The Locked Safe: A Family Memoir

By Miriam E. David and Charlotte Reiner

This family memoir is my back story. A Locked Safe with 5 ‘Nazi’ passports was found after my mother died in 1996. My father had died 16 years earlier. Although we knew he was a German Jewish professional engineer fleeing Nazism in 1936, we did not know the details of how his family fled. The help of my mother’s family, the Leas, was essential. They had fled from pogroms in Ukraine/Russia in the late nineteenth century. Some were also caught up with Japanese internment camps in China, illustrating the diasporic nature of my family. My father, his elder brother and father were also interned by the British in 1940-1941. I look forward to not only my generation as the so-called second generation from the Holocaust, but also the third generation, specifically my daughter Charlotte Reiner Hershman. Although we tell a unique story of one family, that story of migration, seeking asylum or refuge and being exiled is a very frequent tale nowadays. In excavating my parents’ backgrounds and their influences on me and Charlotte, we show the long term psychological and social effects on our lives and possibly on future generations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jun 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9798823087902

Miriam E. David

Miriam E. David is professor emerita of sociology of education at University College London (UCL) Institute of Education (IOE). She has been a teacher, researcher, and head of department in various universities in England and the USA. Her research is on education, family, feminism, and gender. She edited (with Merilyn Moos) Debating the Zeitgeist and Being Second Generation (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2021). Charlotte Reiner is a graduate of the University of Cambridge in Modern and Medieval Languages. She also holds Masters’ degrees from the University of Durham and University College London. She is an experienced teacher and has taught in a range of both primary and secondary schools. She is currently working as a freelance private tutor for both schools and individual families.

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© 2024 Miriam E. David with Charlotte Reiner. All rights reserved.

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This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

Published by AuthorHouse  06/18/2024

ISBN: 979-8-8230-8789-6 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-8790-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024910930

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CONTENTS

PART 1: MAPPING THE COMPLEX FAMILY TERRAIN

Chapter 1Searching for the David Family Backstory

Chapter 2Growing Up in the West Riding of Yorkshire

PART 2: THE DAVID AND LEA FAMILY BACKGROUNDS

Chapter 3The Ancestral Home in Germany

Chapter 4October: A Voyage Around My Father

Chapter 5A Safe Haven in Manchester?

Chapter 6The Family From Ukraine

Chapter 7May Day: Esther Lea In Manchester

PART 3: WAR, INTERNMENT, AND ITS INIQUITOUS AFTERMATH

Chapter 8‘Jewish Refugees Not Wanted: Why?’

Chapter 9Leaving Manchester for ‘The New Life’

Chapter 10David Family Portraits: Klara and Ernst

PART 4: A TAPESTRY OF THE POST-WAR FAMILIES AND AFTER

Chapter 11The David Family Reinvented

Chapter 12A Wound Time Cannot Heal: A Third-Generation Perspective by Charlotte Reiner

Chapter 13A Rich Tapestry with Damaged Threads

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

List of Illustrations

Appendix: Family Trees

References

For

Jacob Hershman and Ezra Hershman,

Charlotte’s boys and my grandchildren

&

Zin, Alice, Jamie, Francesca, Michael and Gabriella Berle,

Judy’s grandchildren

&

Oli, Liora and Guy Blake, and Max and Clara Sultoon,

Anne’s grandchildren

PART 1

Mapping the Complex

Family Terrain

CHAPTER 1

Searching for the David

Family Backstory

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The Lea Family from Manchester

My daughter, Charlotte, asked me whether I knew any families called Lee from Manchester a little over three years ago. My reply was that there were lots of Jewish families in Manchester called Lea who variously spelt as ‘Lea’, ‘Lee’, or ‘Leigh’. I didn’t know of any of our relatives left in Manchester—although, of course, that was where my mother—Esther Leachinsky, later Lea—was born in 1909 and brought up, along with her elder sister, Rebecca, and elder brother, Joshua Lea. My mother left Manchester on marriage to my father on 22 June 1941, and her sister and brother, being almost a decade older, had left in the 1930s. Neither of them had any children, and so we didn’t have any extant family there, nor many friends, and certainly none called Lea. Little did I know!

