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Gathering The Voices Scotland

Gathering The Voices Scotland

Testimonies of Holocaust survivors who settled in Scotland

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You are here: Home / Archives for settling in

settling in

Sonja Hancox – Settling In

Sonja tells the interviewer why she ended up in Scotland and about her life here.

INT: And…So what, after all these apprenticeships, what job did you end up doing?

SH: I became a milliner.

INT: Oh.

SH: Because that was part of my mother’s – what she did in the shops.

INT: Right, and yet you ended up here in Scotland. How was that? Because you were down in the south of England?

SH: I don’t know.

M: You do. You met dad.

SH: Oh yes, I met my husband in Birmingham

INT: Right.

SH: And though I didn’t want to get married, I did. Yes he was, he was a civil servant. [Sonja’s husband, Hank, was head of the Ministry of Fuel and Power in Scotland].

M: An engineer.

SH: Engineer, and he was moved up to Scotland and so I came along. They wanted a married couple.

INT: I see, and what was your first impression of Scotland and the people?

SH: I had been to Scotland before. I had come up for the Edinburgh Festival and enjoyed it thoroughly and I thought it would all be like the Edinburgh Festival, and it wasn’t.

INT: Ah so you were disappointed then?

SH: Yes, yes,

INT: OK, so tell me more about Scotland. When you came here did you meet or mix with any of the, the other refugees or Jewish community?

SH: Oh immediately. .

INT: How did you do that?

SH: In Birmingham before we came up we met a journalist and he was coming back the next day so he arranged to meet my husband and he arranged to…Did you know Isi Metzstein?

INT: Oh yes.

SH: He brought him along.

INT: I see.

SH: And he had two brothers and two sisters and we, we knew half of Glasgow by that time, you know. And he brought other people. So we knew a lot of people.

INT: Did you tend to mix with other people who had come escaping Nazi Germany or local people?

SH: Both. Both because some of the German people went to school with others whom they brought.No, I mixed with a mixture.

INT: A mixture of people. And did you find Scotland a welcoming place?

SH: Oh definitely because we’d already got so many friends.

INT: Well that’s very nice. Were you involved in any sort of voluntary work here or were you working always as a milliner when you were here?

SH: Ah I did miserable Oxfam work and…

M: No, no that was latterly, when you first, when you first arrived you didn’t work.

SH: No, no not when I first arrived.

INT: You had a family?

SH: Oh yes, oh yes.

INT: How many children did you have?

SH: Well, by the time we came to Scotland I had three children and two step- daughters.

INT: That’s a significant number.

SH: Yes.

M: Eventually you had three children.

SH: When we came to Scotland.

M: No, I was born in Scotland. Andy was born in Scotland. When you arrived in Scotland you had no children apart from two step-daughters, just, it doesn’t matter, but I mean just for….

SH: Ok I was…

INT: Then you took, then you…They’ve probably been in your mind the whole time.

M: Absolutely.

SH: Absolutely.

M: Weighing heavily.

INT: I’m sure that’s the case. Is your Judaism significant in your life? The fact you came from a Jewish background?

SH: Yes and no. Yes because whatever we argued about it was nothing you could ever forget or put aside. But religious I’ve never been. Is that right?

M: I’m not quite sure what you’re saying actually.

INT: You mean whatever you argued about back in Germany…?

M: And who are you talking about arguing with? Are you talking about…?

SH: With anybody.

M: No, but you didn’t …Religion never played a part. I mean I’ve never been to a synagogue with you.

INT: But I suppose the reason you had to leave was because of religion.

M: Well exactly, well exactly. And so I’ve never, you know, and that is quite a sort of good reason for not getting involved in religion when this is what, you know. But…

SH: Ok.

M: You’ve never been religious.

SH: No I’ve never been religious but on the other hand I would never have…

INT: Denied that you have…

SH: No, no never. No it’s a difference of approach.

INT: Right.

SH: But I don’t know how you feel, do you feel very religious?

INT: No, not really.

Edith Forrester – Settling In

Edith talks about her new life in Kirkcaldy and her education. She describes her reaction when she finally met her birth father again.

INT: And what about going to school after that?

EF: Well that was…

INT: You still only spoke German?

