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Bridging Generations

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 11:40:18 GMT

The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2026 is 'Bridging Generations'. The Holocaust was, or may seem to be, a long time ago and there are few survivors nowadays to tell us of their experiences of that time. If we cannot bridge the generations, and inspire younger people to remember and care about that event in 'history', maybe the memory will be lost for ever. Does that matter?

When a person loses their memory, they are no longer the same person. Similarly, a nation that forgets is in danger of losing its identity. Whatever nation we belong to, we must remember the events of the Holocaust, record them, acknowledge the violence, abuse, and terror that was inflicted on ordinary people - so that we can do all in our power to prevent such atrocities ever happening again. And we must do this even while we know that in some parts of the world similar atrocities are currently already a reality.

The accounts of survivors, the testimonies of those who witnessed events, and the documents from those who did not survive may be unfinished or fragmentary, but together they build a monument to the memory of people caught up in one of the worst catastrophies that the world had hitherto known.

Creating an active collective memory requires younger people to be part of the memory-making. The need for relevant information and ways of transmitting it to new generations, the participation of young people in establishing a bank of memory against a loss of identity, and their involvement in civic life remains crucial if a nation does not lose its memory and run the risk of repeating horrors from the past.

In Wilhelmshaven in Germany, young people have spearheaded a campaign to remember former members of the Jewish community in their city. Almost a year ago, in February 2025, they successfully had laid in their city 'Stolpersteine' [lit: 'stumbling stones'] in memory of members of five families of the former Jewish community that had been deliberately destroyed by the National Socialist Government in the 1930s and early 1940s. As I write, a new cohort of students is researching, recording, and remembering other families so that those people and their contribution to Wilhelmshaven's civic, cultural, and commercial life is rightly appreciated. Young people such as these who keep alive memories and who are active in their communities will, hopefully, be better equipped and able to act against any rise in right-wing radicalism and protect their country's democracy.

photo: Wilhelmshaven students, their teachers, the artist Gunter Demnig, and representatives of the former Jewish community

after the laying of the last Stolperstein, Thursday 6 February 2025.

The death of baby Victor 1911

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 03:00:02 GMT

Victor Albert Andrew was the cherished son of Emily and Fred Hepburn. After four daughters, they at last had a son and they honoured him with names from the recent royal family – Victoria and Albert. He was born in January 1911, two years after his sister, Doris, and was baptised in the local church of St Philip in Kennington Road in south London on 7 May. But on 7 August 1911, when he was 7 months old, he died of broncho-pneumonia, diarrhoea and vomiting in the Royal Waterloo Hospital, just one mile from home. Emily was with him when he died.

He was by no means the only baby to die during that 'perfect summer' of 1911. It was one of the hottest on record throughout western Europe, and the driest for over a hundred years, with the warmest periods being in early June, and late July to mid-August. From 17 July, temperatures soared and stayed high throughout July and August. There was less than 70% of the average rainfall, with the severest drought coinciding with the time of greatest heat, and with only very light and occasional wind. Victor Albert Andrew died on one of the hottest days of the summer, when the temperature reached nearly 100ºF (37.8ºC). And the weather had alternated between extreme heat and severe cold.

On 27 July giant hailstones had fallen on London and brought traffic to a standstill. 'The Times' began a regular column on 'Deaths from Heat' – and the increase in numbers was largely accounted for by infant deaths. In poorer communities, intestinal infectious diseases were difficult to control and were often fatal for very young children, especially if they lived in crowded accommodation. No-one had refrigeration or air conditioning and babies died from diarrhoea associated with rotted food and bad milk.

This massive and sudden jump in the medical health statistics was particularly high in this area of south London. The noxious smells in the streets intensified, no rain fell, and many people planned to escape the town during the Bank Holiday. Emily Hepburn did not go to the seaside. It was Bank Holiday Monday when her baby son died.

It must have been a terrible, long and weary walk back home from the hospital - through the hot and smelly streets – almost a mile down the Waterloo Road, and then a few streets further on past the Bethlem Hospital before she was home in Austral Street. Once there, she had the care of her other young children. Emily Mary, the eldest, was just eight years old, Ruby Grace was six, Rosina May four, and Doris Winifred was still only two. Many years later, it was still told in the family how keenly Emily felt the death of her little son, and how much she grieved for him.

( photo shows the death certificate of Victor Albert Andrew Hepburn)

Resistance in Arette 1940 - 1945

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 03:00:02 GMT

Thirty years after the Second World War, the cousin of Amélie Derrez, François Casabonne, described her as a member of the Resistance. She lived in the village of Arette in the south-west of France, near to the Spanish border, was married to the secretary of the mayor, and perhaps does not fit the popular idea of a Resistance fighter.

She did not carry arms – as far as I know – and in the early years of the war, when Arette was not occupied by German forces, she certainly did not belong to a recognised group of people intent on subversive activity. Rather, her sense of propriety, her devout Catholic beliefs, and her ingrained Basque traditions made it impossible for her to treat other people as the Nazis expected. While her resistance was passive, it was powerful.

Amélie was married to Gaston Derrez who worked in the town hall in Arette as secretary to the mayor. He was known in the village at that time as someone who was prepared, for example, to make sure that documents were available for young men who wished to leave to escape official transfer to Germany as slave labour. The escape routes across the nearby mountains of the Pyrénées were managed by local shepherds and available for fit young men who wished to join the Free French in Algeria – and who had the necessary paperwork. The mayor at the time was Pierre Casabonne – a relative of his wife's family – who belonged to a respected local family that was devoutly Catholic.

During the Second World War, many people in France supported the persecution of Jews, communists, and foreigners. At the beginning of the war, the people of the Basque areas generally supported the Vichy regime which was sympathetic towards traditional regions. Amélie Derrez resisted. She demonstrated her resistance by helping the Jewish refugees who had arrived in her village at the beginning of 1941. There were many refugees in the village, but only a few foreign Jews amongst them. Amélie befriended the women – Henny Hartog, Elisabeth Preis, and Elisabeth's mother, Gertrud Schück – and invited them to her house. Every afternoon, they gathered around her kitchen table to talk, share experiences, advise each other – and listen to the radio (itself a subversive act).

They listened to 'Radio Londres' – the BBC broadcasts in French to France – and so had more up to date, reliable news than anyone else. There were very few radios in the village, but these women were able to stay informed about the progress of the war, know that they were ahead of the rumours, and keep sane as their world shifted around them.

They also created bonds of friendship. When Henny worried about her husband being drafted into a work camp for foreign men, Amélie found work for him in the village with her cousin. When Henny was deported from Arette, she wrote a final, heart-broken letter to Amélie, and Amélie grieved the sudden departure of her Jewish friends for many years. In 1947, she was still in correspondence with another refugee to ask what she should do with items that had been left with her for safe keeping when people had been taken away from the village. Amélie Derrez died in Arette on 14 June 1950, aged 60. Her husband, Gaston Derrez, died there on 8 December 1958, aged 74.

(photo of Amélie Derrez)

Commemoration at Camp de Gurs

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 03:00:00 GMT

The camp at Gurs in south-west France, about 40 kilometres from Pau, was constructed in 1939 as an internment camp and prisoner of war camp. It was initially set up by the French government to receive those fleeing Spain at the end of the Spanish Civil War. In 1940, when France signed an armistice with Germany, the camp was then used to house foreign Jews and other 'undesirables'. The first contingent arrived on 21 May 1940.

A few months later, in October 1940, the Nazis decided to evacuate all the Jews from Baden and send them westwards to Gurs. That month, some 6,500 to 7,500 Jews arrived in Gurs adding significantly to the crisis of accommodation for the refugees in the area.

In 1942, most of the Jews in the area were taken to Camp de Gurs as part of the Nazis' Final Solution in exterminating the Jews. Beginning in August 1942, they were then sent from Gurs in convoys to the internment camp at Drancy in Paris from where they were deported to extermination camps 'in the East'. Most of them were murdered in Auschwitz.

The camp was dismantled in 1946. More than thirty years later, in 1979, the 40 ^th anniversary of the creation of the camp, young people in the area started to explore their past and began to invite ex-inmates of the camp to conferences and lectures. This was much-publicised locally and led to an event the following year when there was a reunion at Gurs on 20 – 21 July.

The reunion drew people from many countries who had been former detainees, as well as others who had been associated with the French Resistance, or those who had survived the Death Camps. Together, they created an organisation called 'L'Amicale de Gurs' ('Friends of Gurs') which now has its own newsletter and also holds an annual commemorative ceremony that is attended by various Jewish organisations, representatives from Baden, as well as local officials and supporters.

The event commemorates the people who have passed through Gurs and suffered there, and it draws attention to the evils of dictatorial political regimes. Remembering the people and the place makes us all aware of the need to keep alive these memories and use them to inspire us to an active commitment to ensure – in whatever way we are each able – that we are involved in creating a society that turns away from intolerance, racism, cruelty and violence and builds something better in its place.

(the photo shows part of an earlier year's commemoration)

The Vel d'Hiv roundup 16 - 17 July 1942

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 03:00:03 GMT

The Vel d'Hiv (short for Vélodrome d'Hiver) round-up was a mass arrest of Jews in Paris on 16 July 1942 by Vichy police at the request of the German occupying authorities. It was part of a plan to eradicate Jews from all of France. The round-up was part of the 'Final Solution' decided at the Wannsee conference in January 1942, and was a jo int operation between German administrators and French collaborators.

The Vel d'Hiv was a large indoor sports stadium with a cycle track and had already been used as an internment location for Jewish women in the summer of 1940, when Henny Hartog had been one of the women interned there.

There had been other round-ups in France earlier in the year but they had failed to deliver the numbers of Jews promised to the Germans. This one was aimed at all foreign Jews aged from 16 to 50, although exceptions were made for some women. It was intended that children would be sorted at the assembly centre but many children were eventually included in the final number. The director of the city police ordered that

'the operations must be effected with maximum speed, without pointless speaking, and without comment'.

The round-up began at 4.0am on Thursday 16 July 1942 with 9,000 policemen involved. They carried with them detailed lists of the names and addresses of those Jews they were searching for – information that had been carefully collected from existing records and censuses in the city. In total, 13,152 Jews were arrested, including 5,802 women and 4,051 children. They were each allowed to take with them a blanket, a jumper, a pair of shoes and two shirts.

Inside the Vel d'Hiv the summer heat was intense. with the effect of the sun through the darkened glass roof increasing the temperature. All windows were blocked, there were no toilets, and the only food available was that being supplied by Quakers and members of the Red Cross. Anyone who tried to escape was shot and there were some who committed suicide.

After five days, the detainees were taken to other internment camps in France and from there to Auschwitz and other extermination camps.

A fire destroyed part of the Vel d'Hiv in 1959 and the rest of the structure was afterwards demolished. On 3 February 1993, the French President, François Mitterand, commissioned a monument to be erected on the site and this now stands nearby, on the Quai de Grenelle, by the side of the River Seine. It is the work of the Polish sculptor, Walter Spitzer, who was himself a survivor of Auschwitz. The sculpture includes children, a pregnant woman, and a sick man. It was inaugurated on 17 July 1994.

(the photo shows the sculpture)

Change of Immigration Law in USA 1941

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 03:00:00 GMT

During the 1930s, the USA had no designated refugee policy; it only had an immigration policy. American public opinion did not favour increased immigration as many Americans feared that immigrants would 'steal' their jobs. In order to prove that they would not be an economic burden on the state, prospective immigrants had to find an American sponsor who would guarantee their financial resources in an affidavit. The immigration process was slow, with strict quotas limiting the number of people who could immigrate each year. The immigration laws were never revised or adjusted between 1933 and 1941.

As in Europe, there were Americans who believed that the rapid military success of the German army in May 1940 could be attributed to the work of spies, and there was concern that Germany was then taking advantage of the masses of Jews trying to flee by sending spies abroad. So, consular officials were urged to take extra care screening applicants for immigration, and in June 1941 a 'relatives rule' was also issued, denying visas to prospective immigrants who still had family members in Nazi-controlled territories.

On 1 July 1941, the American State Department centralised all visa control in Washington DC. A new review was ordered for each applicant and extra documentation was required, including a second financial affidavit. From that date, emigration from Nazi-controlled territory became virtually impossible. As a result, many thousands of Jews who had applied at American consulates in Europe no longer had any chance to immigrate. Many of them were subsequently murdered in the Holocaust by the Nazis.

Henny and Hermann Hartog were clearly aware of these developments and the new regulations. During the rest of that summer, they both had to come to terms with the likelihood that their emigration would not happen. They were intensely sad at this turn of events and Hermann wrote about his bitter disappointment that their relatives in America could not manage to raise the (very substantial) sum of money they needed for the fare. To have come so far in the emigration process, and to be denied success because of a lack of resources and an extreme tightening of the regulations over which they had no control, was a very cruel blow.

As Hermann wrote to his daughters on 6 July 1941,

'We hear that more specific regulations are again coming from America, so all of our work was probably over and we start again from the beginning. So we have little hope that we can go to America. And whether we survive the war lies in God's hand, because no-one knows how long this war will last, and what will become of us.'

(photo shows the original affidavit for the Hartog family)

When Letters are the only Way to stay Connected

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 03:00:00 GMT

During the Second World War, the main way that people who were separated from each other could connect was through letter-writing. In our own family, letters that we discovered gave us a new understanding of a time and experience that our parents had never wished to discuss. Fragile bits of paper, with almost undecipherable writing in a foreign language, took us on an intense journey of family discovery.

My husband's grandparents, Henny and Hermann Hartog, had lived in Germany with their two young daughters. Both of them were from Jewish families and he was a teacher and cantor in the synagogue. During the 1930s, they sent their elder daughter to England for the education that was denied to her in Germany, and their second daughter arrived in England on the first Kindertransport in December 1938. Henny and Hermann fled to Belgium and then lived as refugees in France before they were deported.

Throughout this time, their only family contact was through letters. At first, these letters were frequent and long, with the parents trying to bring up their children from afar, checking out their clothes, their school reports, giving advice about behaviour and education – and confident for a future where they would all soon live together again in America. In May 1939, they even agreed with their children that the girls would write on a Saturday so that this letter was received by their parents on the following Tuesday and an immediate reply could arrive in England by the end of the week, on the Sabbath.

