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    My Voice: Gerda Rothberg
    My Voice: Gerda Rothberg
    My Voice: Gerda Rothberg
    Ebook146 pages1 hour

    My Voice: Gerda Rothberg

    By The Fed

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    About this ebook

    Gerda Rothberg was born in 1926 in Lötzen. She had a happy childhood, which was shattered by the Nazi rise to power. Following her father’s detention after Kristallnacht and the introduction of many anti-Jewish regulations, her family sought to flee. Gerda and her two sisters escaped to England via the Kindertransport in June 1939, while her parents waited for her father’s identity documentation to arrive.

    Gerda lived in Liverpool for a few years and then moved to a hostel in Manchester. She found employment in dressmaking, following in the footsteps of her father who was a tailor, and started to enjoy life again. She married Nat in 1949 and together they had three children. Gerda later discovered that her parents perished in Theresienstadt.

    Gerda’s book is part of the My Voice book collection, a stand-alone project of The Fed, the leading Jewish social care charity in Manchester, dedicated to preserving the life stories of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Nazi persecution who settled in the UK. The oral history, which is recorded and transcribed, captures their entire lives from before, during and after the war years. The books are written in the words of the survivor so that future generations can always hear their voice. The My Voice book collection is a valuable resource for Holocaust awareness and education.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherManchester University Press
    Release dateSep 10, 2024
    ISBN9781526186393
    My Voice: Gerda Rothberg

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      Book preview

      My Voice - The Fed

      Chapter 1

      A happy childhood

      I was born Gerda Josselsohn on 10 July 1926 in Lötzen in East Prussia. My older sister Ruth was born on 9 February 1925. My younger sister Waltraut was born on 27 July 1929. In England, we called her by her Jewish name, Mirrel, as no one could pronounce her name.

      My father’s name was Rutwin. He came from Vilna in Lithuania and was taken by the Germans as a prisoner in the First World War. I don’t know anything about my father’s side of the family. My mother, Anna Krellenstein, was born in Kovno, Poland and was one of seven. She had four sisters and two brothers. Her birth wasn’t registered when she was born, as things were lax back then. She had to go back to Poland to get her birth certificate and they worked out a date for her. They assessed it to be 20 May 1900. My father met my mother in Germany. She had travelled from Poland to Germany to work as a nanny for a Jewish family with five boys.

      My father was a master ladies and gents tailor and worked from home. He made all our coats, and he saved all the scraps of cloth so he could make us slippers in the winter. At busy times, my mother helped by doing the finishing. We were never well off as tailoring was very seasonal. Father kept busy in the summer months, but business was slack in the winter. He liked a drink and schnapps was his poison. During one period, when drunk, he would sing and dance loud enough for all the neighbours to hear.

      A woman on the left has dark hair in a side parting. She is wearing a V-neck blouse. A man to her right is wearing a suit and tie, with short dark hair and a small moustache.

      1 My mother Anna and my father Rutwin, late 1930s

      Two young girls are sitting on a patterned cushion holding hands, wearing matching dresses with short, dark hair.

      2 Me aged 2 with my sister, Ruth, aged 3

      A document written in German, with the title 'Geburtsurfunde' across the top. At the bottom it is signed and stamped.

      3 My birth certificate

      When my father had no work, he would spend hours telling us about the First World War and how he was taken prisoner. I loved those tales. He used to pretend that he was a gun, making the sounds of what a gun would sound like. I also loved to watch him work and could sit for hours just watching. He always said that when I grew up, I could help him with the tailoring. When I was seven years old, I had the best dressed dolls around. I used to love sewing and crocheting jumpers for them. He made me a skirt when I was older, and I did the hemming and finished it. We were both very proud of my effort.

      My father never found time to patch his own trousers, let alone make himself a new pair. He wore them until they were threadbare. One day, Mother decided to do something about it, and while my father was out, she bought us oranges from the market. She peeled them very carefully, so the peel all came off in one piece and then used it as patches for his trousers. We were sworn to secrecy, but when he returned home and changed into his working trousers, he knew something was up. He looked at us, but we dared not laugh. He sat down and jumped up even quicker. He patched his pants up right away after that and he never wore holey trousers again!

      Mother was a wonderful cook and did all her own cooking. She was taught by her mother. She would prepare the dough for her own bread and take it to a baker who baked it in his oven. Once she baked bread at home and it turned out like cake. Normally, she would make around six loaves which would last the week. She was also wonderful at making cakes and cheesecake was our favourite. The cheese would be about two inches thick. Mother always made her own noodles and managed to make a little meat go a long way. Gefilte fish was the only thing I didn’t like. Her kreplach, on the other hand, were delicious. I don’t believe we ever had food out of a tin.

      Lötzen was a small town with no bus service. It had one Roman Catholic church, one Protestant church, one synagogue and one churchyard shared by all denominations. There was one railway station and one picture house where my father took me once. I was very little. I must have been one or two and I screamed so loud that we got thrown out. There was a market where everyone did their shopping and one main road where all the big stores were. There were no kosher butchers and no Jewish shops in Lötzen. We weren’t a religious family, but we celebrated all the Yom Tovim.

      In the 1920s and early 1930s, our family lived in a ground floor flat with two rooms on Schlageten Weg. It was one of four flats in a converted stables. One of the rooms was our kitchen/dining room/my father’s workroom and the other was our bedroom/sitting room. My sister Ruth and I shared a king-sized bed with our parents. Waltraut slept in a cot, which she slept in until she was nine years old, when we came to England.

      In the kitchen, we had a cooker which was fed by wood and coke, and the stove was the means of keeping warm in the winter. Washing was done monthly and it was a four-day job. Day 1 was for soaking, day 2 for washing and boiling, day 3 for second washing and rinsing, and day 4 for drying. That’s when we all had a bath, us children first and then the adults.

      The only toilet was outside in a small hut. It had a wooden seat and a bucket below the seat, which had to be emptied and cleaned by each tenant in turn. There was no such thing as chains to flush. The dung pit was next door and next to this was a cattle shed where cows and horses were kept, as the place was once a farm.

      I had a happy and contented childhood. I was told that I did a lot of crawling as a baby and once left alone, I was off! My parents were always looking for me, which was not very hard since I always left a trail. Growing up, we always looked forward to our birthdays because we got four different sorts of sweets, which we did not have to share, whereas during the rest of the year, my mother bought 1/4lb of sweets to be shared between the three of us. After her visit to the market, we always got tomatoes and raw carrots.

      We used to play in the grounds surrounding our dwelling, and I remember we played ball games against a wall. One day, while we were playing near the dung pit with our neighbour, she toppled in. My mother had to clean her up outside and change her into our clothes before she dared send her home. I don’t remember playing with her again. She had an older brother who joined the

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