EF: Yes, well they put me in the infant class to learn English and every morning the bell would go at a certain time. I can’t remember when…excuse me…And a group of pupils would be standing there, “We’ve come to take Edith to school!” And I had this for weeks that they came to collect me. And of course they gave me all kinds of IQ tests and various things and I had a lot of help from the infant mistress and the teachers and so gradually I got into my own, into my own age group. But every so often I had a request – somebody would come into the class and say, “Edith is to go to Miss O’Hinnachie and I thought “No, no…”

This lady did IQ tests and she sat on a squeaky cushion and every time you asked a question she would lean forward ‘Squeak! A Question, squeak! And an answer. Oh dear. It was all, you know, a man with a black bag goes up to the door, what’s his job? And things like that.

INT: Yes.

EF: So anyway…

INT: Were the children all kind to you? Because the war was starting and they must have known you came from Germany.

EF: The only time I ever had this was in Sunday School, because Mum and Dad were Christians and Dad, being thirty-nine/forty in age, he wasn’t called up because all the men had been called up. He wanted to go but he was Reserved. And he and Mum, were fire guards and different extra jobs that they did and, fine…But they were church members and we went every Sunday and only one time a little girl that I was sitting next to said, “I don’t want to sit next to you because you’re a German”. And that…whoa, that was…I went home and told Mum and Dad. Dad was furious and of course he saw his sister who was the superintendent of the Sunday School and he said, “Make sure that never happens again! And take that child away from Edith so she doesn’t have this…” You know.

INT: So he was able to stop her.

EF: Yeah, yeah. People were curious when you went out into the park for a walk, I sometimes with Dad’s sisters went for a walk after I had lunch with them, after Sunday school and they would say, “Oh, is that the little German girl” You could hear them whispering it, you know. But nobody was unkind, ever, not ever.

INT: That was good. Did you meet other people? Once you were with your new Mum and Dad did you meet other people who had come on the Kindertransport? That had come as refugees?

EF: No it was ironic that years later friends had been living in Dysart, another part of Kirkcaldy, well they had taken in a boy of the same age as me and they never even got us together.

And he, his parents came back; they managed to escape and get out. And they went to America, and he came back to this country to see that the people who had taken him in, who we knew, and we met here and it was just an amazing, amazing time together that we had. We had never met before but we just…Oh it was just….

INT: Did anybody, as far as you know, come from the Refugee Committee to check that you were being well looked after?

EF: Probably, maybe for Mum and Dad, but I was not conscious of that, no, no. Going to the police station, when I was sixteen, seventeen and eighteen, the superintendent of the police was a friend of Dad’s and he said… ‘Gavin asks to see me each time and we’ll have a cup of tea, just a formality’.

INT: And why did you have to go the police station?

EF: Because I was an alien.

INT: I see. And then were you given British citizenship after that? What happened?

EF: Yes, it was The Minors Act that came about when I was nineteen and Dad saw about that…getting me converted to Christianity…no, to British nationality.

INT: So I am assuming that you, not only didn’t meet any other people who came from Germany, but you also didn’t meet anybody from the Jewish community, is that correct?

EF: Not quite because there was a teacher at Kirkcaldy High, Herr Guhde, and he took in a Polish Jewish lad and we became very friendly. In fact they helped Mum and Dad because they couldn’t speak German and he did the translating so I was very fond of Dr Guhde and Henry so yeah…

INT: What did you find strangest about Scotland?

EF: Tomato soup. Red soup, I’d never, ever had red soup in my life before, red soup…But I thought it was all just so interesting, you know. Nobody was anything but helpful. It was just…Oh I just…Scotland’s the country for me, but British, I’m first and foremost British.

INT: And did you see your father again?

EF: Yes.

INT: What happened with your birth father?

EF: That was very difficult, very difficult because I went to Germany and his sister was a dear aunt of mine and she’d been bombed and she was paralysed from the neck down and I was going to stay with her and my father.

And he arrived at the station with beautiful red roses and everything. I have to confess with shame to this day; I felt nothing when I saw him. He was standing with his back to me when I looked out the window and he was tall and thin, just as I remembered him. Tall, very tall, six feet tall and you know, the crinkly hair which was grey of course but when he turned, the face was so wrinkled and ravaged. But he was always touching me and holding my hand and I could not, I could not feel the love that I had felt for this wonderful father that I had for nearly seven years, well seven years yes.

INT: And when was it that you went? How old were you by then when you went back to Germany to see him?

EF: Would it be nineteen or twenty? I was a student here.

INT: That is a long time.

