Renate talks about her career in nursing. She describes the coincidences that led to her meeting her first husband, Fred Goldschmidt. INT: And at the end of school you decided to become a nurse, am I right in saying? RM: Yes, well, my older brother, who had gone to University at a time when a lot of… Continue Reading Renate Mackay – Integration
Renate describes her experiences as a schoolgirl in St Andrews’s. INT: Now let’s just take you to St Andrews, Renate. They must have been very pleased to have your uncle because he’d come from such a prestigious position as Director of the Einstein Tower in Potsdam. Tell us about what happened when you got there. RM: Well,… Continue Reading Renate Mackay – Settling In
Renate explains that her father was in St Andrews in Scotland being interviewed for a job on the day the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. Renate then talks about Lawrie Wardale, the man she calls her “Scarlet Pimpernel,” who brought her and her family to safety in St Andrews in Scotland. INT: So, eventually you had to leave,… Continue Reading Renate Mackay – Immigration
Renate describes her family background. She talks about her mother’s premature death, her father’s arrest and the reason she was adopted by her mother’s sister and her husband. Her new ‘father’ was the eminent astronomer, Erwin Finlay Freundlich, and she soon found herself joining him and her aunt, first in Turkey and then Prague. INT: Today… Continue Reading Renate Mackay – Life Before The War
All in all I must say I have been extremely lucky. People have been enormously friendly, even when we worked and more work and things were rationed people would invite us to share their meals in their houses when food and everything was very, very short. There was never any word of being the enemy… Continue Reading Pat Anson – Reflection On Life
The food on the Isle of Man was very British which our landlady cooked – we were all dying for potato salad. Whenever we had to peel the potatoes we kind of pinched one or two potatoes and put them inside the gramophone and when our landlady went for the day to Douglas we took… Continue Reading Pat Anson – Settling In
I went to Bradford first to secure the job. Irene’s papers weren’t quite ready so she came 6 weeks afterwards. I still remember, I had never crossed the Channel of course. I went with the train to Holland and then with the boat over to Dover, then to London. In London some of those committee… Continue Reading Pat Anson – Immigration
We had the same job in the household. We were in interned (in the Isle of Man) together. After the internment we both worked in the same factory sharing the same room until Irene and I got married we both were continuously together and we really were good friends which helped tremendously to have always… Continue Reading Pat Anson – Life During The War
I was born on the 9th December 1916 in Kreigshaber which is on the outskirts of Augsburg, (Bavaria, Germany). We lived in a very spacious villa. We lived on the first floor and Lee (Fischer ) and her parents lived on the ground floor. My parents were very loving well adjusted people and in our… Continue Reading Pat Anson – Life Before The War
INT: One of the very interesting things as well which I think happened Moniek, was the fact of your family being traced. MG: Oh yes. INT: Yes. MG: This was. I didn’t know what had happened to my family and I actually tried to keep a low profile on the basis that if any of… Continue Reading Moniek Garber – Reflection On Life