About a year after my conversation with Charlotte, an old friend from Bradford, Jonathan Elford, and I were chatting about our families. We had both grown up in or around Bradford in the 1960s. At that time, I was friends with his sister, Marilyn, who was my age, rather than with Jonathan himself. Jonathan and I now live in London. We turned to talk about my grandchildren and his great-nephews. Jewish geography is never far from my conversations with Jonathan. We asked each other about where they went to school. It transpired that all four went to the same Jewish primary school in Southgate. My elder grandson, Jacob, was about six and a half, and Jonathan’s youngest great-nephew was about to turn six. His great nephew’s name was Joshua Lee! What’s more, Joshua’s father—Harvey Lee—was from Manchester!

I vaguely remembered Charlotte’s question about the Lees from Manchester and went back to ask her, somewhat embarrassed, whether Jacob knew Joshua Lee. I was given short shrift. It turned out Joshua Lee was Jacob’s best friend! In fact, Jacob was about to go to Joshua’s birthday party. It has taken at least another three years to put together all the fragments of this family memoir, such are the vagaries of doing this emotionally intensive kind of family history. I have met Joshua Lee several times since. Joshua Lee’s father, Harvey, is the son of Marilyn (née Elford, from Bradford) and Gerry Lee, from Manchester. Harvey grew up in Manchester. Marilyn, Jonathan’s sister, was part of my social group in Bradford when we were teenagers. I knew her well at the time, as she was just a month older than I, but we lost touch with each other. This explained why I didn’t know that she had become a Lee on marriage and that she had a grandson called Joshua Lee! Unfortunately, after discovering that Marilyn and I had grandsons who went to the same school and were best friends, I was never given the chance to reconnect with her. She had experienced chronic illness for many years and sadly died in the autumn of 2021.

Our families are even more intertwined. Marilyn and Jonathan’s mother was called Edith. Edith’s maiden name was Mallerman. She was born in the East End of London, and Jonathan was tracing the history of the Mallermans in the UK together with his beautiful artwork. Edith had moved to Manchester with her parents as a baby and had grown up there. She moved to Bradford on marriage to Maurice Elford in the 1940s. Her childhood was spent in North Manchester. She went to Temple Elementary School, which was situated in a very Jewish area. This was where my mother taught for ten years in the 1930s and early 1940s. Edith Mallerman was one of my mother’s first pupils! This was common knowledge in my childhood and obviously also in Jonathan’s. Coincidentally both our mothers (Esther and Edith) had moved to Yorkshire from Lancashire with their husbands after getting married. They joined the Bradford Hebrew Congregation (known as the ‘orthodox’ shul) where they rediscovered one another. Former teacher and former pupil were reunited after some twenty-odd years. To add some flavour to this anecdote, Jonathan found a photograph of his parents with mine in about 1960, sitting on the lawn of their home in Wibsey, Bradford.

Circuitous and Complex Family Memoirs

The anecdote in the previous section serves to illustrate the circuitous and long journey I have taken in writing this family memoir. Along the way, I have also found that many other friends’ parents or cousins were taught by my mother. My mother was clearly a memorable teacher! We knew about some of her pupils from her stories, and others have come to light during this search to construct a family memoir, making it, at the same time, of contemporary relevance. Most recently Charlotte told me of a mother of another close friend of her sons Jacob and Ezra at school. Yet again the granny went to what is now Temple Primary School!

Initially the Lea family were not my focus. Almost thirty years ago now, when my mother died in January 1996, my younger sister Anne and I had the unenviable task of sorting through all the accumulated family paraphernalia, prior to selling her maisonette in Woodside Avenue N12, where she had lived for the previous fifteen years. She moved to London from Audley Gate, Peterborough, in late 1980, after my father’s death on 2 January 1980. This was a very momentous event in our family history and has left many waves and ripples that are still ebbing and flowing. Hence this memoir.

Our elder sister Judy was extremely involved in the move to London from Peterborough. We felt we had to get more engaged at the stage when our mother moved to sheltered accommodation round the corner in Mayfield Avenue, North Finchley. My mother lived there, where she had a couple of carers, for only a short period of time—probably a little over a year. She had a nasty fall in early December 1995 and was taken to Barnet General Hospital. At the time, it was mainly old Nissen huts. We hoped that she would recover and recuperate sufficiently to go back to her sheltered accommodation. It was not to be. After over a month in hospital, she eventually died on 23 January 1996: a ‘gift’ to my sister Anne, whose forty-ninth birthday was the next day.