EF: And of course…what I didn’t know was that my Scottish father was going out of his mind because he said to Mum, “She’ll not want to come back. She’ll see her own father. She’ll not want to come back.” She kept saying, she was one of these wonderful calming spirits, she said, “Gavin, she’ll be back, don’t you worry. This is her home and she loves us.” And I never saw such relief on their faces when I stepped off that plane and just ran towards them, you know.

INT: And why was it you weren’t able to go back sooner than that? Because that must have been quite a long time after the war had ended?

EF: Well I had no desire to go. I’d been fighting it and Mum and Dad didn’t want to force it.

INT: Right, right. That’s interesting. And after school what happened?

EF: After school I sort of said, I… I applied for university and was accepted for St Andrews University and then I suddenly said, “You know, you’ve been looking after me all these years. I would like to go and work.” And Mum and Dad said, “No. Take your education first.” But when I make up my mind about something I can be quite firm. So what happened was I applied for the continental exchange in London and got into the Post Office and the civil service here as a telephonist and it was the strangest thing, but just when I realised that I had made a terrible mistake, because all the girls were just talking about their boyfriends and what they did, and I thought I could do a university, Open University…

So I spent evenings/weekends studying and they’d say, “What were you doing at the weekend Edith?” And, you know, even boyfriends, I couldn’t spend the time with them because I was studying. I didn’t want to tell them. I was doing this quietly. And I thought, ‘This is not going to work.’ So I decided I would leave the Post Office and, ironically, when I had just made up my mind to do so, the appointment came through from London that I’d got a post in the continental exchange if I’d wanted it, but I didn’t. So then I went to university.

INT: And what did you study there?

EF: Modern languages and Latin. I did Italian the first year as well but my degree is in French and German.

INT: And then I think you went on to teach?

EF: Yes I went for a year to Moray House and then on to teach. Thirty-one and a half years teaching and I was a couple of years in the Post Office and that counted towards my final pension, so that worked out well.

Suzanne Ullman – Settling In

INT: And so where did you study? When did you decide to study…?

SU: Well I went to this proper school in Welwyn Garden City and did two years there, managed to get advanced German and Biology, I think. I had to do Maths, you know, from scratch and Chemistry and eventually I got into University College, London. They did a course called Intermediate so you could make up. So I did Zoology, Botany, Psychology and Chemistry there. So that brought me more or less on a level with others, not quite, but more or less. And then I didn’t get a place there for a degree but I got into a college, Chelsea College of Science and Technology, and I did my degree there and I did, after that I did my PhD there as well.

INT: Your parents must have been so proud, you know, that you…

SU: I don’t know. I think I was a disappointment to my father, at least that’s how he made out, because he wanted me to get married and have 6 children. That would have been like a Victorian father. So when he got grandchildren I said well, you know, now you’ve got a grandchild and then he said it’s not the same as from a girl. But he never let on to me but he must have been because to other people, you know, other people would come and say your father is pleased but he would never let on to me.

INT: And so did your parents live to a long age or…?

SU: My father, well when I, what happened then? I did my degree, I went, and then I came up to Glasgow and I got a job as a very well known Professor’s assistant, a research assistant in Edinburgh, so I spent 3 years with him. And then I got an assistant lectureship in the university zoology department, and then the policy was you couldn’t stay on after that, you had to move on. And I was invited to Glasgow University. Imagine; now people are clamouring for jobs, then you were invited to apply. So I was very lucky. I was invited by the Professor of zoology and I got the job and I am still in the department 40 something years after. But in 1975 I decided I need a break from Glasgow, and I met someone at a conference and he’d invited me to go to Australia so being a zoologist I thought, well, you know, I must take my chance go see the world. So I went out there for a year and while I was there my father passed away.

INT: Oh right.

SU: In ’75. And my mother… I was offered a job, you know, out there but I thought, well I’ve been separated from my family once in my lifetime, its too far away. So although everything was hunky dory I decided to come back and, you know, because my mother was still alive. And she lived to be 83, and she lived until… I think it was 1990. So that’s what happened.

INT: And so you have twin brothers, and a twin brother and sister.

SU: Yes

INT: And so did you say are some in America? And…

SU: Yes funnily enough. The Hungarians became British, and the British went out to America and eventually became Americans, you know, they were running away. So it’s only in the last 10 years I’ve really got to know my sister because now I go out there. The last few years to visit my aunt who is now 100, and after that I spend a couple of weeks with my sister who has a timeshare in Mexico and this year I came back via New York where I’ve got my brother and his extended family. So, you know, we keep… We’re still scattered but…

INT: And are you the only person who has gone into academia?

