Newsletter for Generation 2 Generation

Editorial

On 8 May we marked 80 years since the end of the Second World War in Europe: VE Day.  In our mind’s eye many of us probably see the famous newsreel footage of British crowds celebrating in the Mall, cheering and singing, dancing and embracing.

But for Jews on the continent, for the remaining third of the Jewish people who had lived and thrived there before the advent of Nazism, it was more of a mixed experience. No doubt everyone was glad to know that Germany had been defeated. Yet once these few survivors, often emerging from the camps or from hiding, tried to return to their homes, they did not necessarily have a happy homecoming. In our two features this month, we explore this theme. Dr Ellis Spicer, author of Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Britain: Community and Belonging, gives an overview of what happened, and four G2G speakers tell of their own relative’s experience in returning to their old hometown.

In August we will be taking a summer break and there will be no Events Update that month. We look forward to seeing you again for our full newsletter in September.

Vivienne Cato

G2G Upcoming Events

Recent Events

G2G News

This academic year has seen continued growth for G2G, and we are receiving new bookings daily.

Across 2024-25 our speakers have been asked to present to 446 audiences in educational, community and civic organisations, numbering in total over 45,000 people. This represents an increase of 20 per cent on the previous year. Schools continue to represent more than 75 per cent of our talks, with civic organisations also showing increased demand.  Overall, since becoming a charity in January 2020, we have delivered over 1,300 presentations to approximately 140,000 people.

The number of our G2G Holocaust presenters has increased from 37 to 42 and we expect to have a total of 48 accredited speakers by the end of 2025. We continue successfully to recruit new speakers, with a specific focus on the Third Generation and those living outside London.  In total we are currently assisting over 20 speakers to develop their presentations, with ongoing mentoring, training and technical assistance. 

Our continued growth is thanks to the hard work of all our wonderful volunteers, who are involved in publicising our work, generating bookings, mentoring our new speakers, fundraising, and delivering presentations – all overseen and driven by our planning committee and trustees. As a result, we continue to receive wonderful feedback about our presentations to schools and to adult audiences. Here is a sample. 

“The presentation on the Holocaust was truly powerful. The way they conveyed the historical significance, and the emotional depth of the topic was amazing. I really appreciated how they highlighted both the personal and collective impact, making it not just informative, but deeply moving. It’s clear they put a lot of effort into it, and it really resonated with me. The presenter’s slides were meaningful and very engaging to one and it also was very appealing to one’s eyes as it shows and strengthens the point and story.”(School student, 14) 

“It helps me to…. remind the students that it began with small things. I have been in teaching for 20 years…. The work G2G is doing is by far the most engaging and impactful that I have experienced.”
(Teacher, Maidstone)

“This was the third year of Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh’s commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day, and we thank Generation 2 Generation profoundly for educating us about the Holocaust.  All the speakers we have had so far have been passionate about sharing their experiences and thoughts.  Thank you Generation 2 Generation. I think these stories are a powerful medium for telling stories of persecution of Hindus in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Afghanistan. We too need to gather personal stories and convey them effectively.”
(The Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh) 

We invite you to contact us to book a speaker for your organisation. Either email bookings@generation2generation.org.uk or Click here to book.

It was often assumed that liberated survivors wanted to return to their nation of origin, or what they defined as ‘home’. It was assumed that the fall of Nazi Germany and the end of the Second World War meant an end to ‘statelessness’. However, Joanne Reilly has highlighted how there was a ‘slow realisation’ that many refugees and survivors did not share this view, and desired a fresh start away from their trauma. Katy Long has also drawn attention to the rise of Communism in Eastern Europe, provoking a lesser desire to return to another authoritarian regime.
 
There was also a much simpler explanation for a lack of desire to return ‘home’: many survivors did not consider their countries of origin their home anymore, rather the site of their families’ extermination. The months following their liberation became not just an attempt at physical and emotional rehabilitation but gathering information about their families’ fates. There was a broad sense of having ‘nothing to go back to’, with the destruction of whole communities giving surviving Jews the sense that they would be returning to a ‘hostile graveyard’.
 
‘Emotionally empty’, survivors sought being far away from the geography of their trauma. Such severe loss, particularly of important places, and indeed the overall concept of what their home was and became can have a paralysing effect on the relationship survivors have to their past, present and future.
 
There have been numerous writings on the concept of home and what the destruction of home can mean to an individual, and the trauma it can cause, or indeed worsen. This evolves for survivors as they become transnational in their approach and immigrate to countries such the UK, evoking how they can develop attachments ‘to more than one place and the ways in which home is shaped by memories as well as everyday life in the present’. Writing in 2001, John Porteous and Sandra Smith highlighted that no word existed for the action of destroying peoples’ homes or expelling them from their homelands, proposing the neologisms of ‘domicide’ (home destruction) and ‘memoricide’ (the destruction of memory’s ‘physical prop, the cultural landscape’).
 
