About us

Our committee
Tim Locke (co-chairman), Jonathan Conway (co-chairman), Peter Stimpson (treasurer), David Shannon, Naomi Tadmor, Jackie Stimpson, Jeffrey Craig, Sandra Ellis, Peter Holmes, Jessica Roland, Karin Fuchs
 

Our stories

David Shannon
My father, Edek, was born in Dęblin, Poland, in 1936. His mother died of typhus in the Dęblin Ghetto, and his father was shot after being handed over to the Nazis. His older brother, Moniek, was sent to forced labour camps, Buchenwald, and finally to Theresienstadt, where he was liberated by Russian forces.

Initially, Edek was in hiding with his older sister, Cesia. Amid the chaos of the Warsaw Uprising, they were separated but managed to survive.

After the war, Moniek travelled across Poland searching for his siblings. He found Cesia, and together they became part of the original 300 children brought to the UK in August 1945 who are known as the Windermere Children. In 1947, the Jewish Refugees Committee was able to reunite the family when Edek was brought from an orphanage in Poland to join them at Stoatley Rough School in Surrey.

Photo: Edek (second from right) studying a bird's nest at Stoatley Rough School

 

Jess Roland

My father’s parents, Gerda and Fred, escaped from Czechoslovakia and Germany before the annexation of the Sudetenland and went to Bombay where they lived until Partition, when they came to London.

Both Fred’s family (apart from his mother) and Gerda’s were not so lucky, all perished in the Holocaust. Gerda’s parents and beloved younger brother were sent to Terezin (Theresienstadt) and then on the last transport to Auschwitz. Her younger brother Josef (Pepek) had volunteered to go with his elderly parents to Auschwitz. He survived but died later on a death march. Her elder brother was executed in Prague by the Gestapo for being a member of the communist resistance. Gerda survived until she was 103!

As for my mother, she only discovered that her father had been the product of orthodox Jewish parents at his funeral.

I live in Lewes and am a politics lecturer, news junkie and art lover.

More on Josef's story on Wikipedia and in an account by Lena Makarova.


Photo: my grandfather, grandmother and father on holiday in Kashmir in about 1942
 

 

 

Tim Locke

My mother Ruth and uncle Raymond were brought up by their parents Hans and Vera Neumeyer as Lutherans. The Neumeyer family lived in Dachau, a quiet town known for its colony of artists but now of course indelibly connected with its notorious concentration camp, which opened in a former munitions works in 1933. Hans, a blind music teacher and composer, was Jewish while Vera had a Jewish father but was brought up by her Christian mother as a Lutheran. Ruth and Raymond had an idyllic childhood in the 1920s, but three of their grandparents were Jewish, which meant they were regarded as Jews by the Nuremberg laws of 1935.

With the advent of the Nazis, Hans lost his job and the Neumeyers became increasingly poor. In November 1938 the Neumeyers were ordered to leave their house by dawn the next day or else face imprisonment.

Ruth and Raymond managed to escape to England in May 1939 on a Kindertransport, but the parents both perished in Nazi camps – Theresienstadt and Auschwitz.

After Ruth’s death in 2012 I found a huge and remarkable collection of letters, diaries, photos and more from the family’s past, all of which is to be taken into the archives of the Imperial War Museum, where some items are on display in the new Holocaust Galleries. Through these artefacts I have managed to find out much about the story and record it in my blog ephraimneumeyer.wordpress.com  


Photo: the Neumeyers in their garden in Dachau, around 1929

 

Peter Holmes

My mother Rosl was born in Cieszanow, Austrian Galicia, in 1914. Her parents fled from there to escape the Russian army  to Vienna in 1915. She became an Austrian citizen and was studying psychology  at Vienna when the Nazis invaded and she and her widowed mother were forced to become refugees for a second time, going to London in 1938, where met my father. He was an English industrial chemist who had a job in a metallurgical firm run by anti-Nazi refugees, mostly Jewish.

She travelled with her friend Trude Falk whose parents stayed behind and died in the Lodz ghetto in 1942.

Rosl died in 1974 and my father later remarried with Trude.