Eighty-five years ago, 9-11 May 1939, my mother Ruth Neumeyer and her brother Raimund Neumeyer (later became Raymond Newland) travelled to England on a Kindertransport from Munich, and never saw their parents again. Ruth and Raimund set off at midnight on 9 May, and travelled across Nazi Germany with a hundred other children, on a journey fraught with uncertainty.
Ten years ago, 10 May 2014, I began this blog, exactly 75 years after that fateful journey. My reason for doing so was partly a way of sorting out the family history in my own mind. I started with what I knew about already, using artefacts I’d found to tell the story. To view that post, click here.
The ferry ticket gave the date of the journey from Hook of Holland to Harwich, and the name of the ship, SS Amsterdam. The silver cutlery our family had used on a daily basis bore the monogram of Vera’s parents Martin and Hildegard Ephraim: that accounted for the two knives, two forks and two spoons each child was allowed to take with them to England. Ruth’s teddy bear, which she’d brought with her, had spent many years upside-down in the toy basket along with a menagerie of other cuddly items, had been purloined by Ruth since around 1990 and given a seat of honour in her bedroom. Those objects in themselves were my starting point for this blog.
Making sense of it all
There were so many things not understood. When Ruth died in 2012, we spent nine months sorting out the possessions in the rambling Sydenham house where our family had lived since 1956, and where I was born two years later. It dawned on me that her bed was the very one on which I entered this world: sawing up the bedframe so the bits could fit in the wheelie bin was one of life’s stranger experiences.
By her bedside was a day-per-page diary for with printed dates for 1940, re-used for economy reasons for 1943-45. It flopped open automatically at what was perhaps the key entry and the reasons she kept it by her bed: the recording on 17 September 1945 of the news of her mother Vera’s almost certain death in ‘a part of Poland from where there is little news’.
Diaries dating from 1937 have proved a fruitful source of information, though Ruth’s earlier ones are near-impossible to decipher. (Click on arrows for slideshow.)
I’ve filed away hundreds of letters, photos and much more.
On the upstairs landing I finally looked into the trunk which contained bags full of prewar family letters, forbiddingly tied up in tight bundles of string. There seemed to have been an unwritten rule in our family during her lifetime that we shouldn’t look at these, and in any case she always played down the importance of the mass of inherited bits and pieces. They turned out to be a treasure trove of correspondence, including over fifty letters sent by her parents in Munich during 1939 to 1940, and letters from them to Frank and Beatrice Paish, whose family’s generosity meant Ruth and Raymond could escape persecution – and almost certain death – at the hands of the Nazis, and begin a new life in England.
Once we started looking into cupboards and drawers in the house, there were reminders of her past life everywhere: among them were photos crammed into in a decrepit shoebox, a complete set of diaries, Vera’s handwritten recipes in the kitchen, prewar Alpine walking maps mixed up with the OS maps, Ruth’s neatly written exercise books from her schooling in Dachau tucked away in her desk, and a lifetime of correspondence needing careful sifting.
IWM and academia take an interest
Staff at London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM) have been following it closely, and although it was Ruth who made the initial contact with them, it was really the content of the blog and the order that I’d started to make of the family archive that resulted in the museum’s offer to take the entire collection into its own archive at Duxford (outside Cambridge), and in particular to display some of the most significant items in the new Holocaust Galleries that opened in 2021. So Ruth’s teddy bear, the photo album, various letters and photos as well as three prewar suitcases all ended up in displays. The vast bulk of it is still here at home, but eventually will make its way to Duxford for perpetuity.
Some of the family objects now on display in the Holocaust Galleries
A number of academics, writers and researchers have contacted me via the blog. Amy Williams visited me in Lewes as part of her PhD research into memorialising the Kindertransport. I had a fascinating Zoom session with Selma Odom, an expert on eurythmics who filled me in with some of the background about Hellerau, the institution where Vera was studying eurythmics in 1914, and where she met Hans as well as Beatrice Eckhard (who was the link with England, the family that saved the lives of Ruth and Raymond by enabling them to come to England). Alice Tofts, a doctoral student with the University of Nottingham and Imperial War Museums, made contact for her PhD focusing on family photographs of Holocaust survivors and their families.
