Newsletter for Generation 2 Generation

G2G Upcoming Events

Monday October 21 7.30pm (online)

G2G Presents: The Story of Mirjam Finkelstein

Using filmed testimony given by his grandmother, Calum Isaacs will tell the story of Mirjam Finkelstein’s (née Wiener) survival. She was imprisoned in Bergen Belsen after having been transported to the Westerbork transit camp with her family. We will also learn about Calum’s family’s role in the establishment of the Wiener Library.  Book tickets here

Thursday 21 November 19:30

G2G Presents: The story of Walter and Herta Kammerling

Using filmed testimony, Peter Kammerling tells the separate stories of why and how both his parents arrived in England on the Kindertransport from Austria. We will also hear what happened to their parents and other family left behind in Austria. 
Book tickets here

Recent Events

G2G Presents

On 12 September, Susanna Rosenberg told the story on G2G Presents of her father’s and uncle’s survival as hidden children in France. Her father Sacha was born in Paris, to Polish parents just before the Second World War started. Her grandfather Kiwa was arrested in the first round-up of Jews in Paris. He was held in Drancy internment camp for nearly a year before being transported and murdered at Auschwitz. 

Her grandmother Estera decided to send the young Sacha and his brother Albert away to safety in the French countryside. She herself stayed in Paris, and was eventually arrested, and transported to Auschwitz where she was murdered. Both her sons survived.

In 1948, Albert visited London on a school trip and got in contact with some distant relatives who eventually adopted Sacha. Albert chose to stay in Paris. Studious and determined, Sacha won a place at Cambridge University, started his own business in London and had a family before coming out as gay in his early 50s. Now 87, Sacha is living his life to the full as an openly gay man, actively working towards a world where minorities are treated with compassion and respect.

Features

A Silver Lining

Noreen Plen

This story starts in 1939 in a small town called Mielec, in southeast Poland. It was the hometown of my father’s family, which at that stage consisted of my grandfather, his four sons, two daughters, three daughters-in-law, and four grandchildren. My paternal grandmother had already passed away and the eldest son was living in France with his wife and family.

One branch of the family consisted of the second eldest son, my uncle David, his wife Erna and his two daughters, Cila and Hania. David fled east, spending most of the war in Russia, and survived. Erna and Hania were murdered by the incoming Germans in 1941, but my cousin Cila survived. She was a child of only 15 when she was separated from her mother and sister and, like so many others, her story is a mixture of bravery, luck, and fortitude. My father, Jan, who was son number three, had also fled east to escape the German occupation and spent a few years in a labour camp south of Siberia, having been arrested by the Russians. At the end of the war the only survivors from this branch of the family were David, Jan and Cila. My father returned to Poland to look for any surviving relatives. He managed to locate Cila, who was then reunited with her father whom they found in Russia. David and Cila emigrated to Palestine in 1948, in time for Cila to put into practice her training in Czechoslovakia and fight with the Israeli army in the War of Independence. My father worked in Warsaw as an accountant for the Polish government. He met and married my mother, who was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and in 1948 they managed to escape via Prague to Paris and then in late 1949 to England. I was born a few months later in Newcastle upon Tyne and hence was raised as a Jewish Geordie. David remarried and lived happily in Israel until his death a few years ago. Cila married and moved on to Canada where she still lives, currently in Toronto. Read more…

Recording a family history on a blog:
how it has helped me

Tim Locke timothy.locke@talktalk.net

I’ve been writing a blog about my mother’s family Holocaust experiences for the past ten years, and would heartily recommend this method of recording a family history to anyone. It has helped straighten the story out in my own head and opened up so many avenues and made new contacts – I have even discovered some unknown relatives. And, unlike publishing a book, blogs make it easy to correct and add to published posts as the story inevitably expands.

Back in 2014 I was visiting Görlitz, on the German-Polish border, as part of an extended family meet-up to coincide with the installation of a Stolperstein commemorating my great-grandfather Martin Ephraim, who perished in Theresienstadt in 1944.

I left Görlitz full of impressions and emotions. The intensity of that occasion prompted me to think about sharing my mother’s family Holocaust story. I’d never written a blog before, but an ideal anniversary happened a few days later. Clearing out the house of my late mother I had found a huge mass of material relating to her past life. One item in particular stood out: the ferry ticket from Hook of Holland to Harwich on 10 May 1939 – a relic of her Kindertransport journey from Munich to England. So exactly 75 years to the day after that journey my first blog post began, inspired by photos of objects relating to that event, including the teddy bear that she had taken with her on that life-changing (and almost certainly lifesaving) exit from Nazi Germany.

There were blanks in the bigger story, but I had learned enough from what my mother had told me some years before to sketch out an account using WordPress – which is free to use and is no more difficult to master than a word processing package: text, headings, photos with captions … and that’s it. I’ve found Facebook groups specialising in Holocaust interests are an excellent way of increasing my audience and interacting with readers.

A journalist friend was kind enough to write a piece about my post, and it reached a wider public as a result. As the years passed, the family story broadened and deepened.

And the vast mass of material I had inherited from my mother slowly began to piece together. Through the blog I have renewed family contact with Dachau, the town where my mother’s family lived, and as a result have been invited over there for two commemorative occasions. I’ve had interest from PhD students and other academics, as well as the Imperial War Museum (where the whole archive will eventually be stored), and numerous items are now on display in the Holocaust Galleries.

Then there were the lovely chance contacts and coincidences. Marianne from Sweden found my blog through googling the name of an old family friend whose love letters from a man called Hans she had discovered in her basement – those letters turned out to be from my grandfather Hans Neumeyer, written to her from Dachau in 1937, plus a few postcards from Theresienstadt, where he was incarcerated in 1942 and died two years later. Bruno, an elderly German academic, emailed me late at night in a state of great excitement: he had spotted my grandfather’s name and knew him through family legend as the man who had brought his parents together in the early years of the 20th century. Ron from Pennsylvania was astonished to read my post about my grandmother’s deportation, where the transcript of her letter written on that train to Auschwitz that she was sitting next to Malwine Porsche – Ron’s great aunt. Mentioning these people by name and inserting dates and place names help the Google searches – and that’s how many people have found my blog.

With the story much clearer in my mind, I made contact with G2G with a view to becoming a speaker: and indeed I now present the story of my mother and uncle as part of G2G’s team of presenters.

Do have a look to see how I’ve done it: https://ephraimneumeyer.wordpress.com I’m very happy to offer advice to others who are thinking of blogging their own family story.

Below: An image from Tim’s latest blog post

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