´óÏó´«Ã½

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Genevieve Tudor of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Dorothy and has been added to the site with her permission. Dorothy fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

---

Dot's story, as told to Genevieve Tudor.

"Let's talk about your family history and some of the stories that you've heard. Let's start with your dad who was from Germany. Tell me, where was he living?"

He was living in Frankfurt am Main in Germany.

"What religion was he?"

He was Jewish. His family was Jewish although my father was not a strict Jew. In fact he had begun to question his faith as a young man and I believe that by the time he was in his twenties he had actually left his faith but his parents were very strict Jewish.

"That was an uncomfortable thing to be!"

It was because the whole of the Hitler rise to power was based around getting rid of people like the Jews and of course Gypsies and homosexuals so it was not an easy way to live, no.

"What sort of time are we talking about - when was this happening?"

Mostly, as far as I'm aware, in the 1930s but of course it would start in the 1920s. My father told me that one of the things that led to the rise of the Third Reich was the collapse of the German economy when people literally lost all their money; their money became valueless and their whole savings would be spent on a loaf of bread. This meant the country was on its knees and it needed someone charismatic, someone very strong, to pull it round. And of course, Hitler seemed to do this although there were people who could see beyond, to what Hitler was actually doing. With the Jews, this meant they began to live in fear again.

"What about your mother?"

My mother came from a Catholic family but, again, she had lost her faith when she was quite young. I remember my mother telling me that she became disenchanted with the church when she was about fourteen. There were two reasons. Firstly, sadly, a friend of hers was abused by a priest. Secondly, and the thing that affected her personally - it was rather touching - a priest told her after the death of one of her pets not to be so stupid crying because animals have no souls. My mother said, "If animals have no soul and don't go to heaven, then I don't want to go either." Both my parents were questioning personalities right from an early age.

"How did they meet?"

Actually my mother was a very keen outdoor person who went rambling and walking. She did have a boyfriend when she met my father. It was through going out rambling and a girlfriend of my father, who wanted to meet somebody, introduced my father to my mother and that led to them coming together… so unfortunately the outing turned out to be the demise of her own relationships. But it was through their rambling activities - and they were quite young when they met, eighteen or nineteen.

"Was there any problem with families with them getting married and being from different religions?"

Very much so. My father's father was perhaps more of a rogue Jew. My father's mother was one of these do-good ladies; she was always doing good deeds, looking after the poor and so on and so forth and she was very much a practising Jew. But my grandfather on my father's side, whenever my grandmother went out (my mother apparently had a very good relationship with her future father-in-law), they would have pork fry-ups while the good lady of the house was out! So I suspect that my grandfather was not really a practising Jew in the full sense of the word. I think a lot of people, even in those early days, had questioned the rituals of religion.

"But they got married?"

They did. The story of them getting married is quite funny - I think they were in Duisburg. My father had fallen ill with yellow jaundice. He wasn't very well and, being a man, that meant that it was a major crisis! I think my mother was still in Frankfurt and he sent for her, so she came to stay in the flat to nurse him. This would be at the end of the 1920s - the fact that they stayed together in the flat - this was completely forbidden so the landlady said "You can't stay here without being his wife," so they decided to get married because the landlady wouldn't allow her to stay. They had known each other, I believe, about a couple of years and they actually got married saying to each other, "We'll get married, have a civil ceremony and if it doesn't work, we'll simply part". They were actually married for 61 years and they were together for more than 63 years! My mum always said, "If I get fed up with it I'll just ..." They didn't get married because it was a huge love match; they got married because they were told to by the landlady, and their witnesses at the ceremony were two taxi drivers!

"That's amazing! So they got married and lived together. Whereabouts was that?"

This would have been in Duisburg because this was where he was when he had the yellow jaundice. After that I believe they moved on to different towns like Mannheim and back to Frankfurt. I don't really know a lot of detail about where they moved around because by then when they married in 1930, Hitler was coming to power and things began to get very difficult for them.

"How difficult did it become for them?"

Difficult in the sense that I think by then they had become extremely politically aware. Both of them independently had joined the Communist party. There was another youth movement, not the Hitler Youth Movement, but the Socialist Youth Movement that they joined and then they decided that the Communists offered more. Because of the nature of both of my parents, they couldn't just pay lip service. They actually became active, as far as I understand, very quickly, and my mother began to participate in issuing propaganda leaflets and my father actually working in sabotage, in wishing to stop the march of the Hitler movement. So they both became very active and this means that the history of their lives throughout the 1930s is extremely disjointed.

I'm not clear of my facts here but I found out in my later life that both of them had worked under aliases to protect their identity and their aliases meant that the authorities weren't quite sure whether they were married or not. There were times when they were together, I know from my brother's notes, there were times when they had been arrested by the SS and were put on trial as a married couple because they were known to work together. But later they were arrested for their political beliefs and in those early days couldn't be held indefinitely and my mother was released and then later recaptured. What I do know is that by some dint of fate, unknown to them at the time, they ended up in the same prison but neither of them knew that the other was there and the authorities didn't know they were there except as their aliases. In other words they didn't know they'd got the married couple they'd previously been after. Through the coding system that all prisons have of knocking on pipes, my father found out that my mother was in the same prison and the way he let her know was at six o'clock every evening he whistled 'their tune' through the bars of his cell so that she could hear it and it kept her morale up. This went on for a few weeks before she was moved on. So they had odd experiences in prison.

See more of Dot's stories:

• The War in Germany — Chapter 2
• The War in Germany — Chapter 3
• The War in Germany — Chapter 4
• The War in Germany — Chapter 5
• The War in Germany — Chapter 6

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.