This week we commemorated the 75th anniversary of VJ Day by revisiting the testimony of Freddie Boxer, who spent much of the war interned in Shanghai. The end of the war meant he could marry his Russian fiancee, which he did three days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Freddie emigrated solo to Shanghai from Vienna, where his family ran a coffee house. He was the only member of his family to survive the war.
Archive Director Dr Bea Lewkowicz wrote a fascinating blog about interviewing 98-year-old author, Dutch Resistance fighter and Ravensbrück survivor Selma van de Perre. In this blog Bea discusses working towards a best practise for doing oral history interviews during Covid-19. Read the blog here.
We enjoyed hearing about Ruth Webber's first family holiday after the war, financed by the sale of her grandmother's patterned china:
We identified with Ruth's desire to be normal:
And we loved seeing Bob Kirk's amazing photos, especially this one of him building an air raid shelter near Whipsnade Zoo:
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