When my father, Curt L. David, died over forty-three years ago now, I was living in Bristol and married to Robert Reiner, himself a Jewish refugee from Hungary. We had two very small children: Toby was just over eighteen months old, and Charlotte was three and a half months old. I last saw my father on Xmas day 1979, and I think of him every Xmas day, rather than on his actual jahrzeit, or day of remembrance. This is ten days later. Such memorials are significant in the Jewish calendar. Writing this memoir is particularly important as part of memorialization. It has taken me a very long time, though, with many digressions along the way. And perhaps I have difficulty letting go of it all, as it has now become so much a part of my quotidian life.

Back in 1979, as my sisters were also visiting my parents, we had to leave the family home in Peterborough and drive home, on a very snowy wintry day. The journey to Bristol was arduous; it involved driving along an old straight Roman road: the Fosse Way. I also not only two demanding babies but also a full-time post as a lecturer in social administration at the University of Bristol. I was also part of the Bristol Women’s Studies group, a collective that put together the first reader in women’s studies, called Half the Sky. It had just been published. I had become fascinated by the intricacies of gender, sex, and social policy, linked to social history, so the seeds of this family memoir were sown back in the 1970s.

The Locked Safe with the Nazi Passports: How Safe a Journey?

Sifting and sorting all the family memorabilia was difficult, although we tried to share out things relatively equally, in accordance with a pattern established by our parents. One of the key treasures that Anne and I found was a locked safe. Jack, Anne’s husband, had to prise it open. To our immense surprise, not to say shock, it contained five old German passports, four of which bore the Nazi insignia, whereas my father’s passport was issued in 1935, before Nazism had taken full hold. The passports belonged to my father, Curt; his parents, Adolf David and Clementine David (née Rothschild); Bertha David, his paternal grandmother; and Klara (Koch), Curt’s aunt and Adolf’s younger sister.

These five David family passports set us all off on a journey of discovery about who they all were and how they had lived in Germany and escaped to the UK. It was only just before lockdown for the COVID-19 pandemic in February 2020 that we finally discovered some key pieces of the jigsaw about what had happened during the war to these five people, plus my father’s elder brother Ernst. By then I had become obsessed with not only family history but also policies regarding internment, or imprisonment without trial of ‘enemy aliens’. I attended many seminars in the previous five years and developed a lengthy list of reading material. The best place for information was the National Archives (TNA) at Kew, I was told. Indeed, it was. But it was both upsetting and disappointing to find some official materials in the TNA. There were several volumes of crusty old documents with byzantine and incomprehensible filing systems.

The six Davids all were in these official records with several Home Office (HO) and police numbers because they had arrived in England in the 1930s. I learnt some details about my father from these records: he was a ‘machine tool designer, employed by Kendall & Gent, Victoria Works (1920) Ltd., Gorton, Manchester’. There was also information about the three men as ‘enemy aliens’ and when they were interned and released, but nothing about where they were interned. The reason given was the government’s ‘circular 21.6.40’. There was also basic information about the three women, who were called ‘internees at liberty’. But how free and safe were they? This information was updated after the war and for several years to about 1950, including when they died. How much nearer to understanding was I with this official information?

Looking through the records at TNA for the national register of people living in the UK on 30 September 1939, used instead of a census at the start of World War 2 (WWII), I found two glaring anomalies. One was about where my mother was living, as she was not with her mother—Golda Lea—in Manchester. Where was she? Secondly, what about Uncle Ernst? He was living with the other five Davids at 76 Woodlands Road, Manchester. But it stated that his record was officially closed for a hundred years! There was the possibility of a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to open the file early. After consulting with Ernst’s daughter Joan, I put in a request in March 2020. I was successful and received fifty pages of A3 Home Office material in July 2020. A portrait of poor Ernst’s travails is in chapter 10, together with a portrait of his aunt Klara.

