By the time she started school Hitler was already in power and soon everybody had to wear an armband on one arm with a yellow Star of David on it and on the other arm a band with a J for Jew on it. People were told not to patronise Jewish businesses, then Jews were not allowed to be treated in public hospitals or have access to anaesthetics. They wanted to take Ellen's tonsils out without anaesthetic but she kicked up such a fuss that the attempt was abandoned but a couple of years later she had her appendix taken out with only an injection.
As a 10 year old she was evacuated to a host family in Budapest who were very kind to her but who couldn't speak any of the languages Ellen spoke but by chance she met a young girl who did and arranged for her family, also Jewish, to host Ellen for the few weeks she was in Budapest while her parents arranged emigration papers for the family to leave Germany. It turned out the father of this family was Mayor of Budapest.
In November 1938 her father along with other Jewish men was rounded up at 2.30am and taken to the square where the synagogue was on fire. The fire brigade came and in the guise of putting out the fire turned the hoses instead on the Jewish men forced to witness the horror of Kristallnacht in Hildesheim. They were then taken to Buchenwald.
Ellen's mother decided to take her to Frankfurt where her sister and husband and their two mothers were living. They returned to Hildesheim to find their house full of other Jewish people made homeless after the Gestapo set fire to their houses.
In 1939 Ellen's father was released from Buchenwald and they made their way to London where Ellen's uncle had been living for a few years. Six weeks before war broke out the family sailed for Wellington on the Melbourne Star, a cargo ship with about 14 passengers .
The family settled in Auckland where they lived first in Papakura where they had a dairy which they left after being accused of being spies as it was near the Papakura Militqry Camp. Ellen attended St Mary's College where she suffered more anti-semitism at the hands of one of the nuns! So she transferred to Epsom Girls to complete her secondary education. The family moved to Hepburn St in Ponsonby where they ran the very successful Busy Bee dairy which is still in Ponsonby to this day .
Her Aunt Gertrude , who had been an opera singer came to NZ too with her young son after being released from Theresienstadt and taught the NZ opera singer Heather Begg. Her son became a successful lawyer.
So a very sobering talk . My mother came to New Zealand in 1939 as nanny to the children of an English couple, the wife of which was Jewish. I spoke to Ellen over lunch but she didn't know them so they must have been on a different ship. The Lillies and Mum settled in Wellington where they also experienced the odd anti-Semitic and anti-German sentiment.
Dieter's childhood in the 1940s under Russian occupation in East Prussia was similarly fraught. He was a sickly child and because he did not seem to be a very strong child and didn't want to go to school he went a few months later, five months before the Russians bombed their town of Willenberg .
They went from there to Ortelsburg from where they got a train going west. All went well until they nearly got to Elbing and the train stopped and they were told the Russians had cut off their retreat and were in front of them. The train went east again to Königsberg where they found accommodation but then Königsberg was bombed and Dieter's mother, sisters and aunt went to the coast where they lived for nearly three years as refugees as East Prussia was no longer part of Germany. The northern part was occupied by Russia, the southern by Poland.
There was no schooling except a little in 1947 and by the time the family got to the west in 1948 Dieter was 10 and started school with 6 year olds. The family was billeted in an old farm house , just a kitchen and a small room for 5 people. They shifted to another house still very cramped with at least one other family.
My childhood was nowhere near as dramatic. I grew up in St Clair , Dunedin. We had a small villa at 21 Onslow St, which later became 26 Albert St, a couple of streets back from the beach where we tended to spend all summer. My mother believed in enjoying life and we made the most of the beach in summer and had a crib in Queenstown where we went in winter for skiing holidays. I started school at St Clair Primary school, then when Helen was five we both went to St Bernadette's a mile or so away by tram or foot in Forbury.
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