James Bulgin, Head of Content at the IWM Holocaust Galleries, put me in touch with his colleague Stephan Jaegar, Professor of German Studies at the University of Manitoba with a view for contributing a piece for his forthcoming academic book about the Holocaust Galleries. My brief was to focus on why I had donated artefacts to the IWM, and how my perception of them and their meaning had changed over time. The book is due for publication in 2025.
Mike Levy, researching refugees, particularly those on the Kindertransports, gave me some invaluable information about the refugee community in wartime Cambridge, and led the project to erect a memorial to the Kindertransport at Harwich, where my brother Stephen and I attended the opening ceremony in 2022. Mike also put me in touch with Irene Anderson (nee Burlin), a German Jewish refugee living in Fifeshire. Her mother Alice Burlin worked at St Chad’s, a hostel for refugees in Grange Road, Cambridge, which trained young women in domestic science, and where Ruth was from April until November 1941. In her diary Ruth mentions her as well as Irene, who was then eight. Irene’s daughter Jill very kindly offered to translate Ruth’s diary during those months at St Chad’s: and Jill and Irene found reading through it a rather wonderful experience, making this emotional connection with Ruth, and much regretted never having met her. Another Cambridge contact came via Mike Levy: the former master of Peterhouse, Rosemary Pattenden, who had written a biography of Greta Burkill, who was a leading light of the Cambridge Children’s Refugee Committee, and whom Ruth also mentions in her diaries.
My guess is that this still life by Dachau artist Aranka Wirsching given in 1953 as a present to Ruth for helping persuade the British authorities that her son Anselm, who had served in the German army, was not a Nazi.
These and other items of jewellery we found hidden in Ruth’s wardrobe after her death. It now seems that they were smuggled out of Nazi Germany and into neutral Sweden in 1943 by my grandfather’s secretary Dela Blakmar.
Dela Blakmar gave me her violin in 1968. This cloth is what it was wrapped in: I now know that DM stands for her maiden name – Dela Mankiewitz, and that she had Russian Jewish origins.
Among the mass of music kept in Sydenham were the preludes for piano by Scriabin, with the name Bial written on the cover. Erna Bial was the link between Hans Neumeyer and Dela Blakmar. A newspaper reported in 1921 she performed modern dance to this music – presumably using this very (much annotated) score.
The suitcase belonged to Edith Zimmern, who I have now discovered was the official guarantor for Ruth allowing to come to the UK as a refugee from Nazi Germany.
Hans Neumeyer’s Christmas song: this lay in our piano stool in Sydenham. I have since found a reference to it in a letter from Hans in December 1939 in which he says he has written a song for Raimund.
These cases, used for many years, turned out on close inspection to have been the very ones Ruth and Raimund took on the Kindertransport in May 1939.
We always used these nail scissors at home.They turn out to be pre-war, made in Germany.
We found these pencils were made between 1935 and 1942, so they must have come on the Kindertransport and were very possibly the ones Ruth used to colour her school books.
Speaking publicly
Writing the first few blog posts started to set the outline of the story in my mind. In January 2015, eight months after my first post, my home town of Lewes hosted its first ever Holocaust Memorial Day event – a mixture of speeches, readings and klezmer music under the theme ‘The Survival of the Human Spirit’ in front of over 150 people in a packed hotel conference room. It was the first time I had ever spoken publicly about the family’s experiences under the Third Reich: I condensed the story into ten minutes, showing a photo of the Neumeyers having tea in their garden around 1929 with Ruth and her teddy bear in evidence, reading out Vera’s letter written on the train while she was being deported in 1942, describing how Ruth and Raimund escaped on a Kindertransport in 1939, and hoisting the hitherto unseen teddy bear out of a carrier bag to unexpected and enthusiastic applause – it dawned on me that that well-worn toy had become a potent symbol of survival.
Since then I’ve helped with annual events with the Lewes Holocaust Memorial Day Group, with support from the town and district councils, as well as the local Depot cinema, and have been interviewed a couple of times for BBC Southeast News (the interviewer rather dauntingly asked me on the spur of the moment if they could film me playing a bit of Hans Neumeyer’s music on the piano, despite it being written for violin and viola, and despite the fact that I’d never actually played it before – so I stuck to the first few bars before the music’s complexity threatened to put me well out of my comfort zone).