Anne gave me another tranche of papers, my mother’s writing case with her diaries for 1939 and 1940, and her calling cards in my father’s diary for 1940, which had been secreted away in the family sideboard. Anne had taken and stored them unopened at her home. She gave them to me in February 2020. During lockdown, I had the unfettered time to go through the material. Finding my mother’s writing case with diaries and calling cards in it helped us discover where my father had been interned. We always knew that he had been interned in Huyton and the Isle of Man (IOM), but we did not have the details. Nor did we really want to ask about what turned out to have been a very traumatic period for my parents. This is not an uncommon experience, as we discovered talking to others whose parents were interned during WWII. It is only now, in the twenty-first century, that stories are beginning to emerge of those traumatic experiences. Neither TNA nor the archives on IOM had kept the specific list of names associated with each camp, or the records had been lost or destroyed in fires or floods. So my searches about the specific internment camps had been fruitless. What it had shown was how the six Davids were held in official government records as prisoners of war (POWs) and their files updated after the war. It did provide clues as to when the David men were interned and when they were released, but that was about all!

Eureka! Finding the Internment Camp Addresses in Huyton and IOM

At last, from Mum’s calling cards tucked inside my father’s tiny diary for 1940, we knew where he was interned. My search of over twenty-five years was successful! First my father, together with his elder brother, Ernst, and their father was at 69, Hillside Avenue, A.I. Camp (Aliens Internment), Huyton, Liverpool. Second, Ernst and my father were at House 16, Mooragh Camp, Ramsey, IOM. It felt like a eureka moment, as I had spent so much time fantasizing about where they were interned. Hutchinson camp, IOM, was the most written about, as there were extant records. The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A True Story of an Artist, a Spy, and a Wartime Scandal was just the most recent book based on Hutchinson camp records on the IOM.¹

I had collected dozens of books and put together a large bibliography about internment and the associated history of the Holocaust in an almost frenzied attempt to find out the details over the last twenty or so years. Francois Lafitte’s book The Internment of Aliens, had piqued my interest, written as it was by a professor of social policy at Birmingham University in the 1980s.² The book had first been published in late 1940 as a Penguin special. It had been hurriedly published to alert the British public to the serious problem of internment. This absolute tour de force of critique, published extremely quickly, was to little avail—either to me personally and to changing the minds of the government of the day not to be so punitive. Imprisonment without trial remained the policy throughout WWII. This is not dissimilar to the debates today by the Tory government about sending so-called ‘illegal migrants’ to Rwanda, a policy judged unlawful by the British Court of Appeal (29 June 2023).

Two other books also fascinated and disturbed me: ‘Collar the Lot’: How Britain Interned and Expelled its Wartime Refugees, by Peter and Leni Gillman, and Island of Barbed Wire: The Remarkable Story of World War Two Internment on the Isle of Man, by Connery Chappell, both published in 1980.³ Both had pictures of internees and internment camps on the covers. I browsed the pictures many times to see whether I could find my father. It turned out that the cover of the Gillman book had a picture of German refugees walking into the camp at Huyton (and could have included my father, his brother, and their father). Above another instance of the cover photo among the photos between pages 144 and 145, it says, ‘Mass internment began on 11 May 1940 and the first of these internees were sent to a hastily improvised camp on an unfinished council estate in Huyton, Liverpool.’

The picture on the cover of Connery Chappell’s book was where my father was interned on IOM in Ramsey. How upsetting that discovery was! The same picture was also opposite page 64, and Chappell wrote, ‘Seaside boundary of the Mooragh Camp, Ramsey, the first internment camp on the Isle of Man in the Second World War. The camp went back from the sea front and was sectioned off internally to prevent different nationals from intermingling. The pictures were taken shortly after a Finn was found stabbed to death on the pavement in the foreground.’

From our archival materials, we found a note from my mother to my father in his diary—a note associated with the date Saturday, 7 September 1940, saying ‘Esther to visit’ (in Huyton), and a note associated with the date Tuesday, 22 October 1940, saying ‘Esther to visit’. Was she to go to Ramsey in IOM? We also found a book from Curt to Esther for Chanukah 1940 sent from IOM: The Compleat Lover.⁴ I visited Huyton in the spring 2021 on a trip to visit Jeff’s son Simon and family to find the house, which was probably rebuilt or renovated. It was easy to find from the maps that Jennifer Taylor (2012) provided.⁵ Finally, we visited the IOM in the early summer of 2022 to find the house in Ramsey and see where the barbed wire was concreted into the ground around the houses.