SU: Yes.

INT: What speciality did you…?

SU: Pardon?

INT: Did you have a speciality?

SU: Yes I took a… I specialised in entomology. Insects. I did my PhD on insect embryology, spent 3 years studying an egg which was 1 and a half millimeters long.

INT: As you do.

SU: As you do. And then when I went to Australia I thought, well Australia’s famous for marsupials so I actually changed to marsupials. I set up the first colony of marsupials in Glasgow University and, you know, we published quite a bit on it.

INT: So do you work with the vet school?

SU: No. I taught vets, but no. Developmental biology became my field, firstly insects and then mice and marsupials reproductive biology and embryology.

Susan Singerman – Settling In

Susan describes how she considered going to Palestine after the war but how, in the end, she came to Scotland and worked first as a trainee nurse.

Int: You were going to explain how you came to Ayr.

Susan: We were going to do this business of the false marriage. They sent away the Regiment; they had come to Belgium and they sent them back to what was then Palestine, not yet Israel, and so I didn’t know what to do and my cousin, the one who had taken my papers, she had got to Palestine. She was blonde and blue eyed and no way did she look Jewish but with the false papers, there were four of them altogether, they went to Budapest and they waited and then they were sent. They started a journey. They were going to go through Rumania and hopefully get a ship and so

Int: She went to Israel on these false papers…

Susan: And there were lists circulating and eventually she found that I was alive. She called herself Shoshana because she thought I had also died in the camps.

Int: She called herself Shoshana (Choisi) as in your name because that was Susan? So she found out and then what happened?

Susan: I thought of applying to go to Palestine. I was in Germany and I wrote on the application form – on the way to visit my only living relatives Dr and Mrs Banyai. Of course here was Germany; here was Scotland and here was Palestine so no way was it on the way but nevertheless my great-uncle and great-aunt also made an application and meanwhile I had met my husband to be.

Int: He was in the Jewish Brigade – Paul ?

Susan: Yes, he was in the Jewish Brigade

Int : You had arranged to go to Palestine via Ayr and in between you met Howard’s father, Paul.

Susan: My cousin, when she discovered that I was alive, and I had written to her, and what I had written was really true, meaning that we had lost our parents and family and so on (said), “What on earth are you doing out there? Why aren’t you here with me?” So I applied to go, but because of, I’ll never know why or how, but because I mentioned Dr and Mrs Banyai in my application and because they mentioned my name (she was able to go to Ayr).

In 1946 Paul and I went back to Kaunitz where we were liberated for Rosh Hashanah [the Jewish New Year] and on the way out we called at Badenhausen, which was where you put your application and we asked what happened to my visa application. “Oh well, didn’t you get your entry permit”. I said, “No”. (They said) “Well when you get back you’ll find it in your letters.

Int : So they checked the papers and they allowed you to come to Scotland

Int:You went back and found the application?

Int: So you arrived and discovered you had a visa to take you to Scotland?

Int: But you came to Scotland and then you decided to study as a teacher?

Susan : Not yet, first I started nursing. I did a year’s nursing.

Int : Because you had to choose between being a domestic or being a nurse. Is that correct?

Susan : Yes, you could either be somebody’s maid, which I didn’t fancy, or be a nurse.

Int : How did you find nursing?

Susan : Well, I didn’t do very much of it and anyway, three months was the preliminary training school, but that winter was the worst, I don’t know in how long. The practice in Stobhill was that they stayed in the ante-natal ward until their waters broke and then the nurse took them to the maternity unit in an ambulance. This time it was so bad, the snow and so on that half the staff didn’t get in to hospital, and it was then, naturally, that two or three people need to go at the same time – their waters break – so there was nothing else for me but to go.

They had to send me and lo and behold the ambulance got stuck and I think if I didn’t wet my pants, I came very near it. The woman kept on saying “Dinna fash, hen, dinna fash, hen”. I had only been here in this country three months. I didn’t know what she was saying. Eventually I asked her, and she said it means, “Don’t worry, dear”. I took her over and I came back and they said “What’s the matter? Your face looks kind of green”.

Sidney Mayer – Settling In

Sidney describes his family life and the tragic deaths of his two wives.

INT: When did you get married Sidney?

SM: I got married for the first time in 1952.

INT: And where did you meet your partner? Where did you meet your partner?

SM: Well, in cafes, you know. In those days we used to go to the Jewish Institute and cafes and that’s how we met.

