David Griffiths – Peter Gutkind’s story

In 1938 or 1939 my parents, Anne Rebecca Griffiths and Llewelyn Parry Griffiths, both Quakers, received into our household in Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, a teenage refugee from Nazi Germany. His name was Peter Gutkind. He lived as a member of our family for several years and attended the local Grammar School where my father taught languages. He and I had some interests in common, including gardening and stamp-collecting.

Peter, in common with other refugees of Jewish extraction, arrived in England through Kindertransport. He had been roughly treated by the Nazi authorities. Not only had his education been disrupted by the enforced and repeated changes of school; he had also experience the trauma of the ‘disappearance’ of his mother and grandmother in the Holocaust.

Peter was naturally upset by his experiences and in the first year or two after arriving in England displayed a combative attitude towards those he encountered. He was allowed to bring very little with him but he did have a bicycle – a heavy machine quite different from British cycles at the time and a source of wonderment for his school fellows. He got on well at school, in the process mastering the English language. He trained as an anthropologist, becoming eventually professor of Anthropology at Warwick University. He married Alice, an English girl, in 1951.

Peter Gutkind was born in 1925 and died in 2001. He was always appreciative of the help my parents gave him, and kept in touch with our family.

David Griffiths
Pickering, North Yorkshire