Yvonne Cresswell, formerly of the Manx Library, was incredibly helpful in showing us around the internment camps in Douglas and Ramsey. The old Victorian boarding houses on the IOM looked rather inauspicious until Yvonne told us how many were housed in each one (as many as a thousand) and where the barbed wire went around each block. None of the houses now looked like a spelunke (cave or cavern), as my father was fond of calling very run-down places. But he probably thought that back in 1940 and 1941. As Yvonne Cresswell (1994) wrote, it was ‘living with the wire’.⁶

We found lots of letters and documents in my parents’ sideboard which we had to clear and sell. Collecting and keeping old family letters and postcards was a family habit, we also discovered—not only for the Davids but also the Leas. A picture postcard album that my mother, Esther, had given her elder sister on her twenty-first birthday in 1920 was chock-a-block full of over 220 postcards; those 32 written on were sent between 1913 and 1928. I began to see the German cards as very mobile, as many were brought to the UK from Frankfurt-am-Main, where my father and his elder brother Ernst were born. Some had survived (along with lots of old books, including some only in Hebrew) from even earlier than the 1900s, as my great-grandfather Tobias David seems to have passed on the habit of collecting to his son Adolf and his grandsons Ernst and Curt. He also passed the habit to his daughter Klara, and my father kept these in the sideboard after she died! I have also picked up the habit and cannot seem to find an appropriate filing system. All the letters and documents that I am using for this book have also travelled after I acquired them from my mother’s flat or from my two sisters to my various homes in London and to their resting place in the filing cabinet in Highgate.

Tobias David, my great-grandfather, died on 27 February 1921 and is buried in the village where my grandfather Adolf grew up (Nieder-Wöllstadt, Hesse, Germany). I first found his grave in a rather dishevelled state in the summer of 1997, when I went to a conference on European Educational Research (EERA) held in Frankfurt am Main. When I returned eleven years later, it had been restored. Tobias’s wife, Bertha, outlived him by almost twenty-five years and died in Manchester in 1944, aged eighty-nine. Hers is one of the Nazi passports that we found in the locked safe. I wanted to know more about her life and the lives of her son, Adolf, and daughter, Klara.

The ultimate piece of discovery—the icing on the cake, so to speak—was what my eldest nephew Antony Berle brought me on 3 April 2022—which I remember because it was my husband’s birthday! The small brown bag contained over 150 letters and postcards sent to my mother, mainly but not only from my father, from the period of 1938 to 22 June 1941, when our parents married. They were a veritable treasure trove of information especially about what happened during wartime. A key focus was on internment and its immediate aftermath. It has been an emotional and stressful task to sort, read, and type up all the letters and postcards.

Taking all this time to put the materials together does make me feel like a true Jäcke: determined and focused with the need to get things exactly right—precision in the detail! This is also because my father was a true Jäcke, telling us the term, of course. He also worked as a precision machine tool engineer, mainly at John Lund, later called Precimax, then called Landis Lund. Of course, we had known that Curt was born in Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany and that his parents came from two different towns (Friedberg and Nieder-Wöllstadt) in Hessen. We had been regaled with stories of his growing up and schooling, his wide set of cousins from his mother’s Rothschild family, his going to university first in Darmstadt and second Berlin, and his going east to Neisse to work. We also knew he came to the UK rather than go to Palestine, because he couldn’t afford the costs.

We were presented with a rather uplifting story of what Jewish life was like in Germany before Hitler’s rise to power, and a lot about education and culture. We didn’t know much about my father’s professional life as a machine tool engineer, nor about his parents and grandparents’ lives. We weren’t told the painful details of how the family came to England, the privations both in Germany and the UK before and during the war. To get to the importance and significance of these highly emotionally charged postcards and letters, I feel it is necessary to provide a considerable amount of background material. First, I need to establish who I am and why I am embarking on this somewhat hazardous journey at this stage of my life. After all, it is now over seventy-eight years since I was born, and that happens to almost coincide with VJ (Victory in Japan) Day. So it is also seventy-eight years since WWII was finally ended. Of course, this story is not unique, but it contributes to our sum of knowledge about the treatment, not only in Germany but also in England, of so-called ‘Jewish refugees’.