In 2021 I was invited as a speaker at the Association for Jewish Refugees (AJR) conference at Chelsea football club, on a panel shared with the Wiener Holocaust Library, the National Holocaust Centre and the Imperial War Museum, each in conversation with a person about a specific item they had donated to a museum. For me, I discussed my uncle Raymond’s letter, which he wrote in 1946 and in which he denounced Sturmbahnführer Dobler, the Nazi official who had kicked the Neumeyers out of their Dachau home in November 1938.
I’ve also developed my talk with hugely helpful guidance from the charityGeneration2Generation (G2G for short), which trains up second and third-generation Holocaust survivors to speak publicly to school groups and adult organisations (and takes bookings from any organisations wishing to have a speaker on their own personal story; there’s no charge for the talks, incidentally, and they warmly welcome enquiries and bookings, as well as potential speakers who have family testimony). They honed my presentation for style, content and historical accuracy, and it was through that process that I learnt how the Nuremberg Laws rules defined Jewishness based on the number of grandparents. I’m now also mentoring prospective speakers.
From the Generation2Generation website: promoting the talk the charity has trained me to deliver
Immersing myself in all this has led to a stronger personal bond with Germany. I have been in close contact with the Dachau Kulturamt and Dachauer Forum, and my brothers and I have been invited by the town for two hugely valued commemorative events, the most recent being in November 2023. In the wake of the disaster that is Brexit, I decided to apply for German citizenship – more as a symbolic gesture than for practical reasons: when at Munich airport last year I used my new German status for the first time, the machine scanned my passport and it was a strange feeling of acceptance when the green light came on as the barrier opened.
Bolts from the blue
The names and events in the blog posts have been picked up round the word. From time to time, I’m contacted by someone completely unknown to me who has a connection, and I’ve even discovered two unknown relatives from the other side of the Atlantic. One of the more obscure snippets that found their way to me was from John Hutchinson, who had worked at the Natural History Museum in Görlitz, and flagged up a mollusc collection acquired from the estate of my great-great-grandfather Lesser Ephraim after his death in 1900. There’s quite a lot of the Ephraim molluscs stashed away in the museum, with their original handwritten labels.
One Saturday night in 2021 one Bruno Sandkühler, emailed from Germany:
While working on my biography, I just wanted to check on some details concerning the ways my parents came together. I knew that both of them were friends of Hans Neumeyer, and that they first met when they accompanied Hans on a journey from Munich to Garmisch, but I was hoping to find further details in the Internet. That’s how I came across your blog, and I am so thrilled by this discovery that I could not go to sleep without writing this short message.
Bruno’s parents it transpired, had met each other through Hans before the First World War, all drawn by a love of playing chamber music. More about that story here.
Ron Kammer was astonished to read that his great aunt Malwine Porsche was sitting next to my grandmother Vera in the third-class compartment of a train destined probably to Auschwitz (although no one is sure where it ended up):
I came across your blog while doing a google search today and felt I must immediately email you as it was so personally profound for me. Your grandmother mentions in her letter she sat next to a Frau Professor (Malwine) Porsche (nee Kammer). That woman was my paternal great aunt (the sister of my paternal grandfather). In fact my middle name is Melvin in her honor (she was my father’s favorite aunt). The internet is so amazing that I found your blog site.
Malwine Porsche: photo from her identity paper
Hans’s secretary Dela Blakmar has turned out to be a key figure in the story. Jan Qvick posted this illuminating comment on one of my blog posts about her:
It was interesting to read about Dela Blakmar, my teacher in music in Norberg, Sweden, in the 1960s. I have always known, she had an exciting story to tell even if I nothing was said to us pupils and we were strongly asked by our parents not to ask anything. Probably because, it was known in the Community that she started crying if anyone sang, hummed or whistled, Lili Marlene. There were a lot of rumours about her, of course, because anyone did not know.
I learnt first to play recorder and then violin with her until she left Norberg in 1967. However, I visited her in southern Sweden in 1975 together with a friend. She mentioned a husband she had left and left for Denmark and escaped to Sweden over Öresund with a boat together with many other refugees. The engine of the boat hit a problem and German patrol boats followed them in the complete dark searching with floodlights, but they were lucky the wind was from the west (which it normally is in this country) and they drifted into Swedish territorial water and were picked up by the coast guards.