INT: And she was a local Jewish, Glasgow girl?

SM: Yes. Cohen her name was. And unfortunately she was, she took ill quite a lot and she had a load of surgery, operations and she was alone in the house, wanted to take a bath and unfortunately fainted and drowned in the bath.

INT: Oh that was…

INT: Terrible.

INT: …terrible.

SM: That was in 1970.

INT: Right, that’s terrible.

INT: Did you have any children with her?

SM: Two children, I’ve a daughter and a son.

INT: I see.

INT: And I think you married again did you?

SM: And then I married again in 1972. And I married a divorcee with a daughter and unfortunately nine years ago she also had an accident. She was run over with a lorry on the Ayr road.

INT: You’ve been very unfortunate. You’ve been very unfortunate.

SM: Yes. I’ve been unfortunate and fortunate, some of each.

INT: Yes, I suppose that’s the human condition. I suppose that’s the human condition.

SM: Yes.

INT: A bit of both.

INT: And what are your children doing now Sydney?

SM: My daughter is married and my son, he is a taxi driver. He has a black ‘hack’. Alan Meyer, he’s quite well known and he’s a good golfer.

INT: Oh yes, yes.

INT: When you first came to Glasgow were you involved with other refugees?

SM: Not really. Only one, one boy, he lived in Newton Mearns and I was friendly with him. He was the only… but we always spoke English. And he emigrated to Australia not long after the war. So that was that. I never associated with German people at all while I was here.

INT: And do you, did you regret that? Had you any wish to mix with other people who had come from similar backgrounds to you?

SM: I didn’t then, no. I do now but I didn’t then. I didn’t then, no.

Saskia Tepe – Settling In

ST: So moving on to the UK. After spending three months in a facility hosted by the British Council for Aid to Refugees, getting basic training in English, ‘Can I have a pound of mince please’, ‘two tickets to…’

INT: And coping with the currency of pounds, shillings and pence.

ST: Exactly. We moved to Hitchin and I started the Catholic school there. My mother had a falling out with the priest and I ended up in the Church of England school and the headmaster of that was part of this teachers association that had sponsored the family so everything was fine. And basically, as I said, my mum had a… Her attitude to religion was diplomatic; whatever came her way that was the way it went. So she was quite happy to go to whatever church, to whatever school. It didn’t really matter to her. My step parent, my step father had difficulties integrating. I think my mother had an aptitude for languages. She went to evening classes, she listened to Michael Mitchelmore on the news programmes to learn how to speak proper English whereas he tended to go to the Polish community, there was a Polish club, and found it quite difficult to integrate. And because my mum was not Polish but German I think she felt a little bit on the periphery. Things went a little bit downhill, they fought a lot, I think he drank quite a bit; it was as though the relationship had changed. I think they no longer had that goal that they had had in Germany where they were desperate to get away to make a new life. And when they found that new life there was nothing there to keep them together. So, I know things were bad because he always had friends round and he was drinking and so on and they didn’t have enough money to get by, so she had to get a job. She did what she had kind of trained for, I suppose, all those years previously and she went into service. And the only place that she could find a job was maybe about 10 miles outside of Hitchin; Kings Walden Bury. It was a colonel and Lady Harrison who ran the place and she became housekeeper and they were willing for her to live in, and for me to live in also. And on her days off she would go back to the marital home and she would cook him meals and prepare them all for the week and so on, until one day she arrived and he had changed the locks. So…And he had another woman in tow. So that was the end of that relationship and she was a single parent in the 1960s.

INT: Which was never easy.

ST: No

INT: It was very unusual I think at that time.

ST: Yes. So there followed a period of job changes. She worked in the Bury for maybe about 9 months and it was getting too much for her because it was a big house and they entertained a fair amount, it was a lot for her to do. At least that’s the story that I figured out for myself. I don’t know what the circumstances were but anyway, she found another job back in Hitchin, and I didn’t have to take the bus anymore and so on. And she worked as a housekeeper for an old gentleman who had become established in Hitchin, Mr. Moss, for grocery stores. A very nice old gentleman who had great difficulty in saying my name, Saskia, and… because he was a little hard of hearing, So I ended up being called Sandie. And this was at the time of Sandie Shaw and I was absolutely delighted. I didn’t want to be called by Saskia, this strange foreign person. By now I felt very integrated, could speak English no problem at all. Obviously my mum had a very strong accent but I didn’t. And so I told people I was called Sandie and I went through a period of not wanting to be foreign, wanting to be part of… And I’m sure everybody that has come from a foreign country goes through this process as well. I didn’t actually start calling myself Saskia again until I started my first teaching job many years later.