This efficient plan could not survive war. When Henny and Hermann became refugees in France, they found themselves anxiously awaiting letters in a deteriorating postal system. France had become an enemy of Britain, so it was difficult to send or receive mail between the two countries. Henny and Hermann continued to write once a month to their daughters and waited anxiously for replies that never came. They suggested new routes for the post. These included writing through a mutual friend – a fellow Jewish teacher, Max Ruda, who lived in Zeurich, in neutral Switzerland. The International Red Cross helped with some postal arrangements, and there were suggestions about sending letters with a reply slip via organisations in Lisbon, but it was a rare occasion when a letter got through – and a time for celebration when a bundle of several very occasionally turned up all at the same time.

As Henny wrote,

'It was a great joy and surprise for us when finally a letter from you arrived, and we are even happier that you received the six letters from us! In any case, we have many worries but our greatest joy is when we receive good and frequent letters from you.'

In France, people increasingly recognised the presence of police terror, informers and collaborators in their communities. They shared less with each other in their conversations, and letters became comparatively bland. Henny and Hermann no longer mentioned the names of any of the people who were helping them. Everyone was beginning to wall themselves into a silence that they hoped would give better security.

By 1942, everyone was grateful for any letters because they showed that the people who mattered to them were still alive. These letters came ultimately to tell merely the often trivial details of their daily lives, and remembrances of happy times that they had once spent together. In the end, it mattered only that a letter confirmed that the correspondent was still alive, that they sent a message of reassurance that they still deeply loved the recipient, and the affirmation that they all continued to hope and pray for better times.

For Henny and Hermann's daughters, letters from their parents had been arriving increasingly infrequently and always delayed, and then they just never came at all.

(photo shows a postcard from Henny and Hermann to their daughters, October 1939)

Two Jewish women in internment June 1940

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 21:45:17 GMT

Two very different Jewish women, who never knew each other but who had both fled Nazism in Germany, found themselves interned in June 1940.

Beate Sulzbach was 43 years old and had been living as an emigré in London for just two years when she was arrested and interned – first in Holloway Prison and then on the Isle of Man. She married Herbert Sulzbach in 1923 and during the 1920s she enjoyed her professional life as an actress in the Expressionist theatres in Berlin. She had no children.

Henny Hartog was 42 years old and had been living as an emigré in Brussels for only seven months when she was arrested and interned – first in Paris and then at Camp de Gurs in south-west France. She married Hermann Hartog in 1921 and was his support and home-maker while he worked as a Jewish teacher and cantor in synagogues in north-west Germany. They had two young daughters who had been sent to safety in England.

For both women, the rapid advance of the German army in May 1940, followed by the fall of Belgium, the Netherlands and then France brought confusion, alienation, and threat to their lives. There were people throughout western Europe who believed that the speed of the attack had only been possible because of insider help. A very public outcry was raised that there must be spies everywhere. Suspicion was directed first at any people of German origin. It was seen as irrelevant that those same people had themselves fled the regime in Germany, and had been either targets of that regime or fighting against it.

Fear and distrust were intensified by the actions of national newspapers that whipped up hatred and xenophobia amongst their readers. For both Beate in London, and for Henny in France, this was a frightening, bewildering, and extremely upsetting time. Their husbands were interned at the same time as them – but in separate places. Neither of them knew their whereabouts for several weeks.

Beate stayed in Holloway prison for four weeks before being transferred to Port St Mary on the Isle of Man. There, she was under house arrest in a large boarding house with several other women, required to share this space (and also her bed) with a complete stranger. She was released eight months after her initial arrest. She tried to find beauty and positivity in her experience and wrote to her husband,

'We can walk, and walk without seeing any barbed wire. My boarding house is by the beach. I am sitting in the window and looking over the sea and the sun is shining.'

Henny stayed in Camp de Gurs for over four weeks until her husband found her after his own release. They were then both given refuge in a nearby village where they lived under house arrest for the next two years until they were deported to Auschwitz. Henny tried to stay strong and positive throughout her experience, writing to her daughters,

'Now we are in a little village in the mountains near the Spanish border. We are together with other refugees and we are in good health.'

Beate survived internment and the war largely because she had found refuge with the victorious nation. Henny was murdered in September 1942 because the French government collaborated with their German occupiers to deliver the required quota of Jewish people to the extermination camps and she was included in that number. Both were victims of the racism, intolerance, and cruelty of those times.

(photo shows the boarding house where Beate was interned on the Isle of Man)

Chaos in Paris 1940

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 03:00:01 GMT

In May 1940, Germany combined attacks with tanks, infantry and artillery to overwhelm the defences of Belgium and Holland before deploying the same tactics against France. German forces invaded France through the rugged terrain and dense forests of the Ardennes – an area thought to be impenetrable by French and British generals. The Maginot Line defences built in France were totally ineffective against the rapid German onslaught. On 9 June 1940, the French government fled from Paris and moved to Tours.

The German forces advanced towards the northern French coast, forcing the British forces to retreat from Dunkirk. They also quickly turned towards Paris and entered the city on 14 June. French forces and many of the citizens of Paris had already left and the German soldiers entered a silent place. Two million Parisians had departed and all the shops and businesses were closed. Paris was formally declared an 'open city', meaning that it would not be defended so that its destruction could be prevented.

Meanwhile, those Parisians who had left their homes, together with people who had fled from northern France, Holland and Belgium ahead of the advancing Germans, escaped southwards for safety. They piled their belongings high into carts, wheelbarrows and prams as they joined the flood of people trying to move along the roads. Those with cars and lorries soon ran out of fuel and abandoned their vehicles to continue on foot with this huge wave of humanity trying to escape the Germans. Meanwhile, those same German invaders strafed the columns of people from planes above them as they made their slow way south.

It was chaos. Absolute chaos.

People travelling south slept wherever they could – under the hedges alongside the road, in empty barns along the route, in the corners of fields. When the food supplies that they had brought with them ran out, they raided abandoned homes and farms for something to eat. Shopkeepers along the way were often generous with offers of food, but there was not enough for everyone to eat.

When war had been declared nine months previously, the French authorities had put in place schemes for a fair distribution of food and a rationing of resources, but the rapid turn of events of June 1940 had not been anticipated and the tidal wave of thousands of refugees from northern France towards the southern towns and villages was far greater than anyone had expected. There was panic, chaos, and confusion everywhere.

(photo shows people fleeing Paris in June 1940 © LAPI/Roger Viollet)

Arthur and Sitta Bodenheimer leave Germany for USA 1938

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 03:00:05 GMT

Eighty seven years ago, on 16 June 1938, Arthur Bodenheimer and his new wife, Sitta Siesal, sailed from Hamburg to the United States of America. They arrived eight days later, on 24 June, in New York and went through the usual immigration process at Ellis Island. Arthur was 29 years old and Sitta was 24. They travelled to their new home with Sitta's parents, Moritz and Selma Siesal who were then 55 and 52 years old. Arthur's parents, the slightly older Louis (62 years) and Hedwig (65) remained in Germany where Louis still had a business in the selling of second-hand clothing.

Louis Bodenheimer had already sold part of his business to finance the emigration of his son. Leaving Germany was an expensive undertaking, with taxes and extra payments required at every turn by the Nazi authorities. The Reichsfluchtsteue r (Reich Flight Tax) was a stringent tax to limit the amount of currency and property that Jews could take out of the country with them. When Arthur Bodenheimer emigrated from Frankfurt to America, his father paid 5,000 Marks in Reichsfluchtsteuer . In order to find the money to do this, he had to sell one of his properties. For many people, the tax was such a prohibitive restriction that it actually made emigration impossible.

Hermann Hartog knew about Arthur and Sitta's plans to emigrate. In August 1937, he had travelled from Wilhelmshaven to Frankfurt to officiate at their marriage at the Pension Rosiner. Arthur continued to hope that his parents would be able to join them in the USA. In April 1941, he wrote to Henny and Hermann,

'Six weeks ago, I paid for the tickets for the ship for my dear parents, and I still have to pay for their journey from Germany to Lisbon.'

Six months later, on 20 October 1941, Arthur Bodenheimer's parents were taken on the first deportation from Frankfurt to Łódź. According to a note in the Reich currency files, Louis' considerable fortune was used 'for the benefit of the Reich'. He was 65 years old and Hedwig was 69. Hedwig died in Łódź seven months later on 17 May 1942. Three months afterwards, in August 1942, Louis died there of a weak heart.

Many years later, Henny and Hermann's younger daughter, Inge, won some lottery money and chose to use it to see her relatives in America. She was extremely pleased to meet those few members of her family who had managed to make a new start in America.

(the photo shows Arthur and Sitta on their wedding day on 8 August 1937)

Evacuation of Dunkirk 1940

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 03:00:08 GMT

'Operation Dynamo', 'The Dunkirk evacuation', or simply 'Dunkirk' took place between 26 May and 4 June 1940. It was the rescue of more than 338,000 Allied soldiers who needed to retreat from the beaches of Dunkirk in northern France as the German army advanced rapidly, surrounded them, and cut them off from further military activity.

During that period, a fleet of more than 800 vessels was hastily assembled to rescue the soldiers. Small vessels with a shallow draught were particularly required to take the men standing shoulder-high in water from the beaches. Pleasure boats, launches, and private yachts set off from the banks of the River Thames and from moorings on the south and east coasts for Ramsgate. There, they had to be verified seaworthy before making the crossing over the English Channel to Dunkirk. The smallest of them was a fishing boat called 'Tamzine', which is now displayed in the Imperial War Museum in London.

As Britain's Prime Minister, Winston Churchill recognised,

'Wars are not won by evacuations'.

Dunkirk was, as he said, 'a colossal military disaster' in which 68,000 soldiers died and in which tanks, vehicles and equipment were lost.

Meanwhile, during those days of chaos on the beaches of northern France, there were other chaotic scenes and disasters elsewhere as people streamed across the French countryside to escape the invading army. Henny and Hermann Hartog were amongst those travelling under arrest from Brussels to Paris, to internment, and to continuing lives as Jewish refugees from the threat of Nazism and from their own native country of Germany. In separate camps in Paris, they had no idea where the other was, and Henny feared for her safety every time a German plane flew over the glass dome of her place of internment. Yet another 'Kristallnacht' seemed imminent. Her young daughters were in England, she was herself in a foreign country, and she was apart from her husband for an unknown time.

Herbert Sulzbach and his wife, Beate, also experienced internment during this time – by the British government. Even though they were Jews who had escaped from Germany, they were seen as a possible threat and interned in separate camps on the Isle of Man. As he was marched between the fixed bayonets of soldiers in Liverpool, Sulzbach was immensely saddened as the civilian population turned away from them – from Jewish people who had tried to escape Nazism and who were themselves fighting against it.

Chaos, confusion, disaster. This had become the norm for ordinary people whether they were serving soldiers, citizens in a new country, or refugees trying to escape an evil regime.

Writing to his non-Jewish friends in Switzerland after the end of this war, Sulzbach wrote,

'My diary of this period is dramatic. After Dunkirk, we conquered only with spirit and the conviction that justice was on our side.'

(photo shows 'Tamzine' in the Imperial War Museum. Photo: Jonathan Cardy 20.12.2016)

Sulzbach family's contribution to Frankfurt life

Sun, 25 May 2025 19:51:37 GMT

In the late 19 ^th century, Herbert Sulzbach's parents joined the flow of other well-to-do families – many of them liberal Jews like themselves – who moved to the western part of Frankfurt. Emil Sulzbach was a wealthy banker and their neighbours were mainly other rich bankers, lawyers and jewellers. Emil and Julie had a huge villa built in Friedrichstrasse and this became the much-loved family home for Herbert and his brother and sister.

The Sulzbach family bank, Gebrüder Sulzbach, had been founded in 1856 by Herbert's grandfather, Rudolf, and his brother and it was the source of the great wealth that was passed on to future generations. Members of the Sulzbach family lived in opulence in Frankfurt during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

But this wealth was also shared with the city. For example, the Sulzbachs contributed to the cost of the creation of the Palmengarten with its exotic plants and greenhouses which was built for the use and enjoyment of the people of Frankfurt. In winter, the lake in the garden often froze over and local people enjoyed meeting there to skate.

When Rudolf Sulzbach died in 1904, his sons (Herbert's father, Emil, and Karl) used part of their inherited fortune to establish a foundation of 100,000 marks for the education and training of talented young businessmen and for the benefit of those in need of help. Rudolf had already supported an endless number of other philanthropic ventures.

Emil Sulzbach had resigned from the family bank in 1894, just a few weeks before Herbert was born, in order to devote himself to music. He was then 38 years old and an accomplished pianist, as well as a composer. From 1904 until 1923, he was also the chair of the governing body of the Frankfurt Konservatorium when, with teachers such as Clara Schumann on the faculty, it became internationally known.

He was also actively involved in science, the arts, and various social institutions in the city and was generous in his patronage. He was on the board of the widows' and orphans' fund of the opera house, provided funds for student musicians, and was on the board of directors of the Senckenbergianum – Frankfurt's natural history museum. As Herbert said of Emil Sulzbach,

'I have often described my father as the most modest millionaire. He lived only for others, spending millions for music and poor musicians, helping thousands without ever mentioning his name.'

After his death in 1932, the city council honoured Emil Sulzbach with the naming of a street in Frankfurt in gratitude for his charitable works.

(photo shows Emil Sulzbach outside the gates to his villa in Friedrichstrasse, Frankfurt)

Henny and Hermann Hartog in Paris 1940

Mon, 19 May 2025 03:00:07 GMT

'Dear children, since Sunday evening Mutti [mummy] and I have been brought separately to these two camps. We have no idea what will happen next. Please write to this address and I will write to you. Write also if you get news from Mutti. Stay brave in life, and if the dear God wills, he will bring us together again.'

Hermann Hartog wrote this note on a postcard to his daughters in England in May 1940, after being taken from Brussels into an internment camp at Stade Buffalo in Paris. At this time of chaos and confusion, French officials used the large spaces of sports stadiums as places to intern suspect people arriving from Belgium and the Netherlands after the German invasion. These people included anti-Nazis and Jewish refugees fleeing Germany.

Stade Buffalo was a huge velodrome that could accommodate 30,000 spectators for different sporting fixtures. (It is now a housing complex). On his arrival from Brussels, Hermann was separated from Henny and taken there with thousands of other men.