German Jewish Refugees Fleeing Nazism: Some Background Stories

I had wanted to explore, as many others have done, the story of a family escaping Nazism: in my case, that of my father’s German Jewish family fleeing Nazism. Over the years, I had become, as my eldest nephew put it, the ‘family archivist’. In the twentieth century, there were some notable accounts from a woman’s perspective—for example, Anne Karpf’s The War After and Lisa Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead.⁷ Anne Karpf’s mother played the violin in Auschwitz, and Lisa Appignanesi was much more akin to my ex-husband, as they were said to be the first Jewish babies born after the war: Lisa in Poland in early January and Robert in Miskolc, Hungary, on 24 January 1946. In the 1970s, I also read Lucy Dawidowicz’s The War Against the Jews, a searing account of what had happened across Europe when Hitler came to power.⁸

I had not related any of this to my own story, as they all seemed to have so much more devastating stories of loss and hardship under the Nazis. In the twenty-first century, such personal accounts have mushroomed, perhaps as their authors are ageing and the need to tell the story is becoming more urgent. My friend and former colleague Gaby Weiner wrote Tales of Loving and Leaving, which is about her parents’ lives and her grandmother’s murder in Auschwitz.⁹ I had followed some of her journey and recently went to see the stolperstein that she had put on the pavement outside her grandmother and great-aunt’s apartment in Leopoldstadt in Vienna. There are countless accounts now of different experiences of growing up in a refugee family. So why mine now?

The topic of Anne Frank’s diary—Jewish children in hiding in the Netherlands in WWII—seems to be of enduring significance and still has powerful resonance.¹⁰ It captivated my daughter as a very young girl and has influenced her reading since then. When Charlotte and I visited Frankfurt-am-Main to attend a memorial for Jews in Friedberg in 2008, she insisted on finding where the Frank family had lived before they left for the Netherlands. We found the blue plaque on the house in north-west Frankfurt. On the visit to Frankfurt in August 1997, I had purchased a wonderful map of key Jewish places in Frankfurt am Main, published in 1996. The map was called ‘Orte der Erinnerung der Juden im Frankfurt am Main’, which is roughly translated as ‘Places of Memory for the Jews of Frankfurt am Main’. It was indeed invaluable as a guide to many of the Jewish places that my father had talked about. On the inside page, it contained a picture of ‘Wohnhaus [Home] von Anne Frank, Ganghoferstrasse 24’ juxtaposed to a photo of ‘Gedenktafel, Unterlindau 23’, which was the memorial stone for the synagogue where my father had his bar mitzvah in November 1921. Curiously, by 2008 it was no longer possible to purchase the map. I still ponder why, as it was invaluable for us in our searches and as a memorial. What a journey back I have been on, and now I want to return to my present, warts and all!

Reflecting on Writing My Family Memoir

I have struggled with how to write. Most of the information at I have found is about family members that I did not know and my children and grandchildren certainly didn’t know. In some respects, though, as the initial anecdote illustrates, there are family memories buried in our consciousness. And quite how to deal with these issues seems both problematic and yet important, as it provides us with a rounded view of how we have been influenced and formed, and who these shadowy figures are. Reading through the materials is deeply emotional and intense. Sometimes I have found myself drowning in emotions and feeling the connections, despite the fact that my father, especially, found it difficult to express his feelings. His English also began to improve as he penned the letters to my mother in 1940–1941, although he was often stuck for appropriate colloquialisms.

Twenty years ago, we felt that we had sufficient material to make a PowerPoint (PPT) presentation of the family history from Germany, based around the German and Nazi passports we had found. We had followed up with getting material from the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), especially the slips that my family had filled in when they registered with their refugee organization. This was in 1997. Ten years later, in 2007, when the Jewish Refugees Committee Archive was transferred to World Jewish Relief, I wrote again to get two addenda to the ‘slips’ about my father and his brother. It was only five years ago, in 2019, that the AJR records were digitized, according to a blog I wrote on Facebook. We found more valuable information that was not on the slips that AJR had provided originally.

Since finding these, the other letters, and postcards, we have found inaccuracies in the PPT. Until recently we had few other pieces of evidence to rely on, although we have found many in both TNA and through various websites, such as ancestry.com. I will include my blogs and short comments I have written as I have found material. These are scattered across the book. It is not, then, a straightforward account of either my mother’s or my father’s life either before I was born or during my growing up or into my adulthood. It is, though, my backstory!

