大象传媒

This story has been submitted to the People's War site by a Patchway Festival volunteer on behalf of Ken Graupner in the home and has been added to the site with his permission. Ken fully understands the terms and conditions.

My name at birth was Klaus Gr盲upner; I was born on Christmas Day 1927 in Breslau, to an educated German middle-class family. My mother鈥檚 father was head of mathematics at a grammar school; my father was an electrical engineering graduate of Breslau University. This young family did very well, my father, a German Jew, had jobs in Berlin, Frankfurt and again in Breslau where we had a house for one family in the country, when most people live in apartments in town. We had a tabby cat and called S A Mann or storm trooper.

Then this family鈥檚 world collapsed as the Nuremberg laws came into force which forbade graduate work for my father. So we had to move back to Breslau. My father found what work he could, and I remember him going off to mend shop-keepers鈥� electric signs on a bicycle balancing a ladder.. Not long after he left his wife and children, to protect them, as his wife was not Jewish. The last that I know of him was that he died in a concentration camp in 1940.

My mother tried to get me away from Breslau whenever Hitler visited the town. Once I went to a small village on the banks of the River Oder which was in flood, but the waters covering the meadows through which the village children and I waded were quite warm. The village families baked their bread communally, a fortnight鈥檚 supply at a time. It was the best bread that I鈥檝e ever tasted! The bread would be wrapped up in blankets and used as required, just cutting off the mouldy bits. It tasted as good when 14 days old as when fresh.

For greater safety, my mother sent me to Denmark to a small dairy farmer in Jutland who probably wanted to adopt this little boy. However, the Danish government did not issue visas for longer than six months. I was terribly homesick for the first three months and then one morning I said 鈥淭his is useless, I鈥檝e got to get on with life (or something)!鈥� so I put on the wooden clogs they had given me and never used and went into the cow-shed where the farmer, his wife, the dairymaid and herdsman were all milking; they cheered when they saw me because they knew then that I was O.K. I had problems with the food there; they would soak bacon fat in full cream unpasteurised milk all morning and then fry it to a frazzle to eat with boiled potatoes!

After six months I returned to Germany, and spent six months in Denmark in each of the next two years, sometimes accompanied by my younger brother. I/we were always unaccompanied on the journey to the village, Lund, which involved an overnight stay in Berlin with distant relations, overnighting in Hamburg in the care of the German railway mission (the Maltese Cross?) and changing at Horsens to the local train. One year, the card announcing our arrival was late in the post. Furthermore, when we got to Horsens the last train to Lund had gone. So the station master put mattresses in the waiting room for us to sleep on.. The next morning I was given the postcards at Lund station to deliver!.

I remember a little of Primary school in Denmark where we were taught Italic script using slates. This is quite different from the 鈥淪眉tterlin鈥� script used in Germany at the time. After the third stay in Denmark I was getting on to being twelve years old and the 鈥�11-plus鈥� continuous assessment put me into the Grammar school stream. I was also now due to join the Hitler Youth but I didn鈥檛 want them and they certainly didn鈥檛 want a 鈥渉alf Jewish鈥� boy. For the Autumn term in 1938 I went to a grammar school (Gymnasium) but after a little while, the Headmaster would not tolerate any longer a half-Jew in his school. So I was transferred to a Secondary Modern (Realschule) but the same thing happened again. In that October there had been the Jewish progrom 鈥� the Krystallnacht (following the assassination of a Third Secretary in the German Embassy in Paris) when across Germany, Jewish shops were trashed and looted and Synagogues burnt down. The morning after as I walked to school I passed jeweller鈥檚 shops with the windows smashed, but the steel bars put up long ago had prevented further damage The class Nazi turned up that day in a gorgeous black and white uniform and announced that this was a glorious day for him and Germany. I didn鈥檛 understand how smashing shop windows could benefit him or Germany but said nothing.

Time to go for good.

My mother had somehow contacted an English missionary society, The British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel amongst the Jews (otherwise The British Jews Society) which devoted all its energies in 1938/9 to getting (converted) Jews out of Europe. It鈥檚 general secretary, Arthur George Parry, was a Bristol Baptist minister. In the early part of 1939 he had a houseful of young men from Germany, Austria, and Poland 鈥� effectively a private orphanage.

Arrangements were made for a Swiss pastor to collect my brother and I to escort us to Venlo on the Belgium / German frontier as the general secretary was persona non grata in Germany. At the frontier there was something wrong with our papers and were not allowed to leave Germany. So we were boarded with a Jewish family in Aachen for a week while the problem was resolved. At the station the second time we joined up with Mr Parry and the Swiss pastor left. Mr Parry told us to call him uncle and my first English spoken for real and not for practice was 鈥渃arry your bag uncle?鈥�. The authorities in Dover changed my name to Graupner as their typewriters did not have funny foreign characters like 鈥溍も��. It was thought prudent that in London in the coming war I should not use such an obvious German name like Klaus, so by usage my Christian name is Kenneth.

So I arrived in England in February 1939. We lived in West Norwood, south London. My brother, who was ten and was boarded out with a Cornish Baptist minister whilst I stayed with Mr Parry. The Society鈥檚 offices where Mr Parry worked were near Theobald鈥檚 Road in Holborn, so I went to a grammar school in North London. Somehow I acquired English without trying; they got me to play cricket - once! When the schools broke up for summer and war was declared on Sunday 3rd. September 1939, all the children and their teachers in London had been evacuated, but none of the teenagers living with Mr Parry. In the winter of 1939/40 the London City Council realised that there were still children in London and set up emergency schools for them. So I went to Dulwich College,

Our house in West Norwood, was severely damaged by a landmine falling on a house three doors away. Mr Parry found a replacement in Wimbledon. Schools were now re-opening. I had a choice of grammar schools to go to, but they all demanded Latin (for entrance to Oxbridge), so I sat in a Prep school with a Latin primer and taught myself Latin. (Its head master was then called up to the navy and the school had to close down.) I got into Rutlish School (where John Major later went). We spent many hours in air-raid shelters, once all day, wondering what was happening - it was the start of the Doodlebug (V1) raids.

At Rutlish I joined the Officers鈥� Training Corps and donned a 1st World War uniform. Once a week we did parade ground drill and learned simple infantry skills like dismantling and assembling SLME rifles and Bren guns. The name was changed to Junior Training Corps and our puttees to gaiters. This remains my only experience of soldiering (unlike my brother.

From school, I went to Imperial College in South Kensington and read chemistry, going on to do research for a Ph.D. I became an active member of the college鈥檚 Dancing Club and a leading light of the Entertainment Committee whose main function was to organise Saturday night hops for the College鈥檚 2,000 demobbed servicemen and 50 women. We had to have good contacts with London all-women colleges like Holloway and Bedford. Thus I met my all-English wife.

This story ends in 1951 when I went to G枚ttingen ostensibly to do some reading for my Ph.D. thesis but mainly to stay with my mother and two sisters. They had to leave Breslau in the winter of 1944/45 and ended up in G枚ttingen. Her sister ended up in Marburg. The other sister was married to a communist and stayed in the Russian zone but came to meet her anglicised nephew. (She had to wade a river to do so as the inter-Zonal pass did not come in time.) I did not make real contact with my cousins in East Germany until the wall came down.

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