Graduating Class Nuneaton High School, July 1948. Sheila is second from the left on the second row and I am third from the left on the front row.
I remember my complaint from all those years ago.
Laying in bed late one night, it was summer time in Coventry, England, the sun still shone. I couldn’t sleep and I cried the words, Why me?
Maybe it was 1944 and I was 12 years old. My best friend was Sheila Deeming and that afternoon I had been invited to her home for tea.
Now at the end of the day I relived the experience of sitting together at the table, being part of a family, the push and pull of life with a father and mother and three brothers.
For seven years I had belonged. There were three of us, father, mother and me. The intimacy had been intense and the loss unfathomable.
Today June 2025, I sort old photos and documents, and place them in transparent envelopes consecutively, ready to pass them on to a Holocaust Museum.
I look intensely at an old postcard.
Postcard from Berlin, sent July 18, 1939
And suddenly the old question returns,
Why me?
This time, rather than dark despair, my inner conversation is suffused with wonder.
The stamp is missing, who peeled it away?
To add to a collection or was Hitler’s face offensive?
It is dated 18 July, 1939, addressed to
Room 154, Isrl. Asyl, Köln, Ehrenfeld. (The Jewish Hospital in Cologne).
Sent by my aunt Lisbet from Berlin, she write, My lovely sweet mouse….
I have just had an emergency appendectomy in the only Jewish hospital in the region that could still treat Jewish patients.
After Kristallnacht or Reichs Pogrom Nacht, November 9 – 10, 1938 when synagogues and Jewish businesses had been attacked, Jewish medical staff were dismissed from German hospitals and Jewish patients were no longer admitted.
That was the time my family and our Jewish neighbors were ejected from our small home town, Gemünd, and relocated to the big city, Köln.
And as I look at the date on my aunt’s postcard again it dawns on me that if we had not been made to move to the big city with the only Jewish hospital in the region, I may not have survived.
I dig deeper into my faint memories, the handwritten date, 18 July, 1939, on Aunt Lisbet’s postcard, clarifies the short time between the surgery and my escape to Britain with the Kindertranport leaving my parents and Cologne…only one week.
Anchoring the series of events in real time clarifies my mother’s fears about letting me go with the Kindertransport. Her strong disagreement with my father, her cry, She is not well enough to go and my father’s life saving insistence, She has to go.
My father prevailed…
Did this really happen? Am I imagining it all?
While writing this questioning blog…
Dr Amy Williams’ latest Kindertransport research,
is published, blogs.timesofisrael.com
Title: Discoveries beyond the Kindertransport lists:The journeys on the ferries.
The SS Vienna
I am recorded as traveling on this vessel that left the Hook of Holland to arrive in Harwich on 26th July, 1939 at 5.30am.
Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.
Jacob (Israel) Genesis 28:16
Fascinating story and so thankful for a strong father who gave you life…twice. Blessed you lived your life tell this story and your memories have been proven true. God bless you. 💜
Thank you Maribeth, for capturing the meaning! God bless you also, Hanna
Filling in details of the ferry perhaps filling in lonely spaces in minds and hearts of you and others. But also making a hazy memory more concrete and real which means more to process. Loved reading of the man waiting with blankets and sandwiches. A small and huge kindness. Older girls looking after the littles. I can imagine their little mothering hearts. Grace and sorrow intertwined. The surprise of seeing the vast sea for the first time. The huge ferry! The names of other children. The letters on board. The dates and times. 2 horses. Important beautiful details for memories. Stunning.
Rebecca,it is so encouraging to read your response to my blog and also to Amy’s. Thank you! Hanna