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Fleeing from Czechoslovakia to Britain in Spring 1939 - Part Two — Dr. Mandler was appointed to Kettering Hospital and he subsequently became a GP in Kettering.

Part two of an oral history interview with Mrs. Vivien Holt about the experiences of her parents, Dr. Walter Mandler and Ruzenka Lene (Rose) née Fischl. Conducted by Jenny Ford on behalf of Bedford Museum.

“They stayed there in Ely and then, I think, I don’t know when, but you’d be able to look this up, the Government suddenly realised they were short of Doctors. And they said OK, any foreigner who has got a medical qualification, we’ll look at it and they can use it but not at the level they’d got too. They’d have to go right back to the beginning, so any Registrar type of thing Father had done he couldn’t do anymore. And he got a post at Kettering General Hospital as a Junior Houseman, that’s the most junior. But then that day they said, ‘OK. You come in as a Junior Houseman we will give you a room in the hospital but tough that you are married.’ So it left Mother totally with nowhere to live and she got a room in a house opposite the hospital where she had the little bedroom, you know the one over the stairs, that was her room. She was left there with nothing to do, bit of a problem. So mother started working for the WVS and did the bed pans and things in the hospital. They did the sorting of bandages because of course they washed things then and then they had to be sorted. There she met a woman who taught German, so she could talk to somebody and that person became our Godmother - to both my sister and myself.

They were living apart for quite some time. They came over in 1939 so 1941 I think they came to Kettering, it was probably until 1943 and then Father was taken on by a local GP practice and Mother and Father lived in a one bed roomed flat. My Mother became pregnant and then my sister was born. Although they had their own family my Father didn’t yet know what had happened to his family at this stage. He had lots of aunts, I mean you know how the ages, if his first cousin was the age of his mother, there were I think six of them. And then there were lots of - his mother had lots of sisters, so there were a whole load. They didn’t know what had happened to anybody at that stage or where anybody was. I don’t think Mother even knew where her brothers where because my eldest uncle stayed in Switzerland. He wanted to go back and I remember Mother saying that the family said to him, ‘You don’t come back, just stay where you are’. So he stayed put. But she didn’t know where he was in Switzerland at that time, didn’t know quite what had happened to him. But Mother’s side wasn’t as acute who was lost of her immediate people. I now know that a lot more were lost but they didn’t talk about it. Looking back I think it probably was a bit difficult for them to talk about it, so they didn’t.

Father became a partner of a medical practice in Kettering and he became the first one there not to pay his way in. Well he couldn’t! Yes and I think this was a bit of a bone of contention for some time with the senior partners who’d all bought their places. I suppose you bought your position in the Church, you bought your position in medicine —you did, money said a lot. But no, he was taken on. He was actually a very kind man and his patients adored him, he couldn’t do enough for them and that probably it showed a bit. He would have been in his early thirties at this time. He also trained to be an anesthetist and that at time you could be a part time anesthetist so he was a part time anesthetist and a full time GP but the practice took the money from it, it all went into the pot. I still meet people who occasionally say, ‘Ooh, your Father!’ Just very occasionally, the old type of GP. My Father’s name was Walter) Mandler and Mother’s maiden name was (Ruzenka Lene known as Rose) Fischl, little fish. So Father’s name wasn’t quite so different. GP’s, until relatively recently and then with some generations still, perhaps not mine, you know the Doctor is the law and you go by it and they had a lot of respect, yes they had a lot of respect for him.

And strange, now we are talking because Kettering was a small market town, fairly insular, not used to foreigners, so very conservative with a small ‘c’ and yet looking back they accepted him although we were still the ‘funny foreigners’. Because they accepted him as a GP but probably still saw us to a certain extent as ‘the foreigners’.

I think Father found it easier than Mother because he was in the end accepted with his qualifications, he’d got a position, he was looked up to in the end, I mean we are talking after several years but he’d forged himself a niche and was very accepted and loved I think. I think people viewed him with a lot of affection in the town, those who he’d helped and Mother found it very difficult, very, very difficult. For various reasons really, firstly she was I think always suspicious of people and didn’t really want — she couldn’t let them in and I think this is because of all that had happened. So she had few friends. She’d got this person who became our Godmother who was from Dublin, a lovely, lovely person who has been very, very good to me and my sister and my children. Probably very few people apart from that so she was quite lonely and I think it affected her on a day-to-day basis enormously. Father had his position, he had a role so that made him appear stronger but he wasn’t really. Once they found that — the Red Cross tried to trace everybody and they discovered that Father had lost virtually everybody. All the cousins, all the aunts, his brother had been killed in the Army, his sister-in-law had ended up in a concentration camp with her 12 year old son, he was taken to the gas chambers. She got out, his sister-in-law. It was his 12 year old nephew whom he was exceptionally fond of. I’ve got upstairs art things that my Mother had done for him as part of her portfolio. She had done things of him and for him, so you know, he was obviously quite an integral part of Father’s life and Mother’s life.

Who had survived was his first cousin who he had lived with in Prague, which was lovely, and her daughter, her son had perished so his male second cousin had gone but the girl has lived. The girl is the same age as Father was. She is still alive in Amsterdam but ailing. His first cousin Mitzi, she was in hiding in Holland and was taken in by a family who hid her and her daughter Magda, throughout. From must have been — I don’t know if they left in 1938, don’t know when they left — but from whenever they left and she was still living with these people in this forest. When we went over to meet her I was six, so that would have 1953 we went over and she was still living there. But Father found it very, very difficult to cope with the fact that his father, his mother, his aunts and everybody had perished and it affected him and how he was with us which in turn affected Mother because the only place to have people safe was actually at home. So Mother stayed at home and Father had to keep coming to make sure that everything was alright. So that affected her to the point that she would get his lunch and get his tea so he’d come home and she was very - what was then the wife at home - looking after the husband who went out to work. But she had no system whatsoever anywhere to support her and they lost a baby two years after my sister was born so that wasn’t easy. That’s, I think partly why she found things a bit more difficult as well, she never really found her roots here.

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