Henny was taken to a different velodrome about three kilometres away from Hermann's. The women's holding centre was at the Vélodrome d'Hiver, close to the Eiffel Tower. This was an enormous glass-roofed stadium and as the women waited on the stone benches normally reserved for sports spectators they cringed nervously as German aircraft flew overhead – expecting any moment for the building to be bombed and for the roof to shatter in yet another 'Kristallnacht'. The weather was very warm that May and the stadium became very hot.

Neither Henny nor Hermann knew where the other was, nor what was going to happen to them. Their separate short letters to their daughters over these few days show - perhaps for the first time – a faltering in their optimism for the future. As Henny wrote to them,

'I am sure that you are very happy that your parents are alive. I think about you very often, my dear children, but I do not think that I can write very often. I kiss you a thousand times!'

A few days later, on 23 May 1940, Henny and Hermann were taken separately – probably in cattle carts on trains – to different internment camps further south in France. Hermann found himself at a camp in Bassens, not far from Bordeaux, and Henny was taken to Camp de Gurs, about 250kms away from Hermann.

(photo shows the site of Stade Buffalo today, now a housing complex)

Brussels invaded May 1940

Mon, 12 May 2025 03:00:00 GMT

'My dearest children, I am in a great hurry to say to you that Vati [Daddy] and I are quite well. Please don't worry about the war, and if you don't get letters from us, don't be sad.'

Henny Hartog wrote these few lines on a postcard from Brussels on 10 May 1940, as bombs rained down on the city and panic and confusion erupted around her and her husband, Hermann. She was writing to her two young daughters who were, mercifully, safely in England – Lore (aged 15) and Inge (aged 13).

Henny and Hermann were Jewish refugees from Germany who had been living in Brussels for the previous six months in the hope and expectation of being able to emigrate from there to the USA, where Henny had relatives who were willing to give them shelter. But political events overtook their plans, and they now found themselves living in a city that was being invaded by the Nazis who had already destroyed their previous life in Germany.

The German assault was swift and efficient, leaving the Belgian government overwhelmed by the turn of events. Within hours of the invasion on 10 May, the radio announced that all Germans living in Belgium faced internment and should report to the nearest police station. There was fear that all Germans might be Nazi sympathisers – when in fact most of the Germans in Belgium were refugees fleeing Nazi aggression. After reporting to their local police stations, these refugees (many of them Jewish) were directed to large halls where they were detained.

A planned and organised evacuation of citizens was impossible and by 12 May Brussels was largely deserted and in chaos as people fled westwards to escape the advancing invaders. As refugees, Henny and Hermann Hartog had registered with the authorities when they first arrived: their names, religion, addresses and other details were already recorded. It was not difficult for those same authorities to find them and decide that they were no longer welcome in Belgium. Along with thousands of others, they were detained before being moved out of the country. Their belongings which they had managed to bring with them from Germany were all left behind.

In this way, on 15 May 1940, Henny and Hermann were taken from Brussels and on 19 May they arrived in Paris. As Henny wrote to her daughters,

'It is impossible to tell you about all that has happened. I think that all our things have been lost.'

(photo shows a newspaper report of the German invasion of Belgium 10 May 1940)

Herbert Sulzbach and VE Day May 1945

Mon, 05 May 2025 03:00:03 GMT

In May 1945, Herbert Sulzbach was working as a British officer in a camp for German prisoners of war in Scotland. He was the interpreter at the camp because he spoke fluent German. Fifty years previously, he had been born into a German Jewish family in Frankfurt and had fought for Germany in the First World War. But he viewed this defeat of Nazism with joy – and pride that he had fought for Britain in the Second World War.

He had four days leave due at the beginning of May so he took the train to London to join in the celebrations for the end of the war in Europe. He was overwhelmed by the joy he felt in this 'great and glorious event' and when he returned to Scotland he wrote to his older brother, who had taken refuge in Sweden:

'On 8 May I stood in Piccadilly Circus. It was hot and sunny, just as it had been on 3 September 1939 when war was declared. The crowds were singing, dancing, cheering, and were very high-spirited.'

He watched with amusement as three young British officers ran out of a restaurant and attempted to scale the protective boarding around the fountain of Eros, in the centre of Piccadilly Circus. When they finally reached the top, the crowd cheered and men and women from all the forces and countries that had fought for this victory continued the day with dancing and singing, hugging and kissing. That evening, Sulzbach wrote a letter to the woman who had been his English governess in his Frankfurt childhood.

'No words exist to express the atmosphere of these days. It is a mixture of joy, deep emotion, and highest pride.'

What Herbert Sulzbach wanted now – more than ever – was to forge a spirit of friendship and reconciliation between Germany and Britain. When he returned to the camp in Scotland, he was aware of the changed mood amongst the prisoners there.

'They began to see how much their 'Führer' had lied to them, and that what they had taken to be propaganda was the truth, and what they had taken to be the truth was lies and invention.'

But there was still a lot of work for Herbert Sulzbach to do amongst these young men, who gradually grew to admire him.

( photo shows Herbert Sulzbach in 1945)

Emily Louisa Brown starts school in 1880

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 03:00:10 GMT

On Monday 19 April 1880, Emily Louisa Brown started her first day at school.

She walked from her home at 45 St Alban's Street to Walnut Tree Walk School, which was just a few yards away round the corner in the neighbouring street. She was 5 years and 10 days old.

45 St Alban's Street was a two-storey house and the Brown family occupied one floor, with the Apps family living in the other half of the house. Both Emily's father, Benjamin, and Maynard Apps worked as carmen, possibly for the nearby Bethlem Lunatic Asylum (now the Imperial War Museum). Maynard's wife, Caroline, worked – probably from home – making artificial flowers.

On the day that Emily first went to school, she left her younger sisters, Sarah and Mary Ann, at her home with their mother, and joined Alfred and Arthur Apps (7 and 5 years old) at school. There were children of a similar age in every house in the street so she must have already known many of her fellow pupils. Four months later, on 19 August 1880, she was joined at school by her sister, Sarah Maria, who was then just a few weeks away from her fourth birthday.

The school was a typical three-storey building built in red brick, similar to many others built by the School Board in London. In most such schools, the youngest children were taught on the ground floor and the top two floors were used by the older boys and girls. There were estimated to be about 100,000 poor working-class children in London at the time that the Board was set up in 1870 and it was hoped to create enough school places for them. Although schooling was not compulsory nationally until 1880, the London School Board passed a by-law in 1871 requiring parents to send their children to school between the ages of five and thirteen. The Board aimed to provide modern, high-quality schools and it was partly due to the provision of such schools that by the end of the 1880s, there were school places in London for more than 350,000 children.

Nationally, the curriculum for the teaching in schools could be quite narrow. The government's requirements very much focussed on the traditional 'three Rs', but the London Board attempted a more liberal standard of education and included elementary science, history, singing, geometry (for boys) and needlework (for girls) amongst those subjects taught.

After leaving school, Emily put her needlework skills to good use and worked as a mantle maker, sewing women's outer garments similar to a cape.

(photo shows the school logbook entry for Emily's school admission)

Cycling in Frankfurt 1911

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 03:00:01 GMT

A few years after Ethel May Smith was escaping on her bicycle from the family and societal pressures of the east of London, a young man in very different circumstances was grateful for the two wheels of his bicycle to be able to get away into the countryside with his friends.

Herbert Sulzbach – unlike Ethel May – was born into a very rich family. He was the son of a banker in Frankfurt, Germany, and benefited from a privileged home life, an excellent education, and an assured lifestyle. But this brought its own expectations of success that he did not always feel able to meet.

In April 1911, when this photo was taken, Herbert was seventeen years old. His father already owned one of the first Adler cars and Herbert was entranced by the possibilities of travel. He thoroughly enjoyed the car rides into the neighbouring forests with the family's chauffeur, Herr Blank. Later, Herbert would himself own cars that he would drive with great enthusiasm through Germany and Italy. (And in the First World War he would hanker after being able to fly aeroplanes.)

But in 1911 he was just pleased to get out of Frankfurt on his bicycle and enjoy the nearby countryside. He and his friends would get up early and by five o'clock in the morning they would be ready to cycle into the surrounding woods. Herbert was not an academic scholar, and he did not enjoy banking, so cycling into the localities where he and his friends could enjoy the flowers and the healing powers of nature was a welcome and powerful release from family expectations. He particularly remembered his early morning forays into the forests in May, listening to birdsong. Herbert would ride also to school at the Goethe Gymnasium on his bike, and many years later he recalled first the anxiety, and then the thrill, that he felt at the time seeing his girlfriend, Mieze Kindervatter, riding her bike towards him from the opposite direction.

In later years, after he had fought in the First World War, he felt trapped in the world of banking where he then found himself – so got on to his bike to visit his parents and talk with them about his future employment prospects.

For young people in the early years of the twentieth century (in different countries) a bicycle represented an existence independent of their family, the possibility of different – and more radical – prospects, and an exciting new future.

(the photo shows, left to right, Hans, Hedwig, Hertha, Karl, and Herbert Sulzbach in Frankfurt April 1911)

Cycling in Edwardian England

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 03:00:01 GMT

The bicycle became a powerful symbol of independence and liberation for many young women in the early years of the twentieth century.

I will never cease to be amazed that my grandmother, Ethel May Smith, chose to have a studio photograph taken of herself standing proudly at the side of her bicycle – which she presumably wheeled into the studio. But this picture speaks volumes of the young woman that she was – and the example that she gave to her granddaughters.

Ethel (later called Hettie by her husband, but I don't know what she was called as a girl) left school at the age of about twelve and worked as a shirtmaker – specifically as a collar-maker. When she was 15 years old, in 1901, she was working as a 'shirt machinist' and living at 57, Commerell Street in Greenwich.

The following year, the pedestrian tunnel under the Thames was opened, connecting Greenwich to the Isle of Dogs. Although cycling in the tunnel was prohibited, Ethel rode her bicycle under the river - from her home near the entrance, to her work in a factory on the north side, where she eventually rose to supervise machinists in the collar-making section.

In her occasional free time from the factory, Ethel rode her bike away from the poor streets of Greenwich into the nearby Kent countryside, where she no doubt met with other bicycle enthusiasts. Cycling was an absolute craze during the early years of the twentieth century – and Ethel relished the freedom that her bicycle gave her, as well as the freedom of the clothes that had been adapted for the female cyclist. Although an extravagant hat seems to have always been part of her outfit.

Ethel's enthusiasm for two- or four-wheeled vehicles met that of a young police officer from the area, Wilfred Percy Reeve. I do not know whether or not they belonged to any of the many cycling clubs that sprang up on the edges of south-east London at that time but they both had an energetic approach to life and a dashing bravura that challenged many of the accepted conventions of society. Bicycles – and later cars – were a way whereby they each tried to escape the restrictions of their lives.

Ethel May Smith and Wilfred Percy Reeve were married on 22 January 1910 in Ethel's local church – All Hallows, East India Dock Road, in the heart of London's dockland.

(the photo shows Ethel with her bicycle, posed for a studio photograph)

Henny and Hermann in Aix en Provence April 1941

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 03:00:05 GMT

They had arrived in Aix in a hurry – by train from the south-west of France.

As soon as they were given permission to leave their refuge in the little village of Arette, Henny and Hermann had made arrangements to travel to Marseille to try to expedite their emigration to the USA. It was April 1941 and they were very apprehensive – partly because of the enormity of the possibilities and partly because they feared that their paperwork was incomplete. They had not even had the chance to inform their young daughters in England about what they were doing.

They decided not to try to find accommodation in Marseille because the city was already crammed with others trying to leave, and also because of the extra expense there. Instead, they found a room in Aix en Provence, at 16 rue de la Couronne – about half an hour away from Marseille, and close to the Jewish community and synagogue there.

They had permission to be away from their refuge for four weeks but this extended to seven as Henny went from one official to another, from one committee to another, to gather the required documents. Meanwhile, Hermann took his place at the synagogue, taught and gave lectures, and played the harmonium there.

Henny was eventually successful in acquiring the many necessary papers, and was given a provisional visa for herself and Hermann to travel to America – provisional on obtaining the tickets for the ship from Marseille to the USA.

Neither of them had any money for the fare (which was hundreds of dollars), fewer ships were risking the journey across the Atlantic, and America was just announcing completely new rules for immigration. So, for Henny and Hermann, emigration had become an impossibility and they made their way back to Arette.

Hermann recognised what was at stake during their visit, and on the first day that Henny left Aix to go the American Consulate in Marseille, he wrote to his daughters,

'Your mother is so courageous and has supported me so well and strongly in every emergency. She never despairs and bears all difficulties and emergencies with me. You must never forget that, no matter what fate brings, and what else happens with us and you.'

Henny and Hermann returned to their good friends in Arette but they were never able to emigrate, and they never saw their daughters again.

(photo shows the front door to 16, rue de la Couronne, Aix, where they rented a room)

Hitler visits Wilhelmshaven 1 April 1939

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 03:00:04 GMT

It wasn't an April Fool's joke.

Part way through Adolf Hitler's speech to a massed crowd of 80,000 people in front of the City Hall in Wilhelmshaven, the radio transmission abruptly failed. Those listening throughout Germany on their radios feared that their Führer had been assassinated but the truth was more prosaic – Hitler was delivering such a vitriolic speech that the radio engineers and their superiors considered it would be better if the rest of the world did not hear it in case foreign nations viewed it as war provocation.

It was 1 April 1939 and Hitler was in Wilhelmshaven to launch the new German battleship, ' Tirpitz '. Named after Grand Admiral Alfred Tirpitz, who was the architect of the German Imperial Navy, the hull of the battleship was launched by his grand-daughter with great ceremony at the Wilhelmshaven navy dockyard.

On the same day, Adolf Hitler was awarded the Freedom of the City at a grand ceremony in the City Hall after his speech in the square outside.

Henny and Hermann Hartog were not in Wilhelmshaven during Hitler's visit. Hermann no longer had a job as a Jewish teacher there, and since ' Kristallnacht ' they had not been allowed to live in their apartment in the city because it was not owned by a Jew. So, they had returned to Hermann's home town of Aurich, where his sister owned the family home, and they were busy doing everything they could to escape from Germany.

Later that month, Henny travelled to see her family in Frankfurt – partly to say goodbye before leaving the country, and partly to prepare a new home for her father in her uncle's house.

The battleship ' Tirpitz ' was sunk by the British Navy on 12 November 1944.

On Thursday 6 February 2025, almost 86 years after the City's award to Adolf Hitler in the Main Aula of the City Hall, I stood in the same building and the same place as him – at the invitation of the City of Wilhelmshaven - to tell the story of Henny and Hermann Hartog. There was a maximum capacity audience and the empathy from the people of Wilhelmshaven was heart-warming.

