The Story of Walter and Herta Kammerling
Walter Kammerling was born in Vienna in 1923. He arrived in England on the Kindertransport aged 15 and worked on a farm in Northern Ireland. After three years there, Walter moved to London where he joined a left wing refugee group, Young Austria; in 1944 he also joined the British Army. Walter married Herta Plaschkes, also a refugee from Vienna, in Salisbury in 1944. Walter’s parents and older sister were murdered in Auschwitz.
Herta also escaped Austria on the Kindertransport, arriving in 1939, with her younger brother Otto. They were fostered in Liverpool but were separated after moving to Chester. Herta then ran away to London and also joined Young Austria where she met Walter. Herta’s parents and baby brother managed to escape to England but most of her relatives were killed in the Holocaust.
After the war Walter and Herta returned to Vienna where they lived for nine years and had two sons, returning to Bournemouth where her parents had settled, in 1956. Walter worked as a chartered engineer, was chairman of his synagogue, and enjoyed singing, both operatic and Klezmer. Because he felt ‘cheated’ out of his childhood education, he sought to catch up as much as he could and studied almost continuously including achieving a degree in Maths and Music with the Open University.
With his dedication to Holocaust Education speaking to over 10,000 children and young adults, in 2019 he was honoured in the Queen’s Birthday List with the British Empire Medal.
The presentation uses extensive video material recorded at various stages in Walter’s life and which also provides a very personal and intimate portrait of how the separation from – and ultimate loss of – his immediate family deeply affected him. A short video of Herta is also included which briefly describes the effect of the Anschluss on her and her family. The presentation also puts the events that led to the Holocaust in a historical context.
Presented by Peter Kammerling
Peter is a retired business consultant, author of books about the IT industry, creator of an e-business start-up and, with his wife, a distiller of gin. He worked mainly in the UK but also in Trinidad and in Bosnia, and was key to the introduction of digital audio transcription into the Crown Courts.
He was born and lived in Vienna; when he was nearly nine years old his family returned to England. Peter and his wife now live in East Sussex.
Peter chaired his local Relate Marriage Guidance centre for several years and now works with a charity funding the training and placing of student nurses to villages in Cameroon.
Having seen the powerful effect that his father’s talks have had on students, Peter wants to continue the work on Holocaust Education that his father engaged in and for which he received a British Empire Medal. He incorporates his mother’s story of Holocaust survival too.
Watch excerpts from the story of Walter and Herta Kammerling