Annette Simpson – Mrs Allard’s tenant

As a first German Assistant teacher of the Hampstead Garden Suburb Grammar School for Girls, the Henrietta Barnett School, shared appointed with Mill Hill County Grammar School for Girls in 1965/66, I found accomodation with difficulties in the suburbs at Number 52, Southway with Mrs Loraine Allard, previously Lore Sulzbacher from Fuerth, Germany. She and her sister, shipped to England, resp. the USA, survived the Holocaust with the help of the Kindertransport. Mrs Allard features in the film and book “Into the Arms of Strangers”, interviewee number 1. It was only on my last day as her tenant, when she took me aside for innumerable hours to tell me her life story, showing me pictures and letters and poems written by her father, the latter having been smuggled out of her parents’ last destination, Dachau concentration camp. She admitted that she had taken me “on board” only to overcome her strong anti-German feelings. We succeeded. I saw Mrs Allard in North London shortly before her death in 1999 and am still in contact with her son, Simon Allard, a physician at the Middlesex hospital, who I babysat for when he was elevent years old. My link with Jewish friends has been strong ever since.

Annette Simpson née Brune
East Molesey, Surrey