Kristallnacht and how the Kindertransport saved Rolf Heymann’s life Part 2 – The Kindertransport

By actiondesksheffield

People in story: Rolf Heymann, Herta Heymann, Mr. Fox, Farnsfield
Location of story: Cologne, Germany, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Harwich, Sheffield, England
Background to story: Civilian

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Roger Marsh of the ‘Action Desk – Sheffield’ Team on behalf of Rolf Heymann and has been added to the site with the author’s permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
Kristallnacht and how the Kindertransport saved Rolf Heymann’s life
Part 2 – The Kindertransport
Transcribed By
Roger Marsh
The Kindertransport (Children’s Transport), my escape to Britain
My mother, Herta Heymann, had realised that there was no future left for us in Germany and she then tried to go to South Africa, and after Kristallnacht, she realised that we had to get out quick. She had heard about this Kindertransport and also this other Jewish Family that was there. I actually do not know how they got out but she managed to get me on the Kindertransport.
My cousin was already in Sheffield; he had got out of Germany in 1937 and my mother corresponded with him. He went to the Jewish community in Sheffield to see if he could get us out and he did.
It was following the dreadful experience of Kristallnacht that I first realised that my mother had plans for me to get out of Germany. My uncle who lived in Berlin had already left Germany in 1936 and had gone to live in South Africa.
My mother went to Cologne and she must have gone to some office and seen whom she had to see to make arrangements for us to get out of Germany. This was at the end of 1938 and I came to England in July 1939.
The Jewish underground and the churches were involved in the organisation of the Kindertransport, which was an attempt to get 10,000 mostly Jewish children out of Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia and give them asylum in Britain. I was very lucky to get on this, and when most of the parents waved goodbye to the children on their way to Britain, for most of them it was the last time that they would see them.
What I can remember of the Kindertransport is that my journey out of Germany started at the end of June 1939 with my mother having to take me to Cologne railway station. There was another aunt of mine there, Aunty Mally. She was not going to leave Germany because she had a gown business and she had built it up from nothing. There was no way that she was going to leave it and she was one of just under 40 of my relatives that perished.
My mother and my aunt took me to Cologne railway station and put me on the train that would take me directly to Rotterdam in The Netherlands. She said goodbye to me and I did not know if I would ever see my mother or my aunt again. However, I was very excited at the thought of going on a big ship to England.
I think that the train went to the Dutch border. I know that we sailed from Rotterdam, but then the Gestapo got on just before the Dutch border to see if we were all kids and that everything was all right. Then they let us through.
The only other thing that I remember was getting on the ship at Rotterdam to Harwich in England. It was very small, there was another boy with me whom I did not know, but we got in this very small cabin with a pair of bunk beds. He had the lower one and I had the upper. When I laid on the top bunk my head was within three inches of some duct work, I did not know what it was for but if I lifted my head up, I banged it on the duct work. I was not very happy about that. I remember going out of the cabin and going up on board ship as we were sailing to England, and some sailor grabbed me saying that I should not be there.
Sheffield
When we got to Harwich, my cousin, who had come to England in 1936 with my aunty and uncle, met me. They lived in the Embassy Court Flats on the bottom of Duke Street, Sheffield. He had managed to get out of Germany early and he had a job at Jessop's in the office there.
I arrived with my little suitcase that was about one foot high and one foot wide, which contained my underclothes, my other possession was a ten-shilling banknote and that is all that I came in with, ‘Ten Bob’ (50 pence).
I settled in Duke Street in Sheffield in the Embassy Court Flats, which have since been demolished
It was a very tough area, and I went to Park School, which was then a very rough school. The kids were so tough that if they did not have a football they would head a house brick, it was that sort of school. The men leaning over the public house bar did not have hair sticking out of their chests they had twigs.
I was only there a couple of months but the kids took to me because I was treated as an oddity and I did not get the beatings because I was Jewish, like the ones that I got in Germany. I could only speak German, all that I could say in English was 'yes' and 'no', and I sometimes said them in the wrong places.
I must have been a nervous wreck. I was still afraid and especially down Duke Street. Tram Cars used to run up and down Duke Street and when they used to stop outside Embassy Court flats, they used to put the sand down and the noise at night was terrible, I do not think that I slept for the first week that I stayed there. As I grew up, I acquired an inferiority complex that stayed with me until I married. I was very unsure of myself but life started all over again from the day that I got married, but that was later.