(the photo shows Hitler outside Wilhelmshaven City Hall on 1 April 1939)

Mothering Sunday for Ethel Fryer 1901

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 16:11:03 GMT

My grandmother, Ethel Chapple (née Fryer), worked as a domestic servant before she was married. Like most others, she changed her position every two or three years – there was considerable demand for their services as the nineteenth century changed into the twentieth. Many of the houses where Ethel worked belonged to members of the clergy.

In the spring of 1901, on Sunday 31 March, a national census was undertaken. This date was exactly one week before Easter Sunday. As it happened, Ethel was in her employer's house that day – the Vicarage of St Bartholomew's Church at Areley Kings in Worcestershire – where she worked at different times as a housemaid and parlourmaid. If the census had taken place two weeks earlier (three weeks before Easter) it is unlikely that she would have been there.

The Sunday three weeks before Easter has traditionally been when Mothering Sunday has been celebrated. My grandmother told me how she was always allowed the day off from work for Mothering Sunday, so that she could go home to visit her mother. Areley Kings is about fifteen miles south of Ethel's home and I do not know how she made the journey, or if she was allowed slightly longer in order to be able to take the train.

Ethel's home was in an isolated hamlet in Broad Lanes, near Bridgnorth, in Shropshire. She told me that as she walked along the narrow lanes closer to home, she would always pick a bouquet of spring flowers from the hedgerows to take as a gift for her mother, Hannah. In return, she knew that when she arrived home she would find that her mother had baked a simnel cake for them all to share.

The simnel cake was baked to a traditional recipe passed on from Hannah's mother – and later to me. It was a fruit cake with a layer of almond marzipan across it midway. On the top was another circle of marzipan, decorated with eleven balls of marzipan - and this had been toasted in the oven or under a flame. The eleven balls of marzipan represented the eleven disciples who were loyal to Jesus. When Ethel left to return to work, she always took a generous portion of the cake back with her.

Every Mothering Sunday, while Ethel was at home, the family attended the celebratory service at their nearby church. The Church of the Holy Innocents at Tuck Hill stands in an idyllic setting on the top of a hill and in spring-time is surrounded by drifts of daffodils and a glorious mass of wild spring flowers. It was a magical time for Ethel when she was pleased to be able to go home, and she kept the memories alive throughout her long life.

(the photo shows the Vicarage at Areley Kings where Ethel worked as housemaid and parlourmaid)

François Casabonne gives Henny and Hermann space for a vegetable garden

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 04:00:00 GMT

In March 1942, Hermann Hartog was working as an agricultural labourer for a local farmer in Arette – François Casabonne. It was an unusual arrangement as François had offered employment to Hermann, a refugee Jewish teacher, in order to have him released from a labour camp. While Hermann was willing to work in whatever way helped François, both men also enjoyed talking together at the end of the day and sharing their thoughts. It was clear to François that Hermann and his wife needed some space where – like every other villager – they could grow some vegetables to supplement their food rations.

There was a corner of a field that François owned that was both unproductive and also unsuitable as pasture for his cattle - a triangular space, at the side of the road up to his farm, and close to the steep edge of the field where he kept his cows. He offered it to Hermann and Henny as a garden, dug it over for them, and left them to cultivate it.

The Hartogs were delighted with this opportunity, and deeply grateful to François for his kindness and generosity. Henny was enthusiastic about the garden's possibilities and wrote to her daughters in England,

'By chance, we got a piece of earth from a good farmer where Vati works, which he dug over for us, and it will be a beautiful vegetable garden, because vegetables are rare here. I have a lot of work to do before it is alright, but I enjoy it and I work in it like a peasant woman. I have already planted peas, garlic, lettuce. Now come onions, carrot, spinach, cabbage, radishes, beans, potatoes, beetroot. I am already looking forward to the harvest.'

Henny often worked late into the evening in the garden and enjoyed it, although the work exhausted her. She quite soon discovered that her initial programme had been quite ambitious – especially for someone with no gardening experience at all. The land had previously been part of a meadow and she and Hermann were faced with a constant battle against weeds and vermin. As François remembered many years later,

'Hermann trapped the moles in my fields but he did not destroy them in his own garden because he thought that they were good for aerating the soil.'

The garden gave Henny and Hermann a physical activity that they shared with all their neighbours in the village, and it was a also a clear symbol of the kindness, generosity, and friendship of the brave people in Arette who tried to give meaningful help to two refugees.

(the photo shows François Casabonne making cheese outside his farmhouse, in about the 1970s)

Final service at Neustadtgödens

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 04:00:01 GMT

Neustadtgödens is a small town in north-west Germany, about 20km south of Jever, where in the 1920s and 1930s Hermann Hartog worked as the Jewish teacher. He also had the care and concern of Jewish communities outside Jever and so regularly visited Neustadtgödens to teach the children there and also on occasions to take services at the synagogue. By the 1920s, the Jewish population had diminished to about 28 people (about five per cent of the town's population) and Hermann was visiting to teach just four children.

The Jewish community in Neustadtgödens struggled on for a few more years under an increasingly powerful Nazi presence in the area. In 1936, the synagogue was issued with an order to close by the local Nazi authorities, who alleged an unstable roof and disrepair. Although this was subsequently proved untrue, the community had by then become so reduced that there were insufficient members – only twelve - to maintain the building.

On 15 March 1936, a final 'celebratory' service was held at the synagogue. The rabbi of the province, Samuel Blum, attended and Jews came from far and wide for the occasion. The synagogue choir from Jever attended under the direction of Hermann Hartog and the soloist from Jever, Rudolf Gutentag, sang. Dr Blum gave a sermon and chose from Psalm 43 as his text:

''What are you grieving for, my soul?

And why are you so restless within me?”

Memories of the event have been passed down over the years, and it has been said that the singing rose the roof and that it was a magnificent and joyous occasion – albeit a farewell. The synagogue was packed and music and singing filled the building.

Two years later, the synagogue was sold to a non-Jewish carpenter from Wilhelmshaven. So, when the pogrom against the Jews took place in November 1938, the synagogue in Neustadtgödens was not burnt down – to have destroyed the property of an Aryan would have resulted in claims for damages. But the local Jewish men were still arrested on that night, and their money and valuables were confiscated before they were taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, along with other Jews from the area.

Today, the building that was once the Jewish synagogue still stands in Neustadtgödens and is cared for by curators from the Schloss Museum in Jever. It has been transformed into a powerful reminder of the Jewish heritage of the town and informs the visitor of its history.

(the photo shows the synagogue as it is today)

Marriage of Henny and Hermann Hartog

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 04:00:00 GMT

On Thursday 10 March 1921, Henny Scheuer married Hermann Hartog in Frankfurt am Main. Their civil marriage was followed by a celebration in the synagogue on the following Sunday, 13 March. Henny was aged 23 and Hermann was 34 years old.

Hermann was a Jewish teacher and cantor from the north-west of Germany. He had been born in Aurich, a small town close to the border with the Netherlands, and at the time was working as a teacher in the thriving city of Jever. After their marriage, Henny and Hermann made their first home in Jever – at Schlosserstraße 23

Henny came from a wealthy Jewish family and was well-educated, as far as the expectations of the time allowed. She had been to a finishing school in Lausanne, Switzerland, and was not only well versed in organising a Jewish household with a kosher kitchen, but was also proficient in French and English, playing the piano, and other social niceties. We know that she took a considerable amount of money, as well as a quantity of linens and jewellery, into her marriage. Her wealth and social standing, as well as her clear intelligence, married well with Hermann's intellectual and educated accomplishments and strong family background. They remained a united and loving team throughout their lives.

Hermann was acutely aware of the moral strength of the woman he had married, and made sure that their daughters recognised it, too. In May 1941, when he and Henny were struggling to find a way to find safety for their family, he wrote to them,

'Everything is very difficult for us here, even more difficult than in the village. But your mother is so courageous and has supported me so well and strongly in every emergency. I have to write this to you without her knowing it, so that you can keep in mind for your whole life what kind of mother you have. She never despairs and bears all difficulties and every emergency with me. You must never forget that, no matter what fate brings, and what else happens with us and with you. You are not so small any more and must already understand that. May God protect all four of us and bring us together again!'

Henny was, indeed, a rock for their family. When she and Hermann were eventually deported from their safe-seeming village in France, their neighbours bore witness to her courage, her smile and encouragement for her husband – and to Hermann's own strength of resolve. Henny and Hermann Hartog had a strong and remarkable bond that sustained both them and their daughters through some of the darkest years of the 20 ^th century.

(photo shows a copy of Henny and Hermann's marriage certificate)

A rich boy's life in Germany just before WW1

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 04:00:00 GMT

In early March 1913, Herbert Sulzbach – the son of a very rich banker in Frankfurt, Germany – failed the Abitur , his final school exam. Since he didn't plan to go to university, and his employment was assured in the family bank, this was of no great consequence for his career. However, the six month world tour promised by his father was downsized to a shorter three-month visit to Italy, Sicily and north Africa with his private tutor as a result of this academic failure.

The tutor, Dr Bernhard Löffler, was ten years older than Herbert, and the two young men set out on their trip on 23 March 1913. They travelled via Trieste to Venice, where they stayed for a few days at the Hotel Royal Danieli on the Grand Canal before continuing to Algeria – by sea, in a violent night-time storm.

Their ten-day visit to Algiers was hectic, as they explored the local sights, including being transported on one excursion 'on two really obstinate Yemen animals'. Herbert recorded it all in long letters to his parents,

'Then in the evening we went with the hotel waiter to the town, first to the casino and then to the gaming rooms to play roulette, where I won 21 – 28 francs, and then lost them all again. On the twelfth was a ball to which we were invited, which went on until early morning.'

Not surprisingly, they ran out of money – spending a fortune shopping for carpets and pictures, buying champagne, and losing at roulette. But a quick cable to Herbert's father ensured further funds and they were able to continue their journey to Constantine, El Kantara, and Biskra. Somewhere along the way, they caught two fenek foxes, which they fed with snakes and lizards in their hotel rooms. They later presented these to the zoo in Frankfurt.

And so their journey continued – a rich boy's initiation into travel, the wider world, and different customs. It was a privileged world that would soon disappear, but it taught him about human experience, different ways of thinking, and the foibles of the human character. That entire world collapsed within a few years, but Herbert Sulzbach took from it the excitement of a journey, empathy with others from a different culture, and the need to adapt one's experience to communicate with people who held different view-points, beliefs, and expectations.

Others would later benefit from the lessons he learnt on those travels.

(the photo shows Herbert Sulzbach with his bicycle - decorated for Margueritentag in 1910)

Lore starts school in England, February 1937

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 04:00:00 GMT

At last she had arrived! Lore was in England, very sad to be away from her beloved parents, but at least she had escaped the relentless anti-Semitism of those people in her home town who seemed to be on an everlasting mission to humiliate all Jewish people, even if they were only youngsters. Lore remained for ever grateful to be safe in England.

After all, there had been that occasion when she was walking along the road by the park and seen her friend Gertrud marching along with her friends. Gertrud had fairly recently joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM) – the girls' wing of the Nazi youth – and was proud to be strutting along in her uniform. Lore, being Jewish, was excluded from this performance but had anyway given a friendly wave and shout-out to Gertrud. How appalling! Shortly afterwards, Gertrud remonstrated with Lore,

'Don't you know that you must not do that!'

There were so many things that a young Jew could not do. All those tedious, humiliating, and restricting rules isolated Lore from her school-mates. Although she was attending a good school in Wilhelmshaven, it was clear that Nazi rules about education would mean that she would soon have to leave her school. Her parents decided that an education in another country was the only possible solution. Education was very important for Jewish families – and their children were being systematically excluded from it.

Like many others with the financial means to do so, they arranged for Lore to go to school in England. Using contacts with members of the Jewish community in Westcliff on Sea, near Southend, they found a guardian and a school for their daughter. Lore's friend from Jever, Hans Weinsten, emigrated with his parents and also attended school nearby.

Lore offered her German school books to her friend Gertrud and prepared to leave her family in Wilhelmshaven. Her mother helped her to prepare what she needed to take – and sewed some of the family jewellery into Lore's underwear in the hope that some of the family's assets would escape customs' detection. The political situation looked increasingly worrying and her parents wanted Lore to have sufficient means to support herself.

Lore arrived in England in February 1937, a few weeks after her twelfth birthday. She boarded with a Mr and Mrs Harris in Westcliff on Sea and attended school locally. She was only able to make infrequent visits back to Germany during the school holidays, and the last time that she saw her parents was probably during the spring or summer of 1938.

(the photo shows Lore and Hans in their new school uniforms in England in 1938)

'For a Better Future': Holocaust Memorial Day 2025

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 04:00:00 GMT

Eighty years ago, on 27 January 1945, soldiers from the Allied armies entered Auschwitz and were confronted with horrific scenes of brutality, degradation and death that had hitherto been unknown on such a huge scale. Humanity had reached a new nadir.

The people who were incarcerated in Auschwitz, and all those who were victims of its killing machine, were individuals who had once each built a home, created a family, enjoyed fulfilling work and professional relationships, and encouraged and inspired their communities. They had valued and cherished those lives that the Nazis had forced them to leave, and they had been heart-broken leaving precious friends and family members, and walking away from what had once been vibrant and joyous lives. For them, the future looked bleak, uncertain and unpredictable – and that is what it turned out to be.

When the Second World War eventually came to an end in Europe, in May 1945, people had to come to terms with what had happened, and what places like Auschwitz had shown was possible. For a long time, there was silence – and often denial – from many people in many countries. Very gradually (and often at the insistence of young people), individuals, and leaders of countries, realised that they had to face what had happened in their past, and try to find a way to a better future. What might that future look like?

Remembering what had happened, and recognising and respecting the people and communities that suffered during that time, was (and remains) a good starting point. In many places in Germany, local people have worked to discover, for example, as much as they can about the people who once created the vibrant communities in their towns and cities. Memorials have been designed, 'stumbling stones' have been laid, remembrance events arranged – and these continue today.

Restoring memory, engaging empathy and action, and ensuring a commitment to the future is an ongoing memorial to those communities. Because we need to be active in our remembering if we wish to be vigilant against evil.