So from Jan’s comment I think it’s likely that Dela escaped to Sweden carrying the jewellery belonging to Martin Ephraim which eventually ended up with us, along with the two surviving bits of chamber music Hans had composed.
Then in 2022 came a bombshell from Marianne Hellman in Sweden, who had found a box of love letters from Hans Neumeyer to his secretary, Dela Blakmar, mostly written in 1935, along with other material relating to Dela. I read it, blinking, then read it again to check it was real:
To make a long story short; I have in my possession several letters from your grandfather Hans Neumayer to Dela Blakmar, written from 1937 up to his death in 1944.
When I found this treasure in our basement (as I said, long story…), I contacted Forum för levande historia in Stockholm, since I was aware that they are collecting material for a new museum regarding Holocaust victims with connection to Sweden.
Since Dela was said to be Jewish and to have fled to Sweden via Denmark during the war, I thought her letters might be of interest to them [it has since been agreed that the letters will go to the Imperial War Museum’s archive in Duxford].
These letters from a “Hans” – I had no idea who Hans was. I thought he could be Dela´s unknown husband Blakmar, since she was born Mankiewitz. The letters were love letters, apart from telling tales of every day life and people they both knew. But why was Dela and her husband separated? So many questions for the new museum, I thought.
A few weeks ago and just before I had a scheduled telephone meeting with a person at Forum för levande historia, I realised I had not even googled Dela. So I did that, and that´s when I found your blog and realised who Hans was and that there are relatives to him that might be interested in the letters too. The letters I found did not only speak of Dela’s past, but also of your grandfather’s.
Earlier this year, I had a delightful exchange of emails with Claudius Massinger from Frankfurt. He was amazed to find a photo of his father, Manfred Massinger, whom I had featured in a post about Ruth’s years in Cambridge – mentioning a photo she had of Manfred, who had written on the back “Dear Rüthy, You gave me in a time without freedom joy and happiness. May this happiness return to your own heart. All the very best to you, with kindest regards“. Ruth had written “POW” underneath. Manfred, it emerged through Claudius, was born in 1927, conscripted into the German army at the age of 16 and captured by American forces (to his great fortune, as it transpired) in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge. He was then sent to various POW camps in Britain, ending up in Trumpington in 1948, on the edge of Cambridge, which is presumably where he met Ruth shortly before returning to Germany.
Claudius painted this very heartening picture of his father’s experiences as a prisoner of war:
When I was a child my father often talked about his time in England to my elder brother and me. Following his narrative I imagined in my childhood fantasy that being a “prisoner of war” was a long holiday. Years later I learned, what “war” really meant – and that his stay had had another purpose.
He experienced great hospitality! Today, it seems to me, that he experienced these three and a half years as the best of his life: He felt free (for the first time, because he had been totally socialised in a Nazi environment – even our grandfather was a communist, but that is another story). As a POW he was able to learn another language, about arts and culture, about freedom of opinion, and about free speech and politics. He was able to do an apprenticeship (typesetting). And, the most important, he met people like your mother who certainly opened his eyes.
Interestingly my father never said a single word about his war experiences. After his death I found some notes with names of places in Belgium and postcards he had sent to his parents before going to the front and after his capture from the camps. Based on this I could track his deployment. I only know from my mother that he had nightmares for many years remembering the tanks that drove over him in a trench. I hope that he had a good encounter with your mother and maybe heard from her about that what happened to her and her family. It is unbelievable that this insanity is still in the world and it horrifies me that currently it becomes louder.
Manfred in 1947 as a prisoner of war in England: a photo sent to me by his son Claudius
The photo of Manfred I found among Ruth’s papers
The reverse of the same photo.
Thoughts still racing through my mind…
The blog has opened up so much – links with people (too many to list in full) and places (Dachau and Görlitz among them) and I’m hugely grateful for all who have made contact.
I’ve solved quite a few unknowns, but those answers in themselves have often raised more questions.
Where did Vera end up?
