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Frank Bright Read full biography at The AJR / Refugee Voices Testimony Archive Memories 960: The Awful Heydrich Reprisals Frank Bright Two Gestapo men came to our flat & asked where was I at the time. My mother had been indoors. I had just arrived from school... Read Full Memory Previous Person Next Person

Sweden Ribbingelund Memories 974: How To Recover Susan Pollack OBE It took a long time for me to strengthen my own needs. I made a friend & she made a very big, deep impression on me. A shared nightmare... Previous Location Next Location

Hans Danziger Read full biography at The AJR / Refugee Voices Testimony Archive Memories 996: How To Hide In Berlin Hans Danziger My father had nerves of steel. Before the war, Jews were obliged to put ‘Israel’ in front of their names. My father refused... Read Full Memory Previous Person Next Person

Margot Harris Read full biography at The AJR / Refugee Voices Testimony Archive Memories 980: Getting Streetwise Margot Harris When we were packing for England, the Gestapo came & went through all the cutlery drawers & took the silver cutlery & this & that... Read Full Memory Previous Person Next Person

Trude Silman MBE Read full biography at The AJR / Refugee Voices Testimony Archive Memories 997: My Mother & Father Trude Silman MBE My mother is a question mark. I know she survived ‘til 1944 because we used to get the odd occasional 25-word Red Cross letter, but then it stopped... Read Full Memory Previous Person Next Person

Gerti Baruch Read full biography at The AJR / Refugee Voices Testimony Archive Memories 956: Getting To Grips With It Gerti Baruch On Sundays in Vienna my father used to take me to Café Siller, along the Promenade. He used to read the paper... Read Full Memory Previous Person Next Person

Selma van de Perre Read full biography at The AJR / Refugee Voices Testimony Archive Memories 936: Why It's Necessary To Talk & Write Selma van de Perre I didn’t speak at all the first 30 years! To anyone or anything or myself. It was in 1975 with the opening of the Ravensbrück Memorial... Read Full Memory 953: Slave Labour In Ravensbrück Selma van de Perre They transported us to Ravensbrück. Terrible. Screaming, shouting, dogs & whips. The dogs had the same clothes as the soldiers... Read Full Memory Previous Person Next Person

Sweden Sweden Memories 928: Goodness Kindness & Helpfulness Susan Pollack OBE I never exchanged a word with anyone. I was on my own, withdrawn within myself. If you'd been found talking to someone, you'd have been shot... 972: Discovering My Brother Was Alive Mala Tribich MBE One day I got a letter from my brother Ben. We were in this stately home with all its beauty, I opened it, I read it & was so excited... Previous Location Next Location

948: Not Remembering My Emotions Hella Pick CBE Credits & tags Home Memories People Places Experiences About Contact Menu Close March 15 939: Hella Pick CBE arrives in Britain from Vienna on a Kindertransport: I can still see myself arriving at Liverpool Street Station & being picked up. That I can remember. But I can’t remember much about the journey. Just a blank. It’s shocking. It shocks me. But it also saved me from thinking about it too much. I can’t remember my emotions. The only English I knew was ‘Goodbye’ so I said “Goodbye” to the family who picked me up. A very nice house in West Hampstead. They had 3 children. They put me to school in London straight away. I don’t remember much about the school at all. But at the end of the first term, I found a school certificate: I was speaking English, obviously doing all right. But I wasn’t there long because then summer holidays & then off I went to the Lake District to be with my mother. Hella's mother arrived in Britain on a domestic permit in June 1939. Obviously huge relief. I was so lucky. She found a job with the Chorleys who wanted someone who knew how to bake Austrian cakes. Theo Chorley became the last hereditary peer to be created in this country. I’m very, very friendly with all their children. Hella's parents divorced when she was 3. Her father remarried & emigrated to the US. I really hardly ever knew my father. The Board of Deputies for a time, tried to get my father to make some financial contribution.He adamantly refused to get involved. He never wanted to do anything for me. My mother adapted well. She learnt English very rapidly. I have memories of the Lake District partly because there are photographs. I was happy walking & swimming & playing with the other children. Just having a normal child’s life. Then war broke out & the Chorleys had to go back to London. My mother had to find another job. She found this job with a family who were very comfortably off. Had a lovely house. But treated her throughout the war as just their cook. I had to go into the house by the back door. If I wanted to swim in the lake, I had to make sure than nobody else was using the garden or was swimming. This sort of thing. It made it hard for me to bring my school friends. Only the very closest friends could be told the circumstances that I was living in. Which, you know, created—well, I don’t know how much a problem it was. I had two or three very close friends who certainly did come. But it was a curious life for a small child. On the one hand to be going to a school where most of the children came from well-off established families & then going home through their back door. And we were ranked as enemy aliens. For instance, if I had school friends who lived on the other side of Lake Windermere which was in what was then Lancashire. Lancashire was a protected area: it had a prisoner-of-war camp. I—theoretically—had to ask permission from the police to go across the lake. But in fact, what we did was to row across the lake without permission. But things like that for a small child were odd experiences. I went a lot to a lovely village called Grasmere in the Lake District & became friends with one of the Lake artists called Heaton Cooper & his wife, a sculptress. They became my anchor, the absolute firmament in my life. They gave me stability which nothing else gave me. I absolutely refused to speak German. If my mother spoke a word of German on a street I would just scream at her & say, 'Speak English!' Then I had a male teacher I totally fell in love with, at the age of 13. And he said to me, 'German is your mother tongue. You’ve just got to speak German.' He forced me again to confront German. Previous Memory Next Memory ← Previous Memory Credits & tags Edited from Hella Pick CBE's interview with Dr Bea Lewkowicz for AJR Refugee Voices Testimony Archive, February 2019 • Learn More → Hella Pick CBE Domestic Service Helped By Non-Jews Kindertransport Not Remembering Read AJR biography Next Memory → See Instagram & Facebook posts England Text adapted & edited by Susanna Kleeman See Locations Facebook & Instagram Posts

