Holocaust Memorial Day: The remarkable stories of the Greater Manchester Jews who survived the horror
“Once our generation is gone, the generation that can speak from experience is gone and people will only be able to talk about something they have been told”
TOMORROW is Holocaust Memorial Day, a day to honour all those who suffered under Nazi persecution, the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi concentration camps.
This year, a number of Greater Manchester’s Jews were recognised in the New Year Honours list, for the work they have done, and continue to do, to educate others about the horrors of the Holocaust.
From being rescued from a pile of bodies after nine months in Auschwitz, the only survivor of a murdered family, to being forced to hide from the SS in a sandpit, these Mancunians endured the worst of humanity.
But the rich lives they have lived, their capacity to rebuild and thrive after such horror, and the kindness of the people who helped them survive, also bear witness to the best of us.
All have now been recognised with an MBE or British Empire Medal for their dedication.
These are their remarkable stories.
“WE ARRIVED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT TO AUSCHWITZ”
EVA Neumann, MBE, was just a child when she was discovered, gravely ill, lying on a pile of corpses in a concentration camp.
The teenager had spent nine months in Auschwitz, and as Russian forces advanced on the camp in early 1945, Eva was taken on a ‘death march’.
Despite enduring the freezing conditions in only light clothing and wooden shoes, Eva survived, and ended up at the NeustadtGlewe concentration camp in Germany.
It was here that a Russian medic found her on a mound of bodies, realised she was still alive and took the then 15-year-old to hospital to begin her recovery.
But while she was eventually physically well enough to leave, Eva was left to contend with the knowledge that she was the only surviving member of her family.
A year earlier, upon arriving at Auschwitz, her father had lied to guards and told them Eva was 18, in order to save her life.
She was spared death and put to work sorting the clothes of everyone who arrived at the camp.
But her mother, father, two younger brothers and grandmother were all murdered at Auschwitz.
She searched for them after liberation, but was eventually forced to accept that she would never see them again.
Eva lived with her cousin for a time, before meeting her husband in Switzerland, and moving to Salford, where the mother-of-five still lives.
For decades, she spoke to no one about her experiences at the camp, not even her late husband, who himself had lost his family at Auschwitz.
Eva says that what happened there was so horrendous that she felt no one would ever believe it.
It wasn’t until decades later, when her grandson asked her to accompany a group of school children on an educational tour of Auschwitz, that Eva finally spoke about it.
“He’s such a good boy that I could not refuse anything he wanted from me”, says Eva, who is affectionately known to many as Bobby, a Jewish term for grandmother.
“You can’t always cry and moan, you’ve got to do for others.
“That’s my principle, if you help others, you help yourself,” says Eva, now aged 90.
Eva grew up in a small border village in what was then Czechoslovakia.
“My father was a businessman. I had two little brothers and life was very simple, and very nice,” she said.
“The children were going to school and their hats were thrown into the river, lots of little troubles started.
“I realised I wasn’t so worried about it, we had parents, they didn’t let us worry, so I wasn’t conscious of the situation.
“Then one day in 1944, April, on a Sunday morning, two Hungarians and two Germans came and told us to pack what we could carry.
“I wasn’t worried. My parents were there, my father said ‘don’t worry’. I never cried.
“They took us to the synagogue where they collected all the Jews.
“Then they took us to the next town and collected all the Jews. Then put us in a huge factory, where we stayed for weeks.
“More or less the whole country was collected, then one morning they announced we were leaving.
“We were happy because we didn’t know where we were going.
“They put us in wagons, we had no idea if it was day or night, there was a tiny window.
“We arrived in the middle of the night to Auschwitz.
“A fellow came up to my father and asked him how old I was, he said 15 and he said ‘don’t say 15, say she’s 18’, and they let me through.
“My mother was sent by (Josef) Mengele to the right and I was on the left. I started crying ‘mummy, mummy’ and she said ‘why are you making a noise? You will be shot in a minute’.
“I went from there to the bath, was shaved and tattooed. We stood outside and it was bitterly cold and then they took us to the barracks.
“I worked there sorting all the clothes that came in with people, putting them in bundles with sheets all over.
“That’s what we did. Starving, hungry, freezing cold.”
Eva frequently heard the chilling sounds of others in the camp being taken to their deaths in the gas chambers.
“I know my mother and my two brothers went in. Then months later my father went in. Then my grandmother,” she added.
“One day they came in, the Russians were already coming, the Germans said ‘we are leaving, anyone who is ill and can’t walk can go to the hospital, anyone who doesn’t want to go can stay’.
“When they said ‘leave Auschwitz’, I grabbed it, but I shouldn’t have, because the people who stayed were liberated and they
went home, and it was fantastic, and I still had months, walking to Germany.
“They called it the death march. There was snow. Not enough clothes, wooden shoes, no food, no drink. Just occasionally we went into farms and slept in hay.
“All the way there was snow and bodies so we tripped and tripped.”
At Neustadt-Glewe, the living were forced to remove the bodies of those who had died, and place them outside.
An exhausted Eva ended up among the dead.
“I was one of the last to be put on the pile by my friend.