It is now established that Vera wasn’t deported to Piaski, as previously thought. My contacts in Dachau town alerted me to the Munich city website’s list of deportations, which indicate she was deported on 13 July 1942 on a train bound either to Auschwitz or Warsaw. Tantalisingly the list shows it as the only deportation from Munich of which the destination is uncertain. We’re unlikely ever to know the answer, or what happened to her on arrival – though if it was Auschwitz, Vera as a 48-year-old woman would very probably be sent straight to the gas chamber. Originally she was due to be deported to Piaski in April 1942 but she got taken off that train. Why? Was there some sort of last-minute appeal? Or some doubt about her Jewishness – she was a Mischling (mixed race) of the First Degree (i.e. with two Jewish grandparents), which made her fully Jewish and therefore liable to persecution if married to a full Jew, as she had been to Hans until their divorce in 1941. Her two First Degree Mischling sisters Marianne and Dora (not married to Jews) avoided deportation – so why was Vera treated differently?
Hans as a musician
I’ve unearthed quite a bit of new material about the Neumeyer family, but that has brought up a series of unanswered questions with it. Hans was blind, but a brilliant pianist: how did he learn new music to play? Writing out music for him in braille might have been possible but would have been hugely time-consuming – and if his secretary Dela or wife Vera played notes for him to memorise that would have been similarly challenging for all concerned.
One big nagging question: did any of Hans Neumeyer’s music survive, other than the four pieces we know about? The trio and duo show great skill in composition, but he was composing for much of the time, dictating presumably via the piano so that Dela could write it down for him. Ruth’s abiding wish was that his music could be played in public. I think the only public performance she went to was at the Imperial War Museum, where on Holocaust Memorial Day the programme included a movement from the trio. She would have been pleased to know that I’ve had several requests from musicians from various countries to perform the music. The trio and duo are as yet unpublished, but I will happily forward a pdf of the scores to anyone who would like to play them.
In May 2014, following the installation in Görlitz of commemorative Stolpersteine to Holocaust victims including my great-grandfather Martin Ephraim, the town staged a talk about Martin in the synagogue of which he contributed towards the building. The second half featured musicians playing Hans Neumeyer’s two chamber works – the first time both pieces had ever been played together to a public audience.
The musicians in Görlitz’s restored synagogue playing Hans Neumeyer’s string trio.
In 2016 students from the North Herts Music School included in their concert the first ever performance of Hans Neumeyer’s little recorder duets, which I later found from correspondence were composed in Easter 1940. The illustration is probably by Vera Neumeyer.
Spanish musicians performed Hans’ trio in a concert in Murcia in 2015.
The concert in Murcia.
A piece I wrote for a programme of music, including the Hans Neumeyer trio, performed in Dachau’s splendid Schloss in February 2018. At that time it was thought Vera was deported to Piaski, but we now know that was not the case. The concert was titled ‘Violins of Hope’, with musicians using restored instruments that were played in concentration camps.
Schloss Dachau: the first time Hans Neumeyer’s music had ever been played in Dachau.
The trio was also played at a fund-raising dinner for the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Gallery at Chelsea Football Club in April 2019.
A letter from Dela to Ruth in 1947 mentions that all the other music was burnt, presumably in bombing. She does mention she has ‘the beginning of a great work’ which they had started on in Munich – though that might have been an academic book rather than a composition. That is the only reference to it that I’ve yet found.
Hans and Vera’s domestic arrangements
Hans was certainly having an affair from about 1935 with Dela – that is proved by the love letters that were recently discovered. And in 1938 the pair of them applied to emigrate to the United States, but they never got there. A letter about this plan from Hans to the Jewish composer Herbert Fromm is somewhere in the Jewish Theological Seminary of America archive in New York, where Fromm lived: hopefully one day I’ll manage to unearth it.
What Vera made of this relationship between Hans and Dela is not clear. According to documents I’ve seen, they appeared to be living together – all three of them – in an apartment in Thorwaldsenstrasse in Munich as late as 1942 (and Dela stayed on after Hans and Vera were deported). Dela continues to pose questions: she has intriguing links via her husband and cousin to resistance movements, and her extraordinary report about her life under the Nazis as a Jew in Munich tells us much without revealing the purpose for which it was written. Meanwhile, the mysterious Leo Weil enters the story in 1939, with a series of very affectionate letters to Vera pleading with her to accompany him to Shanghai, where Jews were relatively safe. Leo is clearly a friend of the family – so it all sounds quite a bohemian set-up.