950: Liberation of Majdanek Rose Lebor Credits & tags Home Memories People Places Experiences About Contact Menu Close July 1944: Majdanek concentration camp is liberated by Soviet troops. Rose Lebor, age 4, was there with her mother: At liberation I was four. All the executions, the beatings that they had to watch. These are things that my mother could never bring herself to tell me directly. She was lucky to have survived, but she made her own luck. Which I think some people did. They found a way, a little niche, a little something to say or to do, that would make them survive another day. She managed to get one of the Kommandants to let her out of the camp and go & work in a family in Lublin, who would give her scraps of food. It allowed us to have a little bit more & survive another day. One day at a time. She kept me with her all the time. The roll call, she would put me under the bench, then she would go out. She would stand near German women, that were not Polish, here in prison for other reasons. That probably helped her not to be selected. So it was each time hoping that she wouldn’t be selected. Hoping she can go out & do a little work & bring back a little scrap of food. Having survived such horrors, who wants to talk about it? You really want to forget about it. In ’44, when the war was nearly finished, she said that she realised that something big was happening, because all the Germans were in the courtyard burning documents. But it all happened so very quickly; they didn’t have time to burn the documents. Then all the inmates were put on trains to be taken to Auschwitz. They were emptying the camp in this way. She then pretended that she was ill. That she couldn’t possibly stand on her feet. So she was allowed to go in the van that the German was driving with the seven remaining children. This is really what saved our lives, because instead of going by train directly to Auschwitz, he went by road. And, as they were crossing, outside Krakow, in the woods the Russian tanks came through. So when the German saw the red flag, he knew his time was up. So he took out his gun & just shot himself, next to my mother. And the tank drove into this van, thinking that it was probably full of German soldiers, but it wasn’t. It was the few children & one wounded woman by that time, because she got wounded by all the glass, the splashing that happened. They didn’t know what to do with us, so they took us out of there. Put us on the side of the road. [half-laughs at the absurdity] The tank drove off. They must have gone into Krakow & told the Red Cross. Because they came & took us to an assembly place in Krakow itself, where they put everybody that they could find there, & where later on, people would search for their families. Little bits of bread. That’s all there was. Nobody had much food. A lot of them just died of hunger. They died of overwork, they died of hunger, they died of disease. She said, 'I was ill, but I got over it'. So… yes, surviving was luck, and surviving was also that I had a very strong mother. A very, very strong woman. Previous Memory Next Memory ← Previous Memory Credits & tags Edited from Rose Lebor's interview with Dr Bea Lewkowicz for AJR Refugee Voices Testimony Archive, December 2015 • Learn More → Rose Lebor Concentration Camp Liberation Majdanek Telling The Story Read AJR biography Next Memory → See Instagram & Facebook posts Poland Text adapted & edited by Susanna Kleeman See Locations Facebook & Instagram Posts

Harry Bibring BEM Read full biography at The AJR / Refugee Voices Testimony Archive Memories 995: Father's Shop Harry Bibring BEM It was perfectly OK to try & obtain Jewish property by purchasing it at a peppercorn price... Read Full Memory Previous Person Next Person

Miriam Freedman Read full biography at The AJR / Refugee Voices Testimony Archive Memories 985: Black Heart Outside The Flat Miriam Freedman It's difficult. Children feel very protected. Everything goes well. Then all of a sudden you see terrible things, like people disappearing... Read Full Memory 999: The Caretaker & His Daughter Miriam Freedman At night time, the caretaker used to bring us food. We sat there, never able to talk, no toys or books or anything. Things becoming all the time worse... Read Full Memory Previous Person Next Person