“A doctor lifted me up and he said I was still alive and he took me from the camp.”
Through her work with the Jewish charity Aish, Eva has accompanied many groups of children on trips to the camp over the past few years.
She knows that by meeting her, young people will gain a far greater understanding of what happened than they ever could from any book or film.
“If they understand what happened there, if they understand it could happen to anyone, not just Jews, we had a lot of non Jews there,” added Eva.
“If you know what can happen, that’s why we work like this.
“Not to say ‘poor Eva that’s been to Auschwitz’, it’s for showing the world, not just the kids.
“It’s so horrendous, when I think about, do we really believe it? Because when we came back nobody spoke, and I know why.
“Nobody believed me, nobody believed any of us.
“What they did is something so horrendous that it’s not believable. If you took a book and started reading, you’d throw the book away.
“Maybe those kids I took, they won’t read that book, or see it on television, but if you talk enough, something might make them think.”
I“SUICIDE SAVED NINE OF OUR FAMILY” N 1938, Dr Peter Kurer BEM was six-years-old and living with his older brother, and the mother and father he adored, in Vienna.
But when Austria was annexed, it wasn’t long before the SS showed up at the family’s door, looking for his dentist father.
Realising the urgent need to leave the country, Peter’s parents turned to Quakers in Manchester for help.
What they did for his family undoubtedly saved all their lives, and ushered in the start of Peter’s lifelong admiration and profound respect for the Quaker faith.
“I remember Hitler coming in. Hitler was very keen on employing people. Every house had swastika flags from the roof to the floor,” says Peter, who now lives in Stockport.
“I remember the early days, seeing the planes.
“A few weeks after that somebody phoned my mother from down the road and said ‘watch it, the SS are coming for your husband’.
“My father was just about ready to go to his dental place a quarter of a mile away and my mother said, ‘go back to bed’.
“She took a thermometer, put it in warm water, five minutes later, ‘bang bang bang’, it’s the SS. They want my father.
“My mother said ‘he’s got a very infectious disease, here’s the thermometer’, and they left him.
“In Germany they would have taken him if he’d been at death’s door, in Austria, Vienna, they left him.”
Peter’s parents spoke for an hour, and decided they must leave the country within a week.
Incredibly, it was because of the connections they had made in Manchester with Quakers, following an earlier family tragedy, that they were able to escape.
Years earlier, his mother’s sister had worked for a Vienna textile firm that did business with a firm in Manchester.
Peter’s aunt frequently corresponded with a young man who worked there, and he eventually came to Vienna to see her.
“The third time he visited, they got engaged,” added Peter
“Three months later they got married in a in a civil service in Vienna and she went to live in Manchester.
“He was a Quaker attendee. My parents always said he was a very nice fellow. I still vaguely remember him.
“After three and a half years of marriage, she committed suicide, from loneliness. Women didn’t work, she was twiddling her thumbs six days a week.
“She had a Quaker funeral, which my parents attended. Suicide saved nine of our family.”
In order to move to Britain, the family first had to find someone to ‘guarantee’ for them, which meant paying the government £50 per person, around £2,500 in today’s money, to increase their chances of getting a visa.
“My father phoned some Quakers in Manchester,” added Peter. “The Goodwins, who lived in Whalley Range. They were jewellers in Swan Street in Manchester.
“They said ‘come to Manchester, we will guarantee for you’.”
After arriving safely in the city, the Kurers lived for a time with the Goodwins, while Peter’s father repeated his last year of dentistry training.
The Goodwins offered to pay for Peter and his brother Hans to attend a Quaker boarding school for two years, where they flourished to such an extent that Peter’s father later carried on paying for them to attend.
As an adult, Peter followed his father into dentistry.
He went on to invent the Kurer Anchor system, a type of threaded post used to support crowns which is now used the world over.
He says what he learned during lessons at the Quaker school helped inspire its design.
Such was the impression his own school days had left on him that Peter and his late wife Heather would eventually send two of their own four children to a Quaker boarding school.
“The Quakers not only saved us, but they got other Quakers to give guarantees, at £2,500 a time, and they saved another five members of our family,” added Peter.
“My education gave me a feeling that I owe something to the Quakers. Six million exterminated and nine of us got out, thanks to the Quakers.
“The Quakers guaranteed for thousands of Jews when the rest of the world sat back and slowly did nothing.
“There were individuals who helped Jews, but as an organisation, the Quakers were the only organisation who helped organise anything.”
Peter’s deep gratitude to the Quakers has been a constant in his life that continues to this day.
After he discovered some years ago that Israel’s Holocaust Museum, Yad Vasham, at the time had no information on the role Quakers had played in helping Jews, he decided to write a thesis about it himself.
At first, they did not accept it, so Peter wrote a second thesis, ‘The Missing Chapter’ and found five historians who were prepared to sign their names to it. After seven years, it was finally accepted by the museum.
Today, at the age of 88, Peter still regularly gives talks to raise awareness of the role they played in saving Jews from persecution.
Asked what motivates him, he says: “I and my family were saved by the Quakers, and nobody knows they existed.” Continued overleaf