For this, it is also crucial that young people are involved in civic life so that their communities and nations do not lose their memory and so repeat the horrors of the past. If we want a better future, we all need to actively and critically engage with the past. This remembering and engagement must then inspire us to address the present. In actively making a better present, we sow the seeds of a better future and work towards its creation. Currently, this is vitally necessary for everyone in every country on earth.

( picture shows the poster for my Holocaust Memorial Day talk - you are most welcome to come!)

Louis Bodenheimer is forced to sell his property and business

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 04:00:00 GMT

Nazi ideology was deeply anti-Semitic and during the early years of their control in Germany the Nazis wanted all Jews to leave the country – and 'encouraged' them to do so with legislation that not only bullied them but also took away their rights and identity as German citizens. Within a few years, an efficient killing machine for Jews was adopted.

While many German Jews recognised the advantages (particularly for young people) of leaving the country, there were serious financial implications. It was ruinously expensive for all but well-off Jews to be able to consider emigrating. It was not only difficult for them to gain entry as immigrants to another country, it was also difficult for them to leave Germany as emigrants. The Reichsfluchtsteuer (the Reich Flight Tax) was a stringent tax to limit the amount of currency and property that Jews could take out of the country with them. In 1937, when Henny's cousin, Arthur Bodenheimer, hoped to emigrate from Frankfurt to America, his father, Louis Bodenheimer, paid 5,000 Marks in Reichsfluchtsteuer for him to be able to do so. In order to find the money to do this, he had to sell one of his properties. In this way, Arthur and his wife, Sitta, were eventually able to emigrate to New York, arriving on 24 June 1938. Sitta's parents went with them.

But even before they left, Louis Bodenheimer was also forced by the anti-Semitic Nazi laws to close his prosperous second-hand dealer business at Klostergasse 34 – 36 in Frankfurt. He did this on 24 January 1938, and then several months later, on 15 November 1938, he was forced to 'sell' this business - probably to an Alois Gassner, and probably at a very low price. Arthur and Sitta hoped to make it possible for Arthur's parents to join them in New York and saved desperately from their meagre wages as newly-arrived immigrants to pay for his parents' journey.

At last, on 30 May 1941, Arthur was able to write to Henny and Hermann Hartog,

'My parents have been given a place on an American Export Line ship for 30 January 1942. God alone knows what will happen before then.'

In fact, on 20 October 1941 - possibly unknown to Arthur and Sitta - Louis Bodenheimer and his wife, Hedwig, were taken in the first deportation from Frankfurt to the ghetto at Łódź. Louis was 65, and Hedwig was 69 years old. According to a note in the Reich currency files, Louis' considerable fortune was used 'for the benefit of the Reich'. Hedwig died on 17 May 1942, and Louis died in the hospital at Łódź on 10 August 1942.

(the photo shows Arthur and Sitta (far left) on their wedding day 05.08.1937 with Sitta's parents (far right),

Arthur's parents (centre) and Arthur's aunt)

Henny and Hermann arrive in Arette

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 04:00:00 GMT

On 6 January 1941 - 84 years ago - Henny and Hermann Hartog arrived as refugees in the mountain village of Arette. As racial and political refugees from Germany, they had at last arrived in what was to become their safe haven in the foothills of the Pyrénées for the next year and a half.

They were very fortunate to come to a village where the mayor and his extended family were – probably through their Catholic faith – being drawn into the burgeoning resistance to the Nazi occupiers of France. In early 1941, Arette was part of the non-occupied southern area of France and the villagers showed both compassion for the refugees entering their village and a quiet defiance of the unwanted restrictions of wartime rules.

Henny and Hermann were given lodgings in an empty house in the centre of the village, near the town hall. They were provided with 'refugee furniture' (as Henny described it) and their fair share of the food rations. Their immediate neighbours and landlord were kind, and as generous as wartime circumstances allowed. Not far away lived the mayor's secretary, Gaston Derrez, and his wife, Amélie – who were related to the mayor. Another Jewish family lived a few streets away, opposite the church in the centre of the village.

Amélie and Gaston lived within sight of the town hall, the church, and the school. Every afternoon, Henny and the other Jewish women refugees were invited to Amélie's house as friends. They sat around the large kitchen table with its cheerful oilcloth covering.

When I asked an elderly lady who had known Amélie why the women went there, she answered straight away,

'To listen to the radio. Very few people in the village had a radio so they came here to listen to the BBC – Radio Londres .'

I was a little surprised, because I thought that this was not allowed – even in the unoccupied zone. When I suggested this, the elderly lady sat up straight and tall, looked me straight in the eye, and announced, with grace and dignity,

'We were free.'

In the middle of this village, one family was strong enough to share their radio with their foreign neighbours so that both the refugees and the local resistance members received reliable information about the course of the war. And other neighbours, no doubt knowing this, kept silent and did not inform on them to the authorities.

Henny and Hermann were indeed fortunate in their refuge in this welcoming village.

(the photo shows the house of Amélie and Gaston Derrez )

Oskar Hartog dies of a heart attack at Lodz

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 04:00:01 GMT

Letter from Sara Hartog to some relatives:

26 Gnesener Strasse, Łódz

New Year's Day 1942

Dear Wolff Family,

I hope you are all fine. We are healthy so far. Only Oskar had a heart attack last week but thank God he passed away quickly.'

Sara and Oskar Hartog were brother and sister, and older siblings of Hermann Hartog. In early 1940, they - together with their elder sister, Berta - had been taken from their home in Aurich, via a stay in an 'old people's home' in neighbouring Emden, to another 'old people's home' in Gnesener Strasse at Łódz in Poland, almost a thousand kilometres east of the place where they had lived all their lives.

Łódz was a ghetto for Jewish people who were taken 'east' towards the killing fields of the Nazis. Many of the people deported there were fairly elderly. At the end of 1941, when Oskar died, he was 64 years old, Sara was 66, and Berta was 69 years old.

The letter that Sara wrote was never sent, but was put to one side by those in charge of the 'old people's home'. However, it was recorded in the administrative files and was eventually discovered by students from Emden who visited the archives at Łódz in 2016.

Sara and Berta did not survive Łódz. On 12 February 1942, Sara was taken thirty kilometres north-west of Łódź to Chelmno, where she was murdered. Three months later, on 12 May, Berta was also taken to Chelmno and murdered there.

Oskar was an extraordinary man. When he was 11 years old, his father died. The butcher's business that Philip Hartog had run successfully in Aurich had been in the family for many years and Oskar's mother helped him to learn the business and continue that tradition. Two years later, his mother also died, and Oskar – aged 13 – was then in sole charge of the family business.

Oskar ran such a successful butchers' that when the Nazis tried to enforce a boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933, Oskar's non-Jewish customers continued to shop with him and refused to boycott the Hartog business. The local police chief was enraged and recommended that Oskar be arrested and put in a concentration camp.

Oskar held high-profile positions in the local merchants' guild, which (prior to 1933) ran smoothly with both Jewish and non-Jewish participation. He was also involved in the Jewish youth organisations - especially those that supported young people continuing with their education and becoming teachers. He and his sisters did not marry – instead saving their money to enable their younger brother, Hermann, to go to college and train as a teacher.

He would not be cowed by Nazi officialdom and propaganda. When German troops were mobilising in the summer of 1939, he deliberately visited the railway station where they were mustering and walked up and down the platform behaving, it was alleged, 'offensively' and 'displaying a strikingly provoking behaviour'. He was arrested and imprisoned.

Oskar Hartog is remembered in his home town of Aurich with a Stolperstein outside his home, which is the obituary he never had.

(the photo is Oskar Hartog in 1939)

Adding 'Israel' and 'Sara' to 'German' names of Jews

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 04:00:01 GMT

Anti-Semitism was central to the Nazi ideology and was clearly laid out in the programme that they published in 1920. Jews would be separated from 'Aryan' society and their political, legal, and civic rights revoked. Once Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, this programme could be put into effect and German Jews were immediately the object of unrelenting persecution.

For the six years from early 1933 until war broke out in September 1939, Jews were subjected to more than 400 decrees and regulations that incrementally restricted every aspect of their lives.

On 17 August 1938, the Executive Order on the Law on the Alteration of Family and Personal Names required those Jews who had 'non-Jewish' names to add a 'Jewish' name to their existing ones. Male Jews had to add 'Israel' to their names, and women had to add 'Sara'. This was particularly aimed at Jews who had become 'assimilated' into German society and who thus tended to choose less obviously Jewish names. The Nazis saw this as an attempt to disguise their Jewishness and wanted to be sure that all Jews were identified and marked out. A list of Jewish names was drawn up by the Third Reich and if a Jew's name was not included on the list, they were obliged to add 'Israel' or 'Sara'. And a second state-approved list of 'German' names was also compiled and none of these names could be used by Jews in Germany.

So by 1 January 1939 it was compulsory for Hermann Hartog to refer to himself as 'Hermann Israel Hartog' and Henny as 'Henny Sara Hartog'. Their new names had to be registered at the population registry office and used in all official documents.

On 5 October 1938, all German passports were declared invalid if they were held by Jews. Jews had to surrender their passports and these only became valid again when a large red 'J' (for Jude , or Jew ) was stamped on them. Also, when Henny needed to show her birth certificate in July 1939 (perhaps for a new passport to be issued) her old one was invalidated and a new one issued with her birth name as 'Henny Sara Scheuer'.

When Hermann and Henny fled to Brussels in October 1939, the authorities there did not use the extra name, although certificates arrived from Wilhelmshaven in answer to requests for authentication – and these all contained the added name.

Once Henny and Hermann arrived in the south-west of France they were able to revert to their original names and all documentation from French officials in Arette, Marseille, Oloron etc is issued in the names of 'Hermann Hartog' and 'Henny Hartog, née Scheuer'.

(the picture shows Hermann's passport, with 'Israel' added, and the red 'J'.)

Hermann Hartog is released from Sachsenhausen

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 04:00:00 GMT

It was a brutal regime in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen in November/December 1938. The young rabbi (Leo Trepp) from Oldenburg, who was incarcerated there at the same time as Hermann, remembers all the prisoners being called for a roll-call at 4.00am on a bitterly cold December morning, being threatened by guards with machine guns, and being told,

'You are the dregs of humanity! I don't see why you should live!'

Prisoners such as Leo Trepp and Hermann Hartog had been taken to Sachsenhausen on the morning after the November pogrom. More than 6,000 Jewish men in the larger Frisian area had been rounded up in their various towns and villages, taken by special train to Sachsenhausen, near Berlin (almost 500 kilometres from Wilhelmshaven, where Hermann lived), and imprisoned under a regime where whips and dogs were used by their tormentors to control and terrify them. Some men died as a result of their experiences, including Joseph Haas, who had been a tobacco dealer in Jever and who would have been known to Hermann. No man was left unaffected. This was the point: the prisoners should have no misunderstanding about the intentions of their Nazi rulers. And none of them knew when – or if at all – they would be released.

For Hermann Hartog, release came on Monday 12 December 1938 – although he did not know this until the day itself. He had been a prisoner there for over four weeks – and survived. He was allowed to leave because he was over 50; he was, in fact, 51 years old. Part of the formalities for leaving required him to sign a document stating that he would emigrate from Germany, that he was in good health, and that he would not speak of anything that he had seen, heard, or experienced during his imprisonment.

When he arrived back in Wilhelmshaven, he was required to report to the local police station, where he also had to hand over his release papers from Sachsenhausen (according to his later account to the Belgian authorities when he eventually manage to leave Germany). A few days later, the tattered remnants of the Jewish community in Wilhelmshaven attempted to celebrate Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights.

Hermann was not allowed to return to his home at Bismarckstraße 107 as this property was not owned by a Jew. Instead, he and Henny were required to go to a 'Jew House' at Tonndeichstraße 4 - the home of Samuel Mordechai Reisner who had once owned the pawnbroker business that was ransacked and destroyed during the November pogrom.

So much of what had once identified Hermann as a person had been debased and destroyed. He was now obliged to leave his country, and leave behind not only his wider family but also the Jewish community that he had served since his youth. It was a very painful time with agonising decisions to be made.

(the photo shows Hermann Hartog in April 1938, before he was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen.)

Adolf Scheuer dies in Theresienstadt

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 04:00:00 GMT

On 10 December 1942, Adolf Scheuer (1864 – 1942) died in Theresienstadt.

Aged 78 years, he was tired and ill, widowered for many years and lonely, with few members of his family (if any) nearby. He had not heard from his daughter and son-in-law in France for several months, nor from his two granddaughters in England, and he had no idea that his daughter and son-in-law had been murdered in Auschwitz three months previously. As he had written to them a short while before, 'Lore's Opa is all alone'.

For some time, Adolf Scheuer had managed to get letters and postcards sent to his daughter, Henny, and her husband, Hermann (who were living as refugees in south-west France) by directing them through a third party in neutral Switzerland. Max Ruda lived in Zurich and was known to the others because he had been the Jewish teacher in Wilhelmshaven before emigrating - when Hermann then took over his job. Settled in Zurich, Max Ruda stayed a good friend to the Jewish community he had once known in Germany and became a focus for the exchange of news and mail between emigrants and refugees in different countries.

Adolf Scheuer sent some news on a postcard to Max Ruda on 31 August 1942, knowing that he would try to pass it on to Henny and Hermann. Neither Adolf Scheuer nor Max Ruda knew then that Henny and Hermann had already been arrested in their village in the south-west of France - and that as Adolf was writing his postcard in Frankfurt, Henny and Hermann were incarcerated in the internment/transit camp at Gurs where they were writing their own farewell letters to their friends.

As can be seen on the postcard, Adolf was living at Scheffelstraße 26 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. This was the address of his brother-in-law's house where Adolf had been welcomed since May 1939 not only because he was a dear relative but also because he was then required to live in a 'Jew House'. But Adolf's brother-in-law, Louis Bodenheimer, and his wife, Hedwig, had been deported from that house to Łódz in October 1941 and (whether or not Adolf had received the news) they had been murdered there on 10 August 1942 – three weeks before Adolf wrote his postcard.

And another two weeks later, on Tuesday 15 September 1942, Adolf Scheuer was himself deported from Frankfurt. He was summoned to the wholesale market hall where all those to be deported were collected together in the enormous underground cellars – and where they were mistreated. This was the ninth convoy of deported Jews from the city. It was also the largest, with 1,367 people on board. Railway lines ran close to the market hall and the deportees were taken by train from there to the Jewish ghetto at Theresienstadt, over 500 kilometres away in Czechoslovakia. Adolf Scheuer died there three months after his arrival.