My plans have also changed radically. Charlotte’s love of family and her deep involvement from childhood in delving into the history of the Holocaust has helped that transformation. She read The Diary of Anne Frank at a very young age and was, according to the author, the youngest reader of Janina Bauman’s (1986) story of her escape from Poland, Winter in the Morning: A Young Girl’s Life in the Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond.¹¹ Together we wrote to Janina when she was living in Leeds, and she wrote back immediately (now over thirty-five years ago).

When I asked Charlotte whether she wanted to contribute, she was immediately enthusiastic. Her specific contribution is chapter 12. She did not want to talk about my family, but to expand our perspective into that of her father, Robert Reiner, who himself was a Jewish refugee from Miscolc in Hungary. Seventy-eight years ago now, Robert’s parents (called Bela and Charlotte) fled immediately after he was born, arriving in Paris in March 1946. They were accompanied by Bela’s younger brother Bini and their nephew Jonah, whose father was the eldest brother of the Reiners. He had been killed in a motorcycle accident after they had returned to Hungary from camps in Russia. The five Reiners remained in France for over two years, living in Nice in the summer of 1946 because of Charlotte’s health. Eventually, they were able to join other family members in London in 1949. My daughter Charlotte’s grandfather, Bela, had an elder sister Rozy (married to an English Jewish gentleman called Uncle Neville to Robert) and a younger brother Julius (Boyu) living in England from before WWII who could vouchsafe for them or find other appropriate individuals to do so. Charlotte, my daughter, has also struggled, understandably, with the emotional intensity of writing her chapter.

The Entwined David and Lea families

My mother’s family is entwined with my father’s family in complex ways. Without my mother’s family’s help, acting as financial and legal guarantors in the late 1930s, fewer of my father’s German Jewish family might have survived. Moreover, some of my mother’s family were also interned, in Shanghai, by the Japanese during WWII, which adds a more complex picture to my family memoir. It also demonstrates how diasporic my family is. Margaret Rothschild is related to us on both sides of the family, as we share two sets of great-grandparents: Nathan and Jeanette Rothschild and Yenta and Samuel Horowitz. Her mother, Lilly Rothschild (née Brown) was the daughter of my maternal grandmother’s younger sister, Annie (née Horowitz). Her father, Hans Rothschild, was the son of my paternal grandmother’s younger brother Isidor. The story that my parents always told us was that they ‘introduced’ Hans to Lilly after the end of WWII, when Hans visited my parents in Keighley to say goodbye as he was going to live in South Africa, having served in the Allied Forces and as a POW during the war. I found a lovely postcard with a picture of my elder sister Judy as a baby on Granny Golda’s lap amongst my mother’s papers. Aunty Bec had sent it to her mother at the end of September 1942. She urged her mother not to be too down and she offered the good news that Lilly and Peter (the nickname for Milly)¹² would be back in England on 8 October 1942. But it was not to be.

Lilly was travelling back to London by ship from Shanghai, China, a couple of years after war broke out. The Brown family had lived in Shanghai from about 1935. Their father, Mendel Brown, had taken up a ministerial post in a synagogue there in 1932. When war broke out, living in China was not safe, and Lilly’s elder sister, Netta, was imprisoned by the Japanese with her husband, Irving Reifler, and their baby daughter, Victoria. Lilly was accompanying her younger sister Peter back to the UK because she had tuberculosis (TB). Peter also contracted typhoid, and so they left the ship at Cape Town, where she died shortly thereafter in Johannesburg in 1942. Lilly was left alone in South Africa, where she spent the rest of the war. Eventually, in 1946, Hans arrived bearing gifts from my mother, including the fare back to London. Instead they married and stayed in Johannesburg, where they brought up three daughters: Margaret, Jenny, and Donna. Margaret has elaborated on this story (see chapter 6).

