The Jewish 101-year-old who used to have Hitler as a neighbour
AJEWISH woman who used to have Hitler as a neighbour has turned 101. Alice Frank Stock, who now lives in Bristol, was born in December 1918 in a German town called Augsburg where her father worked as a public prosecutor.
When Mrs Frank Stock was three months old, the family moved to Munich where her father worked as a judge in the High Court.
Growing up, one of her neighbours was Adolf Hitler, who lived in Munich until becoming Chancellor in 1933.
She said: “Munich is a very cultural city with an excellent university, theatres and opera houses.
“We lived in a small apartment block next to the Prince Regent theatre.
“It was a lovely apartment, with four or five bedrooms, a big salon and a dining room.
“The salon was very large and we had two grand pianos.”
The family lived on the first floor of the block. She was unsure which apartment the German dictator lived in but they were neighbours for about a decade.
The 101-year-old remembers seeing the dictator going in and out of the apartment block a couple of times.
On one occasion, she saw two SS guards escorting Hitler out of a car, rushing him inside the apartment block.
Mrs Frank Stock also saw him once as a teenager in a small opera house in the city.
The opera house would give tickets to school children and, having been given a ticket in the royal box, upon arrival she was told by the SS that she couldn’t sit there.
When she later looked at the royal box during the performance, Mrs Frank Stock saw Hitler sat there.
She said: “We were Jewish and once the Nazis came to power my father was asked to retire.”
Mrs Frank Stock was told she would not be able to go to university in Germany because she was Jewish and her parents sent her to study in Switzerland at the age of 17.
In 1937 she went to a secretarial college in London.
“My parents stayed in Munich and I got a job in London but then the situation in Germany got much worse,” she said.
“The day after the Crystal Night (see panel) a friend of my parents rang them up saying her husband had been taken to a concentration camp.”
Mrs Frank Stock’s father himself came close to being sent to a concentration camp, but was let go by the Gestapo, because he was already in his 60s and the concentration camps were full.
“They had to get out and we [Mrs Frank Stock and her brother] tried to get them a permit to come to England,” she continued.
“The UK government said at the time that you had to have £1,000 in England but we didn’t.
“My father had a valuable violin which he bought as a young lawyer and they accepted instead.”
Her parents finally arrived to London in 1939, in one of the last trains, she said.
Over the years, Mrs Frank Stock worked for the BBC and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
She met her husband, Roy MacDonald Stock, a Bristolian, while working for the OECD in Paris.
The couple met when she was 45 and they lived together in the French capital until 2009, when they moved back to Bristol.
Mrs Frank Stock now lives at Druid Stoke Bupa Care Home.
When asked her advice on living a long, happy life, she said: “Lots of walking and hiking, along with the occasional glass of red wine!”