Peter Read has written of the devastation that can be found when an individual returns to locations they associate with their childhood and finds them destroyed. This was indeed the case for many who attempted to return to their hometowns, who found their previous homes to be occupied by those unwilling to relinquish them, and continued antisemitism despite liberation from Nazism. Despite Poland being freed from the Nazi regime, centuries of antisemitism endured, with Roman Halter recalling examples of stones being thrown at them, with the police and military laughing rather than punishing the aggressors. These instances such as those recalled by Halter are but a small insight into the treatment of the Jews in postwar Poland who attempted to return to a place they had previously called home.
 
The stories of violence and threat encountered by young survivors who returned to postwar Poland from Theresienstadt seeking their lost homes and enquiring as to the fate of their families resonated within the testimony they have given since their arrival in the UK. The most extensive example of published material relating to this theme is former ’45 Aid Society President Sir Ben Helfgott’s1983 article for the Society Journal documenting his experience of returning to Poland. Evocatively, he opens his article with the following statement: ‘When I recall the nightmares of the Holocaust years, there is none that fills me with a greater dread and horror than the one I experienced on my return to Poland soon after my liberation’. Travelling with his cousin to their hometown of Piotrków, they had been treated well on the journey, and it had begun to restore their faith in humanity. To their dismay, this did not last long after crossing the border from Czechoslovakia into Poland, where they were interrogated as to their identities, with proof being demanded that they were survivors. Upon producing their Theresienstadt ID, they were asked to attend the police station with the officers, who proceeded to refer to them as ‘f****** Jews’ and demanded that they be silent. They were taken to a house where their Red Cross-provided clothes were stolen, and they were threatened with guns despite desperate pleas for mercy. The lines with which their interactions with the officers closed were haunting and reflect just how close the two boys had come to death: ‘You can consider yourselves very lucky. We have killed many of your kind. You are the first we have left alive’.
 
Ben’s article closed with how fortunate he felt to have escaped when so many Jews who returned to Poland were killed, and how he often wonders what happened to those individuals who were ‘strewn like dogs in unknown and forsaken places’. Ben’s powerful recounting of this additional trauma reminds us that antisemitism did not end with the end of the war and that survivors faced additional tribulations after their liberation. The opportunity to start again in different countries such as Britain was vital for these young survivors to begin to rebuild their lives.

Footnotes

ⁱ Reilly, Belsen, 81.
ii Long, Katy. 2013. The Point of No Return: Refugees, Rights and Repatriation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 62.
iii Reilly, Belsen, 81.
iv Long, The Point of No Return, 62.
v Unknown, Author. 15 June 1945. The Tragedy of Terezin. Jewish Chronicle, 9.
vi Reilly, Belsen, 83.
vii Read, Peter. 1996. Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 29-30.
viii Blunt, Alison and Dowling, Robyn. 2006. Home. Abingdon: Routledge, 202.
ix Porteous, John Douglas and Smith, Sandra Eileen. 2001. Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, ix.
x Read, Returning to Nothing, vii.
xi Helfgott, Ben. 1983. My Welcome to Poland After the War. Journal of the ’45 Aid Society, 9.
xii Ibid, 10.
xiii Ibid, 11.

Reilly, Belsen, 81.
Long, Katy. 2013. The Point of No Return: Refugees, Rights and Repatriation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 62.
Reilly, Belsen, 81.
Long, The Point of No Return, 62.
Unknown, Author. 15 June, 1945. The Tragedy of Terezin. Jewish Chronicle, 9.
Reilly, Belsen, 83.
Read, Peter. 1996. Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 29-30.
Blunt, Alison and Dowling, Robyn. 2006. Home. Abingdon: Routledge, 202.
Porteous, John Douglas and Smith, Sandra Eileen. 2001. Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, ix.
Read, Returning to Nothing, vii.
Helfgott, Ben. 1983. My Welcome to Poland After the War. Journal of the ’45 Aid Society, 9.
Ibid, 10.
Ibid, 11.

Experiences of Survivor homecomings from within G2G 

From 2010–14, I wrote my mother Naomi Blake’s story of survival from Auschwitz. Despite all the terrible things she experienced, the part that I found the hardest to write was her experience of returning home.

She told me how she constantly dreamed that her father would be waiting for her on the doorstep of their house. But of course, her father was not there and what she found was a house in ruins, windows smashed, doors taken off their hinges, and all their possessions gone. As she walked around in shock she noticed white specks on the ground in the courtyard. Looking more closely, she discovered that these white specks were the remnants of her father’s holy books, torn to shreds and stamped into the ground. Overcome, she fainted and was helped by a neighbour who suggested where she might find assistance.

