Lilly Lampert came to Britain from Vienna on a Kindertransport in 1939:

"All I know: I wanted to come to England to be with my sister Gertie. I didn't know I wasn't going to see my parents again, because they landed up in Theresienstadt. I shared a bedroom with my parents until my sister left & then I got her room. She came to England 6 months before me. She got somebody to guarantee me, because in those days you couldn't just come to England. She had a hell of a job to get somebody to put £50 pounds forward.

I was always doing things. Playing with my dolls, making dolls clothes. Television stops all that, a lot of things I used to do. I brought 2 suitcases. Clothes & one doll. You know, you can't just bring things to England. It had to be a certain weight only.

When Hitler marched in, they welcomed him with open arms, didn’t they, the Viennese? That's all I really remember. Things were hidden from me, because I was a little girl. Now all the young kids, they know everything. But in those days, anything not nice was sheltered. My parents were going to follow me. My sister tried desperately to find somebody to – for my mother to be a cook somewhere & my father, a gardener, which he'd never done his life before. But somebody had to say, ‘Yes, he can come & do my garden’, just to get out. But war came.

The train ride was at night time. We left on the 13th. I always tell people 13 must be lucky for me, otherwise I wouldn't be alive. I wouldn't have left Vienna. I would be dead like the rest of my family. It was just a normal journey. I was 9. My sister met me at the station. She took me back to her place, one room somewhere. She went to Bloomsbury House. They managed to find me a place in The Beacon in Rusthall. A girl's hostel. She put me on the train & someone met me on the other side.

I must have been quite nervous. You don't know the language. You don't know where you are. Terrible, but I survived. But we had 3 lakes. It was a lovely place we lived in. Now it's a sort of hotel. 5 days after I arrived someone I knew from Vienna came there. Mela. She was thrilled to see me. We became good friends until she died.

Most people either were German or Austrian. From Czechoslovakia we got 1 or 2. They discouraged us to speak German. They wanted us to speak English. We were quite happy there. I stayed till I came to London in 1947. It was a lovely place & they were nice to us. Most of them. We had snakes in the garden. Mainly grass snakes, apparently. But a snake is a snake, isn't it? They always told us they were only grass snakes, but I wasn't so sure.

I couldn't write letters to my parents anymore under normal postage, it had to go through the Red Cross. Only a certain amount of words. I had to write it in an office in Tunbridge Wells, tell them the words. They wrote them down. All I was allowed to do is sign my name, wasn't allowed to even write it myself. Send it to Vienna & my parents answered on the same bit of paper.

It's like a boarding school, only a bit rougher. No luxuries. It was quite impersonal, because the staff really, I think they did it just for money. They didn't care for us. There was one matron we quite liked, Mrs Fisher. She was nice because she had her own daughter there. They squashed us in, about 8 in a room. It's not nice sleeping with so many people, squashed in very close to each other. It's hard to remember VE Day because I've wiped these memories out. I don't think about them anymore. It's a different world. Everyone was happy, I suppose.

After the war, in 1946, I got a letter from my mother. She wrote that letter in 1943 & gave it to an aunt of mine who was in the concentration camp with her. This aunt survived, went to America & she sent me the letter that my mother wrote. My father was already dead. It says she's now all alone & would bear anything if she could see me for just a second. She must have been very, very, very low. It hurts when you read a thing like that. You should never know anything like that again happening. But it still goes on. That's all I can tell you."

Red Cross Letters

Memories

Subscribe to our newsletter