This week we were sorry to hear of the death of our interviewee Emeritus Professor Tom Arie CBE, an influential psychiatrist who left Prague for the UK in 1939 when he was six.
We also conducted our first live socially-distant interviews with Kindertransportee Hans Danziger and centenarian Alice Fraser, who came to Britain on a domestic service visa and who was interned on the Isle of Man, in the women’s camp on Port Erin. Dr Bea Lewkowicz and cameraman Frank Battersby stayed four metres apart. Both interviewees have amazing testimony, photos and artefacts. Alice's include her tribunal and internment documents and Hans's include two burnt pages of a prayer book, rescued by his father from the Oranienburgerstrasse Synagogue after Kristallnacht. We'll share their testimony and images on the site soon.
We continued to add images and quotes to our new Interviewee Experiences pages, and worked with our first guest writer, author Simon Parkin, on our Isle of Man Internment – Hutchinson Camp page. Going forwards, we hope to work with different experts to create short introductory texts to themes around the site.
On social media we learned about Ida Skubiejska's forced Soviet emigration from Poland to Tashkent and her subsequent experiences as a nurse accompanying c200 Polish children from Tehran to Palestine:
We read about Freddy Berdach first encounter with cornflakes:
And we were moved by Erika Botkai's words about her father and lost stories: