Bronia Snow came to Britain in 1939 on a Nicholas Winton Kindertransport from Prague:

"My parents always discussed everything. But not a word was spoken about my going to England. So I found myself one fine day, my mother packing a suitcase, me packing a little rucksack full of my doll, my favourite book & so on. On a platform of the main railway station, & getting on a train, with no idea it was going to happen. The platform was full of not only parents with children, but German soldiers with fixed bayonets. I was scared stiff. I thought: since they want to kill us all, why do they let the children, the next generation go? So I thought they would attack us, I was really scared.

The idea was: my mother had a brother in New York who was very comfortably off. We were all going there. My parents & brother were going to pick me up in London, they were just waiting for a document called an affidavit which never came in time. I would have been an American person, instead of which I became an English schoolgirl.

When I first arrived, I was frightened, alone. I didn’t speak a word of English. My aunt & uncle lacked my parents' warmth. They lived a life of luxury, with servants. It was a completely different atmosphere. The children were with a governess in the nursery, the parents were golfing, playing bridge, you know the sort.

I had one last letter from my father, from Theresienstadt, saying, “We’re not starving, we have potatoes to eat.” Then I had the final notification. I was in the sixth form, 1945. One day before school, as I was getting ready, I had a notification informing me that on such & such a date, transport number so & so, my parents & brother were taken to Auschwitz. The Germans kept detailed numbers, records of the people they were going to murder. Thoroughly ridiculous. They were sent to Auschwitz & no more was heard of them.

So I go to school--I mean that was a big shock, because all through the war I had lived in hope of being reunited, we were a very close loving family. So that as closure, I knew I’d never see them again. So I go to school as usual, [laughs], our headmistress announces: “Girls, we are very fortunate to have with us today Miss Moose who has just come back from Bergen-Belsen & will tell us all about it.”

So I sat through that, I didn’t want to have to climb over everybody’s legs, & make an exhibition of myself, so I sat & listened to it all. Didn’t do me any harm, made me even more grateful for what I had escaped. And the chances I had had, & I determined I would try & live the sort of life my parents would have wanted me to live, so they’d be proud of me, & make the best of my chances. I became top of my year, was the school hockey team champion. I became an English schoolgirl, I loved it.

But when I was in the sixth form my headmistress called me into her room & said, “Bronia, we would have liked to have made you head girl, but your lack of tact is against you.” [Laughs]. I had no idea I was tactless. “But we will make you senior prefect, in charge of discipline instead,” I’d been such a naughty child & there was I in charge of discipline, it was an absolute hoot.

What’s lacking in England is an education, the young aren’t being taught history. They’re in cloud cuckoo land, they think England will always be free & democratic, without them even bothering to vote. They don’t realise that if the good people don’t bother, the baddies take over. Just what happened in Germany. Hitler took over before people realised."

Bronia Snow

Memories

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