EXTRAORDINARY LIVES
MY FRIEND ALFRED BATZDORFF
ALFRED Batzdorff had a remarkable life. His grandparents perished in the Holocaust and no doubt he would have, too, had he not left Germany in the nick of time. He was born in the German city of Breslau, now Wroclaw in Poland. He came from a Jewish family, his father was a doctor and his mother a pianist. After Kristallnacht, the Nazis’ pogrom against the Jews in November 1938, his family was desperate to leave Germany. The 16-year-old Alfred had already been arrested and was lucky not to be deported to Buchenwald concentration camp. His parents sent him to Berlin, where his grandmother was involved in organising the Kindertransport bringing Jewish children by train to Britain. She managed to get Alfred on the first transport to cross the Channel and he was one of 200 children to arrive in Harwich on December 2, 1938. At first they were put up at the nearby Dovercourt Bay summer camp before Alfred and some of the children were sent to Swanage by the Bournemouth Refugee Committee. But the weather was unusually severe and the camp was declared uninhabitable, so they were moved to private homes. As Alfred told me: ‘That’s when I met the Hawes family. Mr Hawes owned a haberdasher’s and lived
HAVE you lost a relative or friend in recent months whose life you’d like to celebrate? Our Friday column tells the stories of ordinary people who lived extraordinary lives. Email your 500-word tribute and a favourite photo to: lives@dailymail.co.uk or write to: Extraordinary Lives, Scottish Daily Mail, 20 Waterloo Street, glasgow g2 6DB. Please include a contact phone number. in a small house with his wife and two children. They had enough room to take in a refugee child and luckily chose me. ‘I was very surprised when on the first morning Mrs Hawes brought me a cup of tea in bed. My introduction to life in England!’ He later moved to a hostel in Bournemouth. As he was past the obligatory school age, he started work as a dishwasher, busboy and waiter at the Durley Dean and Sandbanks hotels. Going to Bournemouth Synagogue gave him his faith back. Meanwhile, he secured sponsors and transit visas so his parents and younger brother Ulrich could join him. They arrived in summer 1939 and lodged with a family in Swanage. A year later, the Batzdorffs sailed to New York to join relations. Alfred became an engineer and married Susanne, a childhood friend from Breslau. They had three sons, five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. In the 1980s, they retired to California, where Alfred gave talks about his experiences. Though we only got to know each other in recent years, Alfred and I had a close connection and I cherished our friendship. As a presenter on the local radio station in Swanage, I was preparing a programme to mark Holocaust Memorial Day in 2020 when I learned of Alfred’s story and his connection to the area. And so our email correspondence began. The link between us was firmly established when I discovered a distant relative, a teacher called Irma Zanker, was one of the adults accompanying the children on the Kindertransport that brought Alfred to Britain. Irma, who was also Jewish, returned to Germany and perished in Auschwitz.
ALFRED BATZDORFF, born February 19, 1922; died April 2, 2022, aged 100.