorance from a lot.

INT: And I imagine it would be difficult for your grandmother to complain because of the situation

SU : Well it was extremely difficult because little grandma lived elsewhere and didn’t have influence at home, she had the brains and knew what was going on. And elder grandma didn’t know what was going on but she had the money, and when she (little grandma) complained what was going on, old grandma just raised the salaries. It was a very abnormal situation.

INT: Did old grandma live with you?

SU : Yes when my parents got married they lived with old grandma, she was quite naive, she loved us, but in one of the letters she says to little grandma, if my son wouldn’t have got married he wouldn’t have had these children and I wouldn’t have all this bother. But then she says to my parents she really does love the children, these things came out but she wasn’t quite up to the situation.

Susan Singerman – Life Before The War

In this very short section Susan Singerman tells of her birth in Hungary

Int: Today is Saturday 14th August 2010 and I’m here to interview my mother-in-law Susan Singerman. When and where were you born and what was your name at birth?

Susan: I was born in Western Hungary which was called Transnubia in a small town called Székesfehérvár. My maiden name was Gerofi.