My nephew Antony found the cache of letters whilst clearing his mother’s house in East Finchley in London as it had been sold. He also gave me Judy’s file of relevant letters and other items for our PPT. I have used some of Judy’s material, as it is very apposite. Judy and her late husband had lived there for nearly fifty years. The house had been sold to pay for the costs of an expensive Jewish care home (Hammerson House on The Bishops Avenue). Judy’s husband, David, had passed away suddenly and unexpectedly over five years earlier, leaving Judy a widow with Parkinson’s and growing dementia. The brown bag containing the letters had been secreted away in a cupboard. Given my sister’s tragic health circumstances, we will never know why my mother gave them to her.

These letters altered my orientation, as they contained correspondence and a diary for the year that my father was interned. This gave a completely different perspective to my feelings about my parents and their struggles for survival. My mother showed incredible resilience and power in what she tried to achieve in 1940–1941. She became heavily involved personally and politically in trying to secure my father’s release from internment as an ‘enemy alien’. The government acted precipitately in June 1940, shortly after Churchill became prime minister, locking up many Jewish refugee men and a few women—and without recourse to the law.¹³

The letters that we found for 1940–1941, mainly from my father on his father’s notepaper headed by the title of his then redundant German wine business, tell a most agonizing story. There are none about the nine months of internment itself and ‘living behind the wire’, but there are some about the aftermath of three months. He was sent to a most inappropriate firm—Wickhams of Ware. He had to work long hours as a machine operator and live in terrible digs. Machine operation was inappropriate for his skills as a design engineer of machine tools which could have ‘contribute[d] to Hitler’s overthrow’. He put this in a letter of frustration to my mother. He also fought strongly to receive his requisite Auxiliary War Service (AWS) permit to change jobs to a more appropriate one and location. He had also planned his wedding for 22 June 1941, but the delay in receiving his AWS permit frustrated his plans for a wedding and appropriate honeymoon. His parents and then fiancée also put pressure on him about the wedding arrangements, contributing to his frustration and hurt about the indignities of internment (see chapter 8).

Given that there are no extant records of my family’s periods of internment, the aftermath of being a POW became an important feature of this story. As we shall see in intimate letters to my mother from Ware to Manchester in the spring of 1941, my father’s feelings are revealed about how it felt to be a POW and a professional engineer as a refugee. The indignities and hurt are a subsequent thread of this tapestry. Similarly, my mother’s campaign to get my father released from internment shows the strength of her feelings about the iniquities of the British state in relation to refugees. She then refused the term ‘refugee’ and buried her feelings about this throughout the rest of her life. She was also incensed about the loss of her citizenship and the right to vote in 1941, and this is also a key thread. She exhibited strong feelings about the mistreatment of women.

I still ponder on why it has taken me so long to piece together these fragments. Why were they secreted away and not destroyed or merely thrown away? Maybe my mother especially found it hard to throw them away but also could not bear to look at them again. Maybe it was too painful for her? It certainly has proved very painful for me to read them and piece together a credible story, especially of life in wartime. Its impacts throw a long shadow on my parents’ lives. They have also thrown a similar shadow on me. It feels almost traumatic to deal with them, but it is a necessity. It is for posterity and to provide a deeply personal, social, and gendered history of the times. As Judy wrote in 2005, ‘This history must not be forgotten’.

The Russian War in Ukraine from February 2022

What spurred me to put pen to paper had been the build-up to war by Russia invading Ukraine on 24 February 2022. It reminded me of how my mother’s parents were also refugees, fleeing persecution and pogroms over fifty years earlier than my German family. My mother’s mother—Golda Lea née Horowitz—was born in Staro Konstantinov (Old Konstantin) in Ukraine in 1878 when it was part of the Tsarist Russian Empire (1793–1917). The town is quite near to Lvov, or what had been called Lemberg, as part of the Prussian empire, up to WWII.

Golda’s husband, Nathan Leachinsky, was born in 1871, in a small town that was also in the Tsarist Russian Empire. It is called Lysaia Goro (Bald Mountain), Guberny Khersoor, where ‘guberny’ means ‘a governing district’. We had been led to believe, by my mother, that it was in part of the historic Polish and Lithuanian Commonwealth. But we discovered that Khersoor was misspelt on official documents, such as my grandfather’s 1913 naturalization certificate. I found the naturalization certificate in TNA. By 2013 it was open to the public, having been closed for a hundred years from 1913. A bilingual Russian and English speaker confirmed the misspelling or transliteration from Russian: it is indeed Kherson, in Ukraine.

The Kherson region was a large administrative area between the