(the picture shows the postcard that Adolf Scheuer addressed to Max Ruda on 31 August 1942)

Arriving in England on the first Kindertransport

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 04:00:00 GMT

On 2 December 1938, Inge Hartog arrived at Harwich on the first Kindertransport from Germany to England. Two days later, it was her twelfth birthday.

She had travelled by train the previous day with about 200 other mainly Jewish children from Hamburg or Berlin to the border crossing into Holland at Bad Bentheim. There, Nazi officials had boarded the train and searched through the children and those adults accompanying them. They did not harm the children, although they damaged some of their luggage, but it was a very frightening experience. When the train was allowed to proceed, it travelled north through Holland to the coast. In contrast to their treatment by the Nazi guards – and generally their treatment living in Germany as Jewish children – they were greeted all along their route by smiling and waving Dutch people, many of whom offered food and sweets. Inge remembered this welcoming reception with happiness and gratitude for the rest of her life.

None of the children travelled with their parents but there were social workers travelling with the group to guide, help and supervise. As they waited to board their ship, many of the children wrote messages back to their parents in Germany. Inge wrote to her mother and grandfather at home in Wilhelmshaven,

'Dear Mutti and Opa, now it is evening and many children are writing. We were wonderfully received in Holland.

We received quite a lot. First there was meat, then lemonade, chocolate. In an hour we are going by ship to England.

I will write all about it in a letter to you. My writing is very bad. Much love and kisses, your Inge.'

She didn't include her father, Hermann, in the letter. He was no longer at home but in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen where he had been taken after being arrested the day after the November pogrom three weeks earlier.

The social workers did not travel on the ship with the children but returned back to Berlin. (This was the first Kindertransport to leave Germany and they did not wish to jeopardise future transports by giving any suggestion to Nazi officials that they might be trying to escape themselves.) The children boarded the ship 'Die Prague' and travelled overnight to Harwich, arriving in the early morning of Friday 2 December.

For many of the older children, this was an exciting adventure – although for many of them, and especially for the very young children, it must also have been confusing, frightening and very distressing. The children (and their parents back in Germany) told themselves and each other that their separation was a temporary situation and that they would all be together again very soon.

In fact, Inge never saw her parents again. Ten days after she arrived in England, Hermann was released from Sachsenhausen – on Monday 12 December 1938. We do not know whether he knew before he got back to Wilhelmshaven that his younger daughter had left.

( the picture shows Inge's Kindertransport pass that she needed instead of a full passport)

Leaving Montory as refugee numbers increase

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 04:00:00 GMT

Montory is a village in the Basque Pyrénées where Henny and Hermann Hartog were given refuge in the summer of 1940.

At the time, there were many other refugees also in the area as people who had been living in the north of France had fled the approaching German army. After the armistice had been signed between France and Germany in June 1940, many of those refugees gradually drifted back home.

Henny and Hermann felt safe and welcomed in Montory, although their aim was to reach Marseille and emigrate to America. As Henny wrote to her daughters on 17 November 1940,

'We will stay here in the village until we receive the summons from the Consulate in Marseille.'

They did not tell their daughters much about what life was like for them in the village, but in their December letter, Henny wrote,

'You ask how we live as refugees. Yes, dear children, it is very difficult, but we have enough to eat and we are not restricted, like many others. People here have lent us some warm winter clothes.'

But events elsewhere a few weeks earlier were about to affect the refugees in Montory. On 22 October, the Germans had expelled over 6,500 Jews from their homes in Baden-Württemberg on the French/German/Swiss border, piled them into crowded trains, and sent them to the south-west of France. Two days later, the trains arrived at Oloron Sainte Marie and the Jews were taken by truck to the internment camp at nearby Gurs. In one week in early November, the number of internees at Gurs quadrupled from 3,309 to 14,254.

In the same month, Germany annexed the French departments of Alsace and Lorraine, driving yet more refugees south-west. The arrival in the area of so many new refugees inevitably put increasing pressure on the services that could be provided for those already there. Local town halls had to manage a huge re-allocation of people and resources.

It was soon evident that officials had severely underestimated the numbers of refugees involved, and the plans that they had made were clearly not adequate. In November 1940, fifty of these refugees arrived in Montory. Their arrival required the local council to busy itself with 'credit for the purchase of food, repairs to premises, and bedding.'

The re-allocation of housing, furniture, pots and pans, other basics needed for living – as well as food and clothing - resulted in a move for Henny and Hermann from Montory to a larger village about ten kilometres away called Arette.

The town hall of Arette recorded the arrival of many refugees from Lorraine into the village on 24 November 1940. These refugees spoke both French and German fluently, and one elderly man, Jacky Tillous, in 2023 remembered a young girl, Barbe Grenner, who was in his class at school in 1941 and who spoke French, but with a slightly different accent from the local children.

On 7 January 1941, Henny and Hermann also arrived in Arette where the local people welcomed them with generosity, practical help, and a deep personal commitment.

(photo shows the main street in Montory )

Education for Lore and Inge in 1930s Germany

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 08:52:07 GMT

When Henny and Hermann considered leaving Jever at the end of the 1920s, it was partly in response to increasing anti-Semitic violence in this small town, and also partly with a view to the future education of their daughters.

Like many other Jewish families, they regarded education very highly. Both parents had been well educated and Hermann was himself a teacher. In 1929, when a teaching post became available for him in the near city of Wilhelmshaven, a house move seemed to suit the entire family very well.

In Wilhelmshaven, there was a growing officer class of the expanding German navy that demanded excellent educational opportunities for their children. Thus, with Lore approaching her fifth birthday and school age, there were better facilities there than Jever could offer. So, at the end of October 1929, the family moved to Wilhelmshaven.

In January 1933, when Lore was eight years old, Adolf Hitler was made Chancellor and anti-Semitism everywhere escalated. Less than three months later, a law was passed limiting the number of Jewish children allowed to enrol in German schools. This law also required the end to previous teachings of democracy and equality. These were to be replaced by the spreading of Nazi ideas of obedience to state authority, militarism, racism, and love for Hitler.

In Jever, teachers at the senior school – the Mariengymnasium – included several senior Nazi leaders who incited hatred, intimidation and violence towards Jewish students. Philip Sternberg, who had lived opposite the Hartogs in Jever, moved his family away from the town when his son, Rolf, (who was Inge's age) was refused admission to this school. The Gröschlers' son, Walter, was similarly banned from attending.

Henny and Hermann decided to send their elder daughter, Lore, overseas for her secondary education. This had become a normal course for Jewish parents with the necessary financial means, and school places were advertised in the Jewish press. So, in February 1937, Lore left her school in Germany to attend a boarding school in England.

Meanwhile, all children in Germany were legally required to attend school but educational opportunities were being drastically reduced for Jewish children. In 1938, they were no longer allowed to attend schools in the public state system.

At the beginning of 1938, Inge was eleven years old and had received only a smattering of education and schooling during the previous years. There was no Jewish school nearby that she could attend. In Oldenburg, more than 50 kms away, the newly ordained rabbi, 25 year-old Leo Trepp, asked local Nazi officials if he could open a school in his synagogue for Jewish children within the wider locality. Permission was granted and he was also given funding for desks and some supplies. Inge became a student there for the next few months, until 10 November 1938, together with her friends Hilde ter Berg and Ingrid Cohen.

To the end of her life, Inge was acutely conscious of her lack of early education, her inability and loss of confidence in writing well, and the struggle that she experienced living in a society that valued education when she had almost none. But her parents, who had been unable to give her the schooling that they had wanted for her, shared with her their ideals of freedom, equality and generosity that shone through her life.

(the photo shows Lore – back row, 5 ^th from left – at her school in Germany about 1936)

Pogrom of November 1938 in north-west Germany

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 04:00:00 GMT

During the late evening of 9 November 1938, word came through to Nazi leaders in Germany that the German diplomat Ernst von Rath had died in Paris after an assassination attempt on him by a young Polish Jew, Herschel Grünspan. A chaotic night of revenge and retaliation against all Jewish communities in Germany followed that would change their lives for ever.

Synagogues were burnt and destroyed, Jewish homes and properties smashed, and Jewish businesses wrecked. The attacks were led by paramilitary forces of the Nazi party, aided by members of the Hitler youth and German civilians. Local authorities looked on and did not intervene. Fire brigades were ordered to protect only neighbouring – non-Jewish – buildings.

In Jever, the synagogue was set alight at about 2.30am. The home of one of the leaders of the community, Hermann Gröschler, was trashed by Hitler youth who took away the family's linen, stole works of art, silver, and clothes, and arrogantly smoked Hermann's cigars in front of his wife, Anne, whom they treated offensively. All the local Jews were arrested and taken to the nearby prison.

Similarly, in Wilhelmshaven the synagogue was burnt, Jewish property demolished, and Jews arrested. Henny and Hermann Hartog, together with their eleven-year old daughter, Inge, and Henny's father, Adolf Scheuer, were taken with others to the Jahnhalle – a large hall for local events.

Parallel actions took place in Aurich. While the synagogue burnt, members of Hermann's family were arrested during the night and taken to the agricultural auction hall known as the Bullenhalle. Many of the Jews in Aurich were quite elderly but even so they were rounded up and driven through the streets to the hall with only makeshift clothing. There, they were subjected to insults, abuse, and violence.

On the morning of 10 November, the women, children, and elderly men were allowed to go back to their homes – which they often discovered had been wrecked during the night. For many women, one memory of that night was of feathers floating from the duvets that had been slashed by the Nazis.

Hermann Hartog was not allowed home. With most of the other Jewish men in Wilhelmshaven, he was marched through the streets to the railway station – past the still-smouldering synagogue and the ranks of hostile civilians.

The men were put on a special train that took them to Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. On the way, the train stopped to pick up other Jewish men – including those from Jever and Aurich. At Sachsenhausen, there were more than 6,000 Jews from the larger area, and they all became subjected to a terrifying regime where they were controlled with dogs and whips. None of them knew whether they would ever be released.

Henny returned to her home in Wilhelmshaven with Inge and her elderly father. The following day, Hermann's sister, Berta, visited her from Aurich on the bus and the two women shared their traumatic experiences and talked together about how best to organise and re-establish their households with none of their menfolk at home. Henny found Berta to be 'very melancholy' - and no doubt she felt the same herself.

( the photo shows the ruins of the synagogue in Jever on 10 November 1938 )

Remembrance Day 1945 for German PoW

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 06:00:02 GMT

When an armistice was signed between the Allies and Germany on 11 November 1918, Herbert Sulzbach was an officer in the German army. It was a shattering experience for him to have to read out the terms of the armistice to the men in his command and return, dignified but defeated, to his country.

Between the wars, Sulzbach was on several occasions in London as a business-man on Remembrance Sundays when those who had died during that war were commemorated. He was much impressed with the grave and respectful attitudes that he observed in the people around him on those days and that remained with him as an inspiration.

During the Second World War, Herbert Sulzbach served in the British army. In January 1945, before war had ended, he was sent to work as an interpreter at a prisoner of war camp at Comrie, Perthshire. By Remembrance Sunday 1945, he was a captain in the British army working amongst 4,000 young German prisoners. He saw his role as not only interpreting German and British languages, but also interpreting British democracy to these young men.

Many of the prisoners had been fanatical Nazis. A few months before Sulzbach's arrival, a lynching mob had strung up and murdered a fellow-prisoner who had shown anti-Hitler sympathies. Since then Sulzbach had worked hard to change the attitudes and opinions of any prisoner who was ready to listen.

Shortly before 11 November 1945, he sent out a circular to all the prisoners. It explained that the focus of the Remembrance Day commemoration was on the dead of both World Wars. He also enclosed a copy of John McCrae’s poem, In Flanders Field , and suggested that the prisoners should only attend the ceremonies if they were prepared to take a vow. The vow that he wrote stated:

‘Never, never again shall such murder happen in future. It is the last time that we will allow ourselves to be lied to and betrayed. It is not true that we Germans are a superior race. We are all equal before Almighty God, whatever race or religion we belong to.

'At this moment we swear to return home as good Europeans and as long as we live to take an active part in the reconciliation of all people and the maintenance of eternal peace, according to the principle of the true, the beautiful, the good.'

Sulzbach added: 'Only if that is your own conviction, should you take part in these minutes of silence.’

Thousands of prisoners paraded, affirming the vow. Only a few remained in their huts, and Herbert Sulzbach was pleased and proud.

( the photo shows Sulzbach's battered copy of the poem that he sent to the prisoners)

Henny reaches Brussels October 1939

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 20:12:42 GMT

At last Henny Hartog managed to flee Germany!

On 29 October 1939, eight weeks after war had broken out, she was eventually able to travel from Cologne, cross the closed border into Belgium and arrive in Brussels to join Hermann. Both she and Hermann were exhausted, but ecstatic to be reunited and as soon as she arrived she wrote to their young daughters in England with the news,

'After an adventurous journey, I at last arrived with Vati today and you will feel how great was the joy. But my head is still so dazed after all the exertion that I can't write much. I will write later about everything that I experienced.'

Hermann had located a big room at 127 rue Royale Sainte Marie where they could live together in a house that gave accommodation to refugees, and they were grateful to the kindly Belgian woman who hosted them there. They had been able to bring very little money from Germany and relied on a welfare committee to meet their day-to-day needs. As they wrote to their daughters to explain their lack of correspondence,

'For the price of a stamp to England we can buy a small loaf of bread. You know how much we must economise.'

They found that they could communicate quite well with local people who spoke either French or Flemish. Henny tried to remember the French that she had learnt in her Swiss finishing school over twenty years earlier, and Hermann discovered that Flemish was quite close to the Low German that he had spoken as a boy in Aurich, near the Dutch border.

There were then thousands of new Jewish arrivals in Belgium who had fled German-speaking countries. Many of them had arrived 'illegally' but they were tolerated by the authorities provided that they were looked after by a private organisation. Henny and Hermann sought help from the Comité d'Assistance aux Refugiés Juifs which had its offices in Brussels at rue Roger van der Weyden 25, which was a 45 minute walk away from their lodgings.

As more and more Jewish refugees flooded into Brussels, the committee became increasingly anxious to advise against them giving offence and thus causing a potential rise in anti-Semitism. Painted in large letters in German on to the walls of the organisation's buildings was the exhortation:

'Deserve the hospitality you receive in Belgium!