Assistance came in the form of other Jews who had recently returned and had seen or heard about the fate of her family members. She found her sister Malchi and her brother Moishe waiting for her. They were given a place to stay by a very kind Roma woman, who herself had been persecuted and then saved by a Russan soldier.

There they waited for news of the rest of the family. The wait was excruciating. Every day they went to the train station to see who descended the trains, every day they talked to different people to see if they had come across family members during their incarceration. Finally, they were overjoyed to see their sisters Ruchel and Sari return, together with Sari’s husband Erno. But from a family of 27 people only seven survived. Her parents and four brothers and sisters, along with their spouses and ten young children, had been murdered.

As I wrote this part of the story, I could feel the sadness and the emptiness, living in a place with no Jewish children and no-one over the age of 35, with no parents to offer advice.

My mother said, “It so happens that one feels guilty, it’s not a pleasant thing to survive other people, especially children. In the town you didn’t see a Jew. There used to be lots of bearded Jews, lots of children humming, playing, screaming, crying. Nothing on the street, only a few non-Jewish children, and they kept very quiet, they felt very uncomfortable. Whenever walking the streets we remembered, especially the children. We already knew that they did not survive at all. So, we ended up crying on each other’s shoulders wherever we happened to be together.”

{Source: British Library Audio Collection https://www.holocausttestimony.org.uk/interviewees/naomi-blake}

After surviving seven months in Auschwitz and having been liberated on 5 May from a munitions factory in Czechoslovakia, Lela was able to make her way back to Athens with the help of the Red Cross. She was the only survivor of her entire Greek family; although she entered Auschwitz with her six-year-old daughter Marcelle and husband Joseph, they did not make it out again.

By the time Lela arrived in Omonoia Square in central Athens, it was midsummer and very hot. Initially, nobody recognised her as her head was shaven, and she was wearing a military man’s uniform. When it became clear who she was, a huge number of people arrived to collect her, all fighting over who was to take her home! They asked her, “Where is Marcelle?” Lela answered flippantly, “Oh, she’s burnt”. Her friends looked at each other with disbelief, concluding that she must be mentally ill.

Since Lela’s property was no longer hers and had been looted after her deportation, her wonderful neighbours, the Kiritsis family, took her in and looked after her as if she were one of their own. Back in 1944, they had risked their lives to hide Lela, Marcelle and Joseph from the Nazis. Now that Lela was the only one left alive, they did everything they could to alleviate her suffering.

Lela remained there until 1946, when she joined her cousins, her only living relatives, in London.

My uncle Raimund Neumeyer came with my mother Ruth on a Kindertransport in 1939. The previous year the Burgomeister of Dachau, SS-Sturmbannführer Karl Dobler, forced them to leave their house in Dachau so that the town could be ‘free of Jews’. Just after his 18th birthday in 1943 Raimund joined the British army, anglicised his name to Raymond Newland and was posted to Germany as an interpreter for the intelligence service a month before the war ended.

In his letters to Ruth he describes the utter destruction of the country and his horror at the news from the newly liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In 1946 he managed to get leave to visit Munich, where the Neumeyers spent their last months together in 1939, and found it in skeletal ruins. He hitchhiked from there to Dachau to visit old family friends: ‘In contrast to Munich, everything is intact: there’s virtually nothing changed at all.’ The former Neumeyer house was occupied by a tenant, who recognised him, wearing British army uniform, and screamed in shock. He then mounted a campaign to get Karl Dobler prosecuted: Dobler remained a free man but lost his job at Dachau town hall.

For more about Raymond’s letters to Ruth while he was serving as a British soldier, see my blog:
https://ephraimneumeyer.wordpress.com/2022/03/30/letters-from-war-torn-germany

In May 1945, my father returned to his home country, Czechoslovakia, for the first time since he had left in 1938. He was part of the team of medics who were sent to help with the outbreak of typhus in Terezín.

Before taking up his duties there, he visited his sister Ilse’s flat in Prague. The concierge told him that Ilse and her two children had been taken to Terezín in 1942 and from there, ten days later, she believed they were sent to the Lublin concentration camp. She had no more news of them after that.

Greatly saddened, my father then managed to find some cousins and an aunt in Prague who had, amazingly, survived Auschwitz. They told him that they had witnessed non-Jews sharing their rations with Ilse and the children, risking heavy penalties. One cousin told him she had seen his parents regularly in Auschwitz during 1944 but after a few months, saw them no more.

Knowing all his close family had been murdered, my father took up his duties in Terezín. The work was dangerous due to the high risk of contagion. Even some of his medical colleagues died from typhus.

After the work in Terezín was done, Dad returned to his old home in Brno. A neighbour told him most of the family’s furniture and belongings had been stolen, but he retrieved a few items. These were all that remained of his former life at the end of the war.

So Dad decided to make his home in Wigan, where he married and raised his family.

Partner Events