Came With Parents or Close Family

When my parents left Breslau & said goodbye to their parents, my mother’s father brought out a small package containing a watch that my grandfather had had the foresight to buy & give to his daughter so that she'd have a bar mitzvah present for the little boy, then aged 2, when he was 13. This watch was the last gift & the last act of father & daughter on that station & she kept that watch carefully for the next 11 years & gave it to me at my bar mitzvah. There was only one occasion when she let me wear it before I was 13. That was to take the entrance exam for Haberdasher’s School & it brought me good luck & I got in. It became a totem for me. I wore it on every special occasion, every exam I took at university. Every special occasion in my life, I will wear that watch.

And on one holiday– it was in Switzerland in Champéry and we met an English Lord, Sir Robert Dunlop. And he and my father hit it off, they became good friends, and my mother was also a stamp collector and Lady Dunlop was a stamp collector. And my father was told by Sir Robert, ‘Don’t go back to Germany,’ and my mother was told by Lady Dunlop, ‘If you have to go just send me one stamp, one rare stamp, and I will know you need help.’ And that’s how we got our papers [to emigrate to England].

The journey should take 36 hours by train. It took us 4 days. We got to Cologne & the Germans caused us some problems. We were turfed off the train. It’s midnight, pitch dark, I remember Cologne as an absolutely empty station, just us sitting around not knowing what to do. We found a train the following morning & went to Holland. This time we were in a bigger train, about 200 refugees. Once again we were thrown off with quite a number of these other people, but by some miracle we got onto another train & managed to get through to Flushing. A funny recollection: in those days Dutch engines had a very unique feature, highly polished brass sort of round turrets on their engines. I can still see these polished dome things sitting on the engine. Anyway, we got to Flushing and then we went across to Harwich. We arrived at Liverpool Street Station. It’s always midnight, every time we arrive it’s midnight, I don’t know why. They threw the luggage out from the luggage van. My aunt had a huge duffel bag for the family shoes & this thing ripped & there on the platform were all the shoes. That’s my arrival at Liverpool Street Station.