Always carry yourself in an exemplary manner!

Respect the customs of the country. Don't get noticed.

Avoid speaking loudly in the streets and in public places.

Discipline yourself! This is in your own interest.'

And so – eighty-five years ago - their time as refugees began for Henny and Hermann.

(the photo shows the house at 127 rue Royale Sainte Marie where they rented a room)

going to Jever

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 05:00:02 GMT

It is always very special to be going to Jever – a town in north-west Germany where members of our family lived and worked almost a hundred years ago. It is an event to anticipate with pleasure, to be grateful for the opportunities to reclaim an uncertain past, to meet with fellow travellers on a similar quest for an elusive but fundamentally necessary understanding of those who walked before us in Jever, who walked through our own lives, and who continue to walk with their descendants.

We are the guests of those in Jever who keep alive the memory of the Jewish community that was once such a vital part of the town. It is a memory that almost disappeared without trace – at least, that was the plan of the ruling Nazi party during the 1930s in Germany. Certainly, their plan was successful in destroying millions of lives, in dispersing surviving German-Jewish families throughout the world, and in wiping out the culture and heritage of a significant group within German society.

But the memory could not be totally annihilated.

During the 1960s and 1970s, young people asked questions - and wanted answers:

'Who were the Jewish people in our society?'

'Where had they lived?'

'Why was there discrimination against them?'

'What did you do to help them?'

The questions were difficult and troubling, and the answers were often evasive. But the students had teachers and leaders in the community who encouraged their curiosity, supported their tenacity, and enabled their research.

As we approach our visit to Jever, we are the beneficiaries of those large-hearted people who are welcoming back the descendants of a once-vibrant force within the locality. We come from many parts of the world – all those places where Jews managed to get a visa for immigration; Israel, USA, Britain, Argentina, South Africa. It is good to greet each other, and to recognise our belonging.

(photo shows the names of Henny and Hermann Hartog on the memorial in Jever)

my writing room

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 05:00:03 GMT

I like to know where writers write. Details fascinate me – the mess, or lack of it; the creative details, or their absence; the layout of desk versus window versus brick wall.

So where do I write?

For many years I worked from home and was happy to flit between the computer, washing machine, and school run. Sometimes I had more space than at others.

The children left home, we downsized, and a small bedroom became my work space. Then the grandchildren arrived and very soon my writing room was taken over by a cot. Important documents fought with the needs of an infant.

I took myself out of the house and found the ideal writing space. I now drive for an hour into the countryside - wonderful 'thinking time'. When I come to my destination I arrive at silence, except for birdsong.

Crossing the courtyard, I let myself into an oast house and climb the steep stairs to my circular first floor room. It is usually freezing. My desk is in front of a window that looks out over the Sussex countryside. From time to time cars, farm vehicles and the postman scrunch over the gravel outside. Small birds flit around outside and nest in the eaves. On windy days the cowl on the roof thumps in time to my tapping on the laptop.

The round walls are hung with images – collages of family photos, paintings by my grandchildren, treasured pictures. Surrounded by the people who matter to me, I write about what matters to me too.

(photo shows the view from the window above my desk in my oast house writing room)

research and the kindness of strangers

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 06:00:01 GMT

For the past twenty years, my research has been subject to an avalanche of generosity. For example, when I first visited Potsdam in the footsteps of Herbert Sulzbach, I was at the end of a research trip and had limited time. The little information that I had proved to be unreliable but a young receptionist at Babelsberg Palace rushed to consult colleagues. Soon I was with the Potsdam librarian who gave me her time, advice and some contacts.

Back home, I sent emails but little happened. Then came one lengthy reply, plus pictures. A kind historian had spent the weekend travelling to photograph exactly what I needed and writing a wonderfully detailed account. A year later, I was sharing coffee and cake with him and his wife in their home, and listening to even more insightful and helpful explanations.

I wrote a letter to an ex-PoW who had known Sulzbach. He phoned back within days and a fortnight later I was driving to stay with him and his family to see his papers, and listen to his stories. Sons and daughters of ex-PoW have been amazingly generous with their treasured documents.

'I know it's in good hands', said one such son on our first meeting, dropping a massive file and photograph album on to the table.

'Just bring it back when you've finished with it', as though I dropped by Bonn from Brighton every few days.

Before I started, I began a list of the complete strangers who have helped me to discover Herbert Sulzbach. It is far too long to print. In Featherstone Park camp, the prisoners used to speak of 'the Sulzbach spirit'. Perhaps it is this which has been following me around.

(photo: Helga and Dr Klaus Arlt, Potsdam – with many thanks)

a case of mistaken identity

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 06:00:03 GMT

Herbert Sulzbach survived four years with the German army during the First World War. Throughout this time, he sent his diaries and photos for safe-keeping to his family in Frankfurt. Twenty years later, in 1935, he had them published in Berlin. ' Zwei lebende Mauern ' ('Two Living Walls') told of the ordeals and gallantry of German soldiers who showed courage, cheerfulness, and great patriotic pride.

The book received high praise from the Nazi press, who presumably had not realised that Sulzbach was a Jew. Publication was two years after a massive book-burning in central Berlin of books written by 'degenerate' authors, and was just one year before Sulzbach was made bankrupt and forced into exile by the Nazis.

Nazi endorsement for his book continued. As late as March 1945, a student leader of the Nazi Youth in Munich was issued with a copy which he was to read to his platoon at their weekly meetings. He had only got half-way through it when the American army arrived in Munich. The eleven year old was captured and his pack searched. When Sulzbach's book was discovered inside, the American lieutenant chucked it into the River Isar.

Thirty years later, in July 1973, the diaries were translated and published as ' With the German Guns '. A complementary copy was – by chance - sent to the 'Hitler Youth platoon leader', who was by then living in England. He was delighted to carry on reading from where he had left off, and wrote to the publisher to say so. When Sulzbach heard, he invited the reader to be the guest speaker at his next Anglo-German Association meeting.

('With the German Guns' by Herbert Sulzbach is now published by Pen and Sword Books)

'Journey's End'

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 15:42:19 GMT

'Die andere Seite' or 'Journey's End'

'Die andere Seite' ('The Other Side') opened on 29 August 1929 at a Max Reinhardt theatre in Berlin. The play, written as 'Journey's End' by Robert Cedric Sheriff, had already been staged in London and New York, and its premier in Berlin was enormously successful. Mathias Wieman acted in the main role of Stanhope, and the director was Heinz Hilpert.

The setting of the play was the British front in WWI near St Quentin just before the German offensive in March 1918. Herbert Sulzbach, living in Berlin in 1929, went to see it at the Künstlertheater. In March 1918 he had fought 'on the other side' in that battle, and the play affected him deeply.

'Once, for a whole week long, I had behaved like that. Sheriff’s drama was set exactly at the same time as I, a young Prussian Lieutenant, and my regiment began the huge offensive early in the morning against the British 5 ^th Army. I lived through those great, terrible, and unbelievable days all over again.'

Nearly twenty years after seeing the play, and after a Second World War, Captain Herbert Sulzbach arrived as an interpreter at a Prisoner of War camp for four thousand German officers at Featherstone Park in Northumberland.

The cultural programme meant that the large camp had four theatre stages, and many of the prisoners took part in the dramatics. On 26 February 1946, one month after his arrival, Sulzbach was invited to a performance of 'Journey's End'.

'They put it on ten times, so that two thousand PoW could see the piece which I had once seen in 1929 in Berlin, where it had moved me enormously. Now I saw 'Die andere Seite' afresh from the other side, and as a British captain, myself in khaki, I watched German PoW playing British roles. It is too much to be able to take in! I went back to my hut deeply impressed.'

(photo: the site of Featherstone Park PoW camp today)

Eighty years later

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 20:11:44 GMT

The 4 September is a memorable date for my husband and me; it is our wedding anniversary. But what we didn't know when we married on that gloriously happy and sunny day in 1971, was that about thirty years previously it had been a desperately sad and tragic day for our family. Not even my future mother-in-law knew the details: now, we do.

On Friday 4 September 1942, eighty years ago this year (2022), my husband's grandparents were herded on to a cattle truck at the concentration camp at Drancy, in Paris. (It happened to be the Jewish Sabbath.) They were sent with other Jews on Convoy 28 from Drancy to the extermination camp at Auschwitz, where they were immediately murdered. Henny Hartog was 45 years old, and her husband, Hermann – a school teacher and cantor – was ten years older. Their daughters, then aged 17 and 15, were in England.

There had been French people who had willingly tried to help, but ultimately they were unable to resist the arrest and deportation of the Jewish refugees from Germany who had lodged in their village in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Despite the courageous actions of their neighbours, Henny and Hermann had been rounded up by the French police who - acting on orders of those subservient to their German invaders - had returned them to the local concentration camp, Camp de Gurs. From there they had been transported by lorry to the nearby railway station, Oloron Sainte Marie, and then by cattle trucks to Paris.

Henny and Hermann had been fearful of this outcome for some months. They had been able to listen to the radio reports over the summer months which described the rounding up of Jews in the south-west of France, for deportation 'to the east'. It was really just a matter of time before they, too, heard the knock on the door. There was little – at this stage – that their French friends could do for them, but they took care of some money, letters from the children, Hermann's religious vestments.

In Camp de Gurs, there was not much time to make arrangements, but Henny gave another detained Jewish woman her daughter's address, and asked her to write:

'She asked me to write to you before she left. She looked well, she was very quiet (so was your father – and both were very courageous) and not afraid of the long journey. Your parents asked me to tell you that you must not be afraid, and not be worried if you hear nothing for a long time.'

This year, we remember the thousands of Jewish people who were deported from the Unoccupied Zone of France to the extermination camps of Germany, eighty years ago.

Henny and Hermann say goodbye in Spring 1939

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 09:00:03 GMT

Theirs was a forced emigration, and they planned carefully. However, circumstances changed all the while as they tried to make arrangements, and so plans were constantly having to be altered. It was only after the pogroms of November 1938 that Henny and Hermann Hartog had finally had to accept that they could no longer stay in Germany – but opportunities for emigrating were closing swiftly everywhere.

By early 1939, they were trying to travel to relatives in America – to be joined there later by their two daughters in England – but waiting lists were lengthening rapidly. Their plan changed to find a way to emigrate to England, but there were huge obstacles to entry.

Meanwhile, Henny arranged for many of their belongings to be taken in a container to the port in Bremen ready for shipping, but before long the costs of freight became so high, and money became so scarce, that they realised that this was probably not achievable. They left the 'Jew house' to which they had been allocated in Wilhelmshaven and went to live with Hermann's relatives in Aurich. Henny's father was already there; six adults in a not very large house.

In April 1938, Henny travelled to Frankfurt to say goodbye to her elderly relatives. She enjoyed the journey and the fine weather, and was pleased to see hills and forests again after the flat moorlands of the north of the country. The old people were thinner and frailer than she remembered them, and she worked hard to make life easier for them. She made a detour as she returned to Aurich in order to say goodbye to Hermann's sister who lived in Cologne.

In Frankfurt, she had also been preparing a place for her elderly father to live with his brother-in-law. Adolph Scheuer left Aurich for Frankfurt in May 1939, having made his home with Henny and Hermann for the previous nine years.

Friends and neighbours in Aurich were all leaving if they could, although many of the young people had already gone. The Jewish teacher, Max Moses, left for Hamburg and the USA, and Hermann took his place teaching the few children who remained.

All plans were hurriedly shelved when war broke out in September 1939, and a few weeks later Hermann arrived in Brussels to find a place where Henny could join him. She managed to get there in November 1939. At that time, they had little idea that their farewells to relatives and friends had been final. They had become refugees.

(the photo shows Henny's father, Adolph Scheuer, in 1938)

serving in both world wars

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 10:48:08 GMT

Men who served as combatants in both world wars very often recognised that they were fighting for a very different cause the second time round.

In 1914 the British diplomat Harold Nicolson was 'burning for war'. Herbert Sulzbach felt much the same – as he volunteered for the German Imperial army. When he was elderly, Sulzbach wrote 'the Great War is still so near to us, nearer than 1939 – 45.' He often spoke of it as 'the 'last knightly war', when soldiers on both sides believed in the justice of their cause, were filled with idealism, and 'had respect of each other, in spite of the terrible fighting.'

The artist Keith Vaughan, who was too young to fight in the First World War, distrusted such values. Painting scenes of barrack rooms in the Pioneer Corps – in places very similar to those in Sulzbach's Second World War service career - he considered that in wartime, 'it is through conditions commonly shared that one imagines oneself at one with [others], but it is an illusion.’

In his January 1932 diary, Nicolson described Hitlerism as 'a doctrine of despair' and foresaw a catastrophe for Germany. For the Jewish artist Samuel Bak, Nazism was 'a machinery of dehumanisation' where he realised 'what man is capable of doing to man.' Sulzbach fought Nazism, but not the 'other' Germany that he still believed existed. Despite the horrors, loss, and exile of the Second World War, Sulzbach held on to his chivalrous ideals. Wearing first field-grey for Germany and later khaki for Britain were both important.

As a British officer, Sulzbach worked as an interpreter amongst German officer PoWs. Some of them shared his First World War experiences, and of one of them Sulzbach wrote, 'tomorrow General Heim will have been here for one year. I sent him a photo of me. “My comrade from 1914/18, my enemy from 1939/45, my friend since 20 May 46”'.

(photo: military cemetery in Thiescourt, France, with German and Entente graves)

saving her daughter via Kindertransport

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 11:35:28 GMT

Henny Hartog was 40 years old when this photo was taken in 1937. She was a Jewish woman, married to a Jewish teacher – Hermann - and they lived with their two daughters in north-west Germany, in Wilhelmshaven. The previous year they had all waved goodbye to the elder girl, Lore, as she left for England to pursue an education that was no longer available to her as a Jewish youngster in Germany.

One year after this photograph, on the night of 9/10 November 1938, Nazis burnt synagogues to the ground, destroyed Jewish businesses, and took Jewish people into custody, where they harassed and humiliated them. Henny and Hermann were taken into custody along with their younger daughter, Inge, and Henny's father. The following morning Hermann was taken to a concentration camp and the others were allowed home.

Henny remained extraordinarily strong, despite 'wanting to cry my eyes out'. She arranged for her elderly father to go and live with Hermann's relatives away from the city, and immediately wrote to Lore with instructions of how to help their situation from England. Lore was 14 years old. Henny's other concerns were how to help effect Hermann's release, and how to get Inge to safety.

