Stella Shinder, Chemnitz, 1934:

It was when I started school at the age of six, that I had my first encounter. I had a little umbrella with red stripes. A little schoolmate of mine said, 'Is that the blood of German babies that the Jews are killing?'

I came home to my mother & said, 'Could this be true?' That was my first experience of what was happening. My mother said: 'Absolutely not. This is not true. You must never believe that'.

My father had an encounter with a janitor who called him a ‘dirty Jew’. This man had a stick. So my father took the stick & beat him up.

There was never any talk about going. Never. It wasn’t until we actually left in July 1938—Friday the 13th—that my mother—we went on our usual holiday to Czechoslovakia.

We lived quite near the border & holiday in Karlovy Vary. A beautiful spa in the Sudeten part of Czechoslovakia. When we crossed the border, my mother said to my brother & myself, 'We are never going back'. So that was it.

My brother & I were elated. Because we'd already experienced antisemitism. We were thrown out of our schools. We were spat at in the street. We'd experienced antisemitism quite strongly. We weren't allowed to sit on park benches or use swimming pools. So we were very, very happy to leave all that behind.

When we were getting ready, I said 'Mummy why are you packing winter stockings on our summer holiday?' She gave me a smack & said, 'Be quiet'. Because we had a cleaning lady working in the flat & she didn’t want her to know that we would never come back again.

My father was still in Germany & didn’t want to leave, because we had a beautiful home. He had a business. He didn’t want to leave.

My mother wrote to him & said 'If you don’t follow us, you'll never see us again'. So he packed his bag & he had some money in a briefcase. And on the platform at the station he was so nervous he left this bag with the money behind. My poor, poor father. We never saw it again. So he came & joined us.

Then we went to live in Prague, where we stayed for six months prior to coming to England. So. Then we had a small flat which we rented in Prague. My brother & I attended a German-speaking school. And of course we were spat at by the Czech children not for being Jewish but because they thought we were Germans.

There was a lot of anti-German feeling in Czechoslovakia at that time. We had a letter from my father’s parents who lived in Warsaw at the time to say there was an aunt, my grandfather’s sister, living in England, in London. 'Write to her, get her to, get her to get you a visitor’s visa. Get out of Czechoslovakia because Hitler’s going to come into Czechoslovakia'. So, we were so lucky, we managed to get this visa.

My mother arranged for us to fly to England. Crossing Germany would have been dangerous for us, if we'd gone by train. So we took a flight which landed at Brussels & then another flight from Brussels to London. We landed in London on the 6th of December 1938. Croydon Airport.

When we left, my mother used to write to—in those days we didn’t all have telephones. She would write to our friends, 'Leave, leave'. And nobody paid any attention. Nobody paid any attention. There was great antisemitism, but nobody could have imagined what finally happened.

Stella Shinder

Memories

Subscribe to our newsletter