Fortunately, there was a schoolteacher at Park School called Mr. Fox who could speak a little bit of German.
I was also very fortunate that my mother and aunty had also escaped from Germany and had come to England just two weeks before the war started on September 3, 1939. I saw them for a short while, but then I was evacuated.
Evacuation:
On Saturday 02, September 1939 the day before war was declared, two hundred and fifty kids from Park School, together with Mr. Fox, were evacuated to a little village called Farnsfield, about half way between Mansfield and Newark-on-Trent. I was billeted, together with two other boys, in a farmhouse just outside Farnsfield, and on the first night, the three of us went up the stairs to a very large room and slept the night in a large bed.
The next morning, as soon as we woke up, we went down the stairs into a massive kitchen where a maid was cooking Sunday breakfast.
I had been brought up very strictly in the Jewish religion, and I mean really really very strict, and the thing that worried me most was that here were certain things that I knew that I should not eat.
I smelt what ever she was cooking and it was a smell that I had never smelt before. I became concerned hoping that it was not something that I should not eat. I went to the maid and I could see that there was some meat or something in the frying pan. I tried to converse with the maid, I asked her in German, “What is it that you are cooking in the pan?” but she could not make sense of what I was saying. She tried to explain to me, but I could not understand. There was nothing wrong with the smell, it was all right but I had never smelt it before. I kept on insisting that I wanted to know what was in the pan and eventually she must have realised what it was that I wanted to know. She took me by the hand and led me from the kitchen outside into the farmyard and showed me some pigs.
When I realised that she was cooking bacon, I actually heaved because I knew that I had almost eaten bacon and that I must not eat it, even though I had not eaten anything since four or five o’clock the previous afternoon. My religious upbringing in Germany had been so strict, that even the thought of a pig would make me sick, I had been brought up so strictly that I thought that if I had eaten bacon, God would have struck me dead.
I was heaving all morning and I could not eat breakfast, so I did not have any. I just had dry bread, I could not even eat the egg that had been cooked in the same pan. I had been so brainwashed in religion in Germany.
However, with regard to eating pork, this has not stayed with me. I do not think that it is a religious law; I believe that the religious regulations were more to do with hygiene in those days 2,000 years ago. In the Middle East, pork would have been the first thing to go off because there was no refrigeration and the only thing that they had to preserve the food was salt. In hot countries like Israel and Egypt, I should imagine that food poisoning was a big killer and there must have been so many people dying from it and that is why the religious leaders in those countries decided to forbid the eating of pork.
That morning, and every other morning, except weekends, it was to be a two-mile walk to school, and of course a two-mile walk back. I picked up English quite easily because as I recall, there were only 150 children alltogether attended at the Church of England School. There was no Jewish school or anything like that at Farnsfield, and if all you hear is English all day and you do not hear any German, then you have got to listen and you have got to learn. I think that I learned English well within six months.
The family at the farm where I was billeted were protestant and the lady of the farm had written to my mother to say that she thought that I should have some religious up bringing and could she take me to church. The thought of her little Jewish boy going to a Christian Church upset my mother very much. I know that the lady from the farm had only the best of intentions but my mother said, “No way,” and that, “I should study my bible and that was all.” That was my faith for four years until I came back to Sheffield.
My Family in War Time Germany:
I have two cousins who are twins, Inger and Ludwig. The Nazis sent them to Auschwitz Concentration Camp. There Dr. Josef Mengele, commonly referred to as the “Angel of Death”, had a special interest in twins. Being a twin, regardless of age, meant survival in 1944. He had selected 1,500 pairs of twins for experimentation. Of the children involved in these experiments, only about 200 were alive when the Soviet Army liberated the camp on January 27, 1945, and these included both of my cousins.
They had survived only because Dr. Josef Mengele had experimented on them. He had destroyed Inger’s ovaries and he had sterilised Ludwig, but they were still alive and the twins are only a year older than me.
They managed to travel to the United Sates of America and they still write to me, but from what they say they have not had a very happy life because of what happened to them in the camp.
After Farnsfield, I came back to Sheffield and I had lots of different jobs because I could not settle, and had about 17 jobs in six or seven years including butchering and farming.
Pr-BR