Betty’s miraculous escape
Hans’ sister Betty lived before the war in Garmisch, in the German alps. This is where Hans and other musicians got together from an early date (before 1914), and in the 1930s he first met Dela there. It sounds almost like a musicians’ colony; did Hans’s sister Betty arrange all this at her home, the Starenhäusl? Betty escaped to Columbia in the nick of time: Trans-Siberian railway in 1941 to China, then ship to Columbia just before the Japanese attach on Pearl Harbor made such crossings out of the question – but how did she organise that trip and pay for it? Did she have fake ID papers?
The Neumeyer’s personal effects
I posted about the lengthy compensation claim Ruth made against the Bavarian state after the war, but don’t know what riches the Neumeyers had. I suspect there was art and applied art in the house. Some of the possessions – particularly books and sheet music – were sent to Ruth in England after the war. I can only presume the Neumeyers suspected they were about to be made homeless in 1938 and got friends to look after some of their things, in which case that was fairly canny of them.
Some mysteries, left to right: Betty, the Köbners in Thorwaldsenstrasse, and Dela and Hans
What happened after the Neumeyers were forced to leave Dachau?
The Neumeyers were told by the authorities to leave Dachau town before dawn on 9 November 1938. This they did, and Ruth talks about it in her interview with the Imperial War Museum. But what she doesn’t mention is the danger of arriving that morning in Munich, as the massive pogrom known as ‘Kristallnacht’ happened on that very night. She, her brother and mother were presumably out of harm’s reach in a loft somewhere in the suburbs – but had the Neumeyers no idea of the mayhem that was taking place in the city centre, as the synagogue was being burnt down, Jewish homes ransacked, Jews beaten up and made to scrub pavements, and Jewish shops smashed up and looted?
We know from letters Hans and Vera were still desperately trying to escape to England in summer 1939. With their connections in Switzerland and England, they could have got out earlier – but I have to assume their domestic/romantic relationships complicated matters too much.
A few weeks after that the Neumeyers were living with the Köbner family in Thorwaldsenstrasse, Munich. Ruth never mentioned them to me, so we don’t know if they were friends or if this was a commercial arrangement. I assume Dr Köbner and his family were fully Jewish and what happened to them later is a mystery.
Where are the photos of Irma?
Then we have Hans’ elder sister Irma Kuhn, who died in Theresienstadt, where she wrote that extraordinary poem, whose significance I only discovered in 2021 through historian Lauren Leiderman. What I don’t get is why Ruth never talked about her. And among the hundreds of family photos, there is not a single one identified as Irma. Her image might be among the uncaptioned ones, though I can’t spot any obvious candidates. Ruth never mentioned this poem, which was sent from a Theresienstadt survivor, Alois Weiner, via Dela, but I suppose she never realised what it was or who wrote it.
A fairytale ending
Part of Vera’s notes on a children’s performance of Hansel and Gretel
One final thought: the story of Hansel and Gretel. It has occurred to me there is something quite profound in Ruth’s huge affection for the story, as well as Humperdinck’s romantic opera (I chose the poignant Evening Prayer from the end of act 1 for the music for the committal at her funeral). I do wonder if she ever rationalised her feelings for it. I remember her encouraging us as children to put on a play about that story on the landing of our house; I had a non-speaking role as a toadstool, but on the day of performance chickened out through a fit of stage shyness at the last moment. Only very recently have I been struck by the parallels with her own childhood in the Dachau house, staging plays in the biggest room with neighbours and friends watching. And sure enough, among the family papers I spotted Vera’s stage notes for Hansel and Gretel, with musical interludes. The story is how things should have turned out for the Neumeyer family: two children cast out of their home, and an encounter with an evil witch who wants to put them in the oven. Virtue triumphs over evil, the parents reappear and the family is together again – and in the opera all the dead children the witch has turned into gingerbread come to life once more.
The Ephraims and the Neumeyers 
Tim I truly enjoy your narratives. It helps understand so many things. Frieda
Thanks so much, Frieda. You are one of the amazing contacts I have made via this blog!