INT: So you obviously became a teacher. So what do you teach?

ST: What happened was, after all these various moves and so on, my mum tried to do some nurses training, so we moved to Papworth in Cambridgeshire and she trained as a nurse and then became ill, is the story I was told. Obviously while she was training she was living in and I lodged with a lady so I don’t know the whole story. I was about 12 at this stage. So that was my second secondary school. She became ill and we moved back to Worthing where we had started out with the help of the British Council for Aid to Refugees. And they housed us and then she went through a period of doing a lot of menial jobs. Not a happy time for my mum at all. But I was doing well at school and got my A levels, tried for university but didn’t get good enough grades, but was very interested in languages, and French was my particular favorite. I spent some time as an au pair in France. During a holiday job I met a Scot, and and came up to Scotland to be with him. So my husband was what brought me to Scotland. My mum didn’t come up to Scotland until many years later, shortly before she died, when she became fairly ill and it was time to move her. She’s told me that her happiest times were in those last 20 years from 1971 till 92/93 when she died, not very rich, living on the state you could say. And I always get very angry when people talk about refugees and sponging off the state and so on. I think my mum did her fair share of work in all the time that she was capable. She had a stroke when she was 52, she had a heart attack when she was 56, and I think a lot of that was just stress.

INT: And hard work.

INT: And poor health before. You said that she talked to you a lot when you where 13? What do you think triggered?

ST: When we first moved back to Worthing the house that we lived in that was owned by the BCAR, we had the downstairs and upstairs there were 3 rooms and there were 2 single gentlemen and a lady who was German speaking. We weren’t there long, she had just moved in and I came home from school and found my mother sitting sort of staring into the distance. I wondered what was wrong, and then she just started talking, she said “that bitch upstairs, that bitch upstairs”. I’d never heard my mother use a word like that. The woman had been a Commandant’s wife in a camp and because my mother speaks German she thought .. you know, my mother was an ally… And she started talking. My mum obviously didn’t say anything. but I think this brought up a lot of memories, and that’s when she told me about being Jewish. And I thought ‘Well we’re Catholic, how can we be Jewish?’

‘It had nothing to do with your religion, it had to do with your blood.’

And she told me then about, you know, what had happened to her and the train, jumping off the train and so on. And it was a subject that after that one night I realized that it was a painful thing for her to say, so it was always a touchy kind of subject. But I would ask her the odd question, but being 13 you never quite know. You take things as you hear them but you have no concept of what lay behind that and certainly I didn’t know anything about it, about Nazism and so on. I did do some research. I remember wearing a Star of David around my neck because I thought it might be quite nice to be different when I was about 17, as though it was some kind of…it was strange, I couldn’t figure out why, I think part of being a teenager is you want to be different. I think I had also read enough to know what she had escaped from by then. So I think I was kind of fiercely proud of that fact, that although she wasn’t Jewish she had had the Jewish experience, let’s put it like that. The only other time that we really talked about her background and where she had come from and so on was maybe about 2 years before she died on a visit up to see us. I had moved to Scotland, had had children up here and she came to visit and I went down to visit her. And this particular time she obviously realized that she had to tell me about her background in more detail. And she had this box of documentation and brought out her mother’s marriage certificate and her grandmother’s death certificate to show the fact that she had been Jewish and the papers that she’d had to show to the Gestapo and so on to prove how much of a Jew she was. And we drew out a sort of a historical timeline, if you like, and traced it back to a famous composer called Leo Fall, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him?

INT: No, but we will look for some music.

ST: The Dollar Princess, I think, toured in the UK in 1912? But obviously because of the Nazi influence and the fact that he was Jewish, that kind of music was no longer played, it sort of fell out of favour.

INT: And this was a distant ancestor then?

ST: Yes. So that particular afternoon we went through and she told me a little bit about her dad and her step mother and so on and I got a lot of my knowledge, what little there is of it, of her life before the war.

INT: She must have been very keen that you knew more?

ST: Yes. So it was a bit of a shock after she died and I looked through that same paperwork to discover that she’d held out and not told me that she had had a baby at the end of the war.

INT: Can you stop the tape?

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Links to Other Testimonies by Saskia Tepe

Life Before The War
Life During The War
Immigration
Settling In
Reflection On Life
Video Interview

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