Margot Harris came to Britain from Kassel with her family in 1939 after her father's imprisonment in Buchenwald:

"When we were packing for England, the Gestapo came & went through all the cutlery drawers & took the silver cutlery & this & that. My parents had expected this. So, in Germany, on the kitchen wall you had a salt cellar, oval enamel in white & blue. There was salt in it & my father put my mother’s jewellery into the salt cellar. He told us—they always told us what was going on—so we wouldn't look there. They came in with the big hats, turned everything over, the sofas, & they didn't find it.

So when we went across the border from Germany into Holland, again the Gestapo came in & they went through all—people were taken off because they didn't have papers but we had our papers. My mother & father [laughs] had put the jewellery into little cigarette cases. In those days little girls wore bodices. We were told to put one case in each of our bodice & we went & looked outside & they turned the carriage upside down. We learnt to smuggle at an early age. So you get streetwise.

I had a lovely little girl-friend, Rita. She lived around the corner, we used to go to each other’s houses all the time. We had a warning that we mustn’t talk to any strange men. So one day a man approached us: 'do you want some sweeties?' We ran off quickly because our mums had told us what to do or not to do. Little lessons you learnt.

Rita was Jewish. On my return to Kassel they had listed all the people who had lived in Kassel & their fate, if they hadn’t been lucky enough to live—leave. I found Rita & her parents had died in the concentration camp. That was very sad. Another sad story: my father had a bookkeeper who had a Down’s syndrome daughter. He always brought her with when he came to do the books & I used to play with her. I saw in the book, in Kassel, that the three of them had died in a concentration camp. That was sad. It was very sad."

Kassel

Memories

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