Daughter of survivor to tell harrowing story
UNIVERSITY HOLOCAUST CENTRE SCREENING FILM
A STORY of displacement, strength and loss will be told at Huddersfield’s Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre by the daughter of Ursula Michel, who fled Nazi Germany with just one small suitcase of belongings.
Judith Rhodes will show a documentary, The Little Suitcase, that tells her mother’s story, and will bring Ursula’s Kindertransport case with her.
The event, on November 24, is organised with support from the National Lottery’s #ThanksToYou campaign, designed to give something back to lottery players whose contributions ensure more than £30m is donated to good causes each week.
Anyone who buys a National Lottery ticket on the day before the talk can attend the talk for free – the usual price is £6, with concessions £4.
Ursula was just 15 when she left her hometown of Ludwigshafen am Rhein on one of the final Kindertransports to leave Germany.
Her father, Heinrich Michel, was Jewish and her mother, Gertrud, was Christian with a Jewish mother; despite the fact that Ursula and her younger sister Lilli were baptised Christian, the family was at serious risk of persecution as the children had three Jewish grandparents.
Judith said that they simply did not consider themselves as a Jewish family – they were German first and foremost, an ordinary middle-class family.
Heinrich was a civil servant at the District Court and the children had happy childhoods until the rise of antisemitism during the 1930s.
However, after Kristallnacht – the Nazis’ pogrom against Jews in late 1938 – Ursula was forced to leave school, with the family ejected from their home.
As life became increasingly unpleasant, Heinrich and Gertrud learned there was a place available for one of their daughters on a Kindertransport – the rules meant that this would be allocated to be the elder child.
Ursula began her journey to England just days before the outbreak of war, in late August 1939, taking two trains, a boat to Dover, a train to London and a further train to reach foster parents in North Staffordshire.
After a fortnight, she was offered a permanent home with a second family in Newcastle-under-Lyme, with whom she stayed until being married in 1946.
Ursula attended a girls’ grammar school where parents of existing pupils generously made financial contributions towards the education of the small number of refugee girls there.
Ursula worked hard, passing her School Certificate after just two years before going on to a School of Commerce to learn office skills.
She met Judith’s father, Harold Rhodes, at a Youth Congress in 1944 and the couple married two years later.
Tragically, Ursula never saw her parents or little sister again.
The last communication she received from her mother was a Red Cross form in March 1942, saying the family were to be deported the following month.
While Gertrud’s siblings in Berlin received a form in the summer of 1942 from the Polish concentration camp in which she was incarcerated, it is believed that the family had all been murdered by early 1943.
Judith said the experience understandably left her mother with deep scars but added: “She was remarkably lucky in the family who took her in – a divorced mother with two very bright teenage children who were destined for university.
“There was no money to spare yet they gave my mother a loving family home where the son and daughter called my mother their ‘German sister.’”
Ursula died in August 2011 at the age of 87.
Judith’s talk begins at 2pm but the centre will be open from noon so guests can also experience the interactive exhibition Through Our Eyes, that tells the story of the Holocaust through memories, belongings, photographs and film from 16 survivors who settled in Yorkshire.
Since the centre opened a year ago, more than 5,000 visitors have experienced the exhibition, which details the poignant stories of 16 survivors and their families through original artefacts, film, photographs and their own personal testimonies.
Members of the Holocaust Survivors’ Friendship Association raised £1.1m to create the centre, in partnership with the University of Huddersfield.
For more, go to https://holocaust learning.org.uk/events/judith-rhodes/