Within the following week, the British government agreed to permit the temporary admission of Jewish children under seventeen years of age without their parents, and without the requirement of a visa. This transportation of children became known as the 'Kindertransport'. Clearly, not all children whose parents wanted them to go to England would be able to do so; Henny worked fast to secure a place for her younger daughter.

She needed to complete a questionnaire concerning Inge's character and background, and enclose a photograph of her that were sent to the local social worker’s office. This office then sent the documents to the 'Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland' [the Federal Representation of Jews in Germany] in Berlin, together with Inge's health certificate - in order to receive permission to leave the country. Henny also had to sign a statement allowing the committee in Britain to look after Inge, and another statement that declared the religion that Inge had been brought up in. The documentation was then sent to London for review by the Refugee Children’s Movement.

All went well, and Henny was issued with a travel date and departure details for Inge, who was allowed to take a small sealed suitcase with her – but no valuables, and only ten marks in money. She was included, with almost 200 other children, on the first 'Kindertransport' train which left the German town of Bad Bentheim, on the border of Holland, on Thursday 1 December 1938. Inge was then three days short of her twelfth birthday.

(the picture shows Henny Hartog (born Scheuer) in 1937)

a German soldier's experience of August 1914

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 09:54:44 GMT

August 1914 was a month to remember for 20 year old Herbert Sulzbach in Frankfurt. On 2 August, Germany mobilised for war and there was 'magnificent enthusiasm and a superb mood'.

His brother-in-law, a medical officer, reported for service on 3 August. Sulzbach himself volunteered with the local artillery and reported for duty on the 8 ^th – with many of his school friends. One of his girl friends gave him a lucky penny. There was 'much enthusiasm and tears'.

An eleven o'clock curfew for the town surprised him and he was sad, but patriotic, when their much-loved Adler car was requisitioned and sent to the Front at Metz.

Sulzbach's brother, Ernst, was in London and needed time to return home. A welcome telegram from Hamburg brought news from him, and he arrived in Frankfurt on 9 August.

The following day Sulzbach was fitted with his uniform and had his photo taken with his girl friend. He felt strange as he walked around town, since he couldn't even salute.

Three weeks later he was excited about his departure for the Front. On the evening of his farewell, 29 August, news arrived that his brother-in-law's ship had been sunk and his sister's husband was dead. She could barely face her brother to wish him goodbye.

In another August, many years later, Sulzbach stood in the half-destroyed centre of Frankfurt and told a companion how he had once walked around town unable to salute. He also described how a horse – on which sat a young Lieutenant - had come through, leading the forage wagons. He knew the name of the Lieutenant, Fränzchen Trier.

A few minutes later Sulzbach and his companion were in a restaurant. He was fascinated by an older man and asked the waiter if he knew the man's name. 'Yes, that's Cavalry Captain Trier'.

This was 1950. Thirty six years and two World Wars had since passed.

(the picture shows leafy Friedrichstrasse in Frankfurt where Sulzbach lived in 1914)

Hermann Hartog's school room

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 11:40:34 GMT

We stand in a fairly small room, with its whitewashed walls, and its windows that look out onto neighbouring walls. Those very nearby walls had once saved this room from destruction. During the pogrom of 9/10 November 1938, when the synagogue was burnt to the ground, the local fire brigade ensured that the neighbours' properties remained intact. Their water hoses had saved the house next door – and so also part of the synagogue.

We are standing on the site of a synagogue in Jever, in north-west Germany. The teacher in this school room from 1910 to 1938 was Hermann Hartog. Here, he instructed a succession of youngsters in the Jewish faith, as he later also did at the synagogue in Wilhelmshaven. In the early part of his tenure, it was a lively and thriving community. But the 1930s was a cruel period for all Jews and many left. By the time of the 1938 pogrom, there was no use for the school room; there were no children left to teach. It was used as living accommodation for one of the community – and she nearly perished in that night's conflagration.

After the pogrom, Hermann was incarcerated in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, along with hundreds of fellow Jews from the area. He was released after several weeks on condition that he would leave Germany – and not tell of the horrors that he had seen. Together with his wife, Henny, he stayed until the bitter end – like many other leaders of Jewish communities throughout Germany.

Much has happened between that time and our experience of standing in the restored school room. An original window remains, and part of a wall, and we are glad to see and touch them. There is a huge gulf between the present and the time of that vibrant Jewish community and its school room.

Today – 22 February – is Hermann Hartog's birthday. He was born 135 years ago, and he was my husband's grandfather. His story, and that of his wife, Henny, is one that I will tell because we must never forget their lives if we want to make sense of the future.

The picture shows the entrance to the school room after the burning of the synagogue on 9/10 November 1938

anti-Nazi resistance in Germany during WW2

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 14:18:40 GMT

In November 1946 a young German arrived at Featherstone Park PoW camp. Otto John had been sent by the British army's Political Intelligence Department to interview every German colonel who was being repatriated. Herbert Sulzbach asked him when he had left Germany. '20 July 44'.

Otto and his brother Hans had been in an anti-Hitler group since 1936 and had both taken part in the assassination attempt on Hitler in July 1944. Hans was caught, tortured, and hanged. Otto escaped by plane via Madrid to Portugal.

As Herbert Sulzbach discovered more about German resistance, he realised that 'little, if anything, was known about it before the end of the war. Many people actually did not want to know anything about the existence of such a movement during the years 1933 – 45'.

Even when Sulzbach welcomed another Resister, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, to the German Embassy in 1968 he felt that he needed to explain to guests that 'it remained unknown that a vast cross-section of Germans, working class men, trade unionists, labour movement leaders, civil servants, soldiers, officers, had formed groups of anti-Nazi movements, that students even dared to issue and distribute leaflets telling of the horrors of Nazism.'

He wrote in a letter to 'The Times' in 1978, 'the attempt of 20 July 1944 was one of many attempts to kill the mass-murderer between 1939 and 1944!'

Today, the German Resistance Memorial Centre in Berlin is located in the former headquarters of the Army High Command, at the site of the attempted coup. On 20 July 1962, the mayor of Berlin unveiled a plaque bearing the names of the officers executed there by a firing squad on 20 July 1944.

(the picture shows the plaque in the commemorative courtyard)

reconciliation after WW2

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 16:26:03 GMT

Yehudi Menuhin said of Herbert Sulzbach's work at Featherstone Park PoW camp that it 'healed and encouraged the human heart and spirit', and 'furthered and generated mutual respect and mutual trust'.

Yet Sulzbach was working in the immediate post-war period, amongst German officers, and he was himself a Jew. The violence, displacement and personal loss of the previous years were still vivid in people's memories. How was reconciliation to be possible?

His own explanation was that 'hatred leads to self-destruction. My ideal was Anglo-German friendship and reconciliation, based on a united Europe.' He immersed himself in as many one-to-one conversations as possible, with significant results.

Sulzbach had understanding of both the German and the British character, and also the necessary empathy to put himself in the German officers' place and see the world through their eyes. He helped them to face their own responsibility for the atrocities of the recent past and to understand the truth of the situation.

He knew that reconciliation would be a long-term process, and require not only their changed moral perception but also a commitment to justice and truth. This would need to include institutional transformation in the new Germany. Many of the PoW officers returned home to influential positions and demonstrated exactly that commitment to the country that they needed to rebuild.

A new German Consulate opened in London in 1951, and Sulzbach joined as a cultural officer. For the next thirty years he remained passionately involved in Anglo-German friendship and reconciliation. Partnerships and exchange programmes were arranged, town twinnings set up, and every opportunity taken to promote and deepen mutual understanding.

Reconciliation is an endeavour for the long term and Herbert Sulzbach was committed to it until the very end of his long life.

footsteps in biography

ainslie_hepburn@hotmail.com — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 14:38:05 GMT

'How much do I want this adventure?'

'Perhaps I need different shoes.'

It is an extraordinary experience for a biographer to walk physically in the footsteps of someone who made that journey many years before. Why am I doing this? What do I hope to find? On one level, perhaps I will merely verify all those facts that I have painstakingly accumulated. Maybe that's enough.

But what I am really hoping for is an empathetic experience with the very person about whom I am writing. Perhaps by making the physical journey, I will more easily connect with their world – and even their thoughts.

After my first visit to Frankfurt to discover the world of Herbert Sulzbach, I made other journeys – to Berlin, London, the Isle of Man, southern England, northern France, Scotland and Northumberland. What was the use?

I can only say that on one particular day, I walked through the streets of Berlin holding a sheaf of papers that had been written by Herbert Sulzbach. Written in the late 1940s, these directed me through the bombed devastation that he had witnessed at that time. The city had been his home ten years before that. These were streets that he had known and loved in better – and saner – times. Despite the transformed Berlin that I actually walked through, and whether or not I managed to empathise enough, or to stand adequately in his shoes, it was an extremely powerful experience.

If you care for the person about whom you write, nothing beats standing where they have stood, seeing what they would have seen, and struggling to hear and to think what they might have heard and thought.

experiencing WW1 near Noyon - and reconciliation after WW2 near Hexham

Sun, 28 Nov 2021 10:53:58 GMT

In Thiescourt, a village in Picardy, the edges of the fields are drenched in poppies. Reports of WWI battles are unnecessary: the noise and smell of the guns of 1915/16 seem vivid. I stare at the remains of a gun emplacement. Almost a hundred years ago Herbert Sulzbach – a gunner and officer in the German army - operated here. Did he use that emplacement?

The military cemetery divides into two, but with no physical barrier. The dead from the German army lie close to those from the armies of the Entente. Some German headstones commemorate Jewish soldiers. These each stand particularly close to a fellow German's memorial, and somehow this now seems very poignant.

In March 1917 Sulzbach called the nearby town, 'my well-beloved Noyon', as he enjoyed the comforts of the German headquarters. Nowadays, not far from the building that housed the Germans, is a traffic sign to Hexham in Northumberland, England. Struck by this discovery, I am again confounded by the many coincidences in this man's life.

Thirty years after his time in Noyon, Sulzbach found himself – as an officer in the British army – just fifteen miles from Hexham. From 1946 to 1948, he worked in a Prisoner of War camp for German officers at Featherstone Park. His success at 'denazification' and reconciliation enabled thousands of German officers to return home to rebuild hope and democracy into their shattered country.

The coincidence of the Noyon/Hexham link is intensified by Sulzbach's later work at the German Embassy in London. For the last thirty years of his life he worked there to further all aspects of Anglo-German reconciliation, including town twinning partnerships - but not, it appears, that between Noyon and Hexham, which came later.

acknowledging fear in wartime

Fri, 05 Nov 2021 15:25:20 GMT

The whole point of the sustained bombing attack that Germany inflicted on Britain from September until November 1940 was to destroy morale. Night-time raids accentuated the fear factor. Fear not only affects people's mental abilities, it is also often contagious.

Virginia Woolf described her fear during an air raid. 'During those seconds of suspense all thinking stopped. All feeling, save one dull dread, ceased.' It was hard for most people to express this fear, but it was noticeable in other ways.

From November 1941, Herbert Sulzbach's diary records his hospitalisation for serious abdominal complaints. Five months later, he improved markedly when he received a letter from his brother; their first communication since the outbreak of war.

Readers of letters and diaries from this period notice an increase in the recording of stress-related physical ailments, a distortion of writing styles as people try to cope - and a tendency for the full stop to puncture the page.

In July 1944 a bomb demolished part of the house where Herbert Sulzbach's wife was lodging. She was terrified, anguished and distraught. A refugee in exile, this was the second time that her home in England had been destroyed. Sulzbach was given compassionate leave to join her.

During the following nights he experienced the 'frightening monstrosity' of the V1s. But in the early morning, he would emerge from the shelter and look around. 'How joyful the world seemed to me. Breakfast in the garden, among the dead roof tiles and the living garden flowers, was wonderful.'

using diaries in writing

Fri, 05 Nov 2021 15:15:05 GMT

Whilst writing the biography of Herbert Sulzbach, I have access to many original documents. His diaries, in particular, seem to be a revelation of the man.

But are they – and, if so, to what degree?

Like most people's diaries, Sulzbach's changed over the years. As a teenager, he charted the political situation in Europe as cheerfully as he did the social occasions of the wealthy Jews of Frankfurt. His diaries written during the First World War were sent to his parents as he finished the available pages. He said that he wanted to let people back home know what was happening.

Much later, these war diaries were published. So a larger audience than merely his parents and friends had clearly always been envisaged. His diaries had moved away from the private space that we often believe diaries to occupy.

Later, Sulzbach lived in England and fought for Britain during the Second World War. His letters to his wife told of his experiences as a soldier, his feelings, and also gave a political commentary on the war. On his instructions, she filed them at home as his diary. He wanted them to be available when he wrote his autobiography. So how private were either the letters or the diary? What story about himself was he hoping to put into his writing?

I am working with diaries that are written with flair, passion, and humour. But they can never tell me the whole story about this man. I need other documents, insights, and viewpoints to verify his world.

remembrance between the wars

Fri, 05 Nov 2021 10:41:34 GMT

On 11 November 1926 Herbert Sulzbach was staying in London on business. As he walked down the Strand at about 11 o'clock he was astonished as silence fell all around him. For two minutes, buses and cars came to a standstill, people stood quietly, and men removed their hats. He was deeply impressed by the respect shown to the dead of the Great War on this Armistice Day.

When the original armistice had been declared in 1918 he had been a senior lieutenant in the German army on the Western Front and it had been his duty to read the order to lay aside arms to his men. Proud but humiliated, defeated and stricken to his soul, he had then led them on the march back to Germany.

The following years had not been easy, with revolution in the cities and a deteriorating economic situation. As he wrote to French friends, 'After all these years, we now see the results of that terrible war'. But his memory of his four years as a soldier remained very strong. On that business trip in 1926 his respect for the British became even greater as he experienced their solemn remembrance of the war.

Some years later, as a refugee from Hitler, Sulzbach was living in London and was one of the huge crowd at the Cenotaph in Whitehall on Armistice Day 1937. Again, he marvelled at the dignity, ceremony and respect accorded to 'the glorious dead' and those who had been bereaved by the war. He appreciated the lack of triumphalism and the solemnity.

In 1920, viewing the chaos all around him in Germany, and thinking back to his patriotic time as a soldier, he had written in his dairy, 'Weep for this poor, dead German Reich!' His day at the Cenotaph had shown him a different approach.