Life During the War

Photos left to right and top to bottom

The Children at Newlands 1939
Mr. Epstein with his daughter Denise and me 1942

My Father, Herbert Samuel
My Grandmother Selma Nussbaum

I lived with the Epstein family from January until September 1939, the outbreak of war. During this time Mr. Epstein hired my Mother as a general maid, allowing her to leave Germany and escape the Holocaust. I clearly remember eating dinner with the family in the dining room while my Mother ate in the kitchen.

July 1939 my aunt Hilde, her husband Arthur and son Hanns left Dresden for Shanghai, China where they spent the war years. After the war they immigrated to the U.S. and settled in New Jersey. My Uncle Arthur died in 1950, his death hastened by the terrible conditions in Shanghai.

On 1 September 1939 I was evacuated from London to Guildford in Surrey. Approximately 3½ million British children were evacuated from London and other large cities to the countryside to escape the expected bombing by the German airforce. Mrs. St. Loe Strachey, who lived alone in a large manor house at Newlands Corner on the outskirts of Guildford, took me in with seven other children. We four boys and four girls spent the rest of the war with Mrs. Strachey. Very early on she hired my mother as a sort of governess to help look after the children.

In Dresden my father was moved to several “Jew Houses” including
48 Schumanstrasse and eventually to the Judenlager Hellerberg (camp) and in 1943 was sent to Auschwitz, where, at age 49 he died.

On 25 August 1942, my Grandmother, Selma Nussbaum was #232 on the 5th Dresden transport to Theresienstadt where she died 29 December 1942.