Eva Shrewsbury – “I have felt I had two families”

Memory is not a subjective thing, but seen through the window of experience so that one is not certain how accurate these memories are after nearly seventy years. I travelled with my two-year-old brother from Frankfurt on 5 June 1939 to join a Quaker family who lived in Marple, now a suburb of Manchester but then a small village. Hugh and Marjorie Bedford had been married for two years. They had a three-month-old son, Richard. For over a year I had been to a Jewish boarding school, Herrlingen, of which my uncle was the headmaster. I was there with my four cousins. In April 1939 the school was closed and I then stayed with my maternal grandparents who lived then in a one-room flat in Dortmund. My father, released from Buchenwald concentration camp because he was able to prove he had served in the First World War, travelled to Dortmund to pick me up on the day we were leaving; my mother lost our nice flat before Kristallnacht and was living with my brother at the children’s home where she worked in Iseburg. They had a dreadful experience on Kristallnacht. My brother was not yet two years old but it obviously affected him greatly and he had some emotional difficulties all through his childhood and later, only resolved when he finally found out what had happened.

My mother travelled with us to the Dutch border where she had to return to Frankfurt and a very uncertain future leaving her dearly-loved children in the care of two strangers. We were met by Hedwig, one of the mothers with whom my mother had dealt at Isenburg, and who had been our much-loved maid and nursemaid for many years. That was the last time we saw her; she escaped to Holland. My father had a brother and sister, my mother a sister; they all left in 1938 for the USA, New Zealand and Palestine, as it then was. But they could not persuade my father to leave: he was a German first and did not recognise in how much danger he and his family were.

A friend of my father, Ruth Feldheim, had found the Bedfords who would only take one child but had friends living nearby who would take Michael, my brother. On 7 June we arrived at Harwich and were ushered onto a train to Liverpool Street Station in London. Here we sat in a huge hall waiting to be picked up. Michael and I were the last ones, by which time I was pretty desperate. Elaine and Edwin Rothwell had come a long way so were rather late. We went by taxi to Euston while I marvelled at double-decker buses and the other street scenes unfolding before me. Eventually we arrived in the small station at Marple where Auntie and Uncle, as I quickly learned to call them, met us in a car. After dropping Michael and the Rothwells off at their house, we at last came to the semi detached house by the canal that was to be my home for the next three years.

The Bedfords were truly good people: they welcomed my father when he was released from a temporary internment after his arrival in England at the end of July, and my mother when she arrived a week after the outbreak of war. They arranged for my mother to be the housekeeper for the tenant farmer who lived on the farm they owned. Uncle was not allowed to work on the farm when his objections to fighting were recognised; he was instead instructed to work on the land. At the end of the war they welcomed released prisoners, who had been in jail because they were conscientious objectors, to the house in which they then lived, deep in the Welsh countryside; and they bought a house for my parents to rent after we were reunited as a family. In many ways I have felt I had two families, my own and the Bedfords, and now Richard and his children are part of my family too.

Eva Shrewsbury
Argyll