Kurt Munzer was 32 and his young wife, Elfrieda, 20 and pregnant with their first child when they boarded the Zeemanshoop
at Scheveningen on the 14 May 1940, the day the Netherland surrendered. They were both Jews from Germany and this was the
second time they had left home to seek safety in another country. They
had met at Enschede in the Netherlands in 1938, fallen in love and
married in the local synagogue the following year.
Kurt Munzer's story
Kurt's
story begins at Beuthen, a town in Upper Silesia with a mixed German
Polish population which had been part of Germany for centuries. Kurt was born there
on the 1
August 1908 and was eleven when the peace treaty assigned Upper Silesia to Poland in 1919. Germany
protested and the treaty was modified to allow a plebiscite in 1921.
Kurt never forgot the hysteria in the area leading up to the voting. In
the end, the province was partitioned and Beuthen stayed in the German
part. It was a period of instability that stayed with Kurt for the rest
of his life. Beuthen finally became part of
Poland after the Second World War and is now called Bittum.
His grand parents had some ten children, all shopkeepers
owning shoe and draper shops, and although quite well off were not rich. Kurt had a
sister who was four years older than him. They went to a Jewish infant
school for three or four years but then attended the same school as
other children. Kurt went to the Gymnasium, the equivalent of an
English
Grammar School, and learned English and French. There were only three Jewish boys in his class. When he was twelve he
took extra English lessons and decided he would like to visit
England some day. Kurt's Mother died when he was fifteen. There was a large Jewish community and Kurt was not
conscious of any anti-semitism. There was also massive inflation
but by the time he left school aged 16 in April 1924 the currency had
stabilised and he decided to join a local bank as an apprentice.
He thought he was "not cut out for shop keeping".
Germany's
defeat in the First World War and the loss of territory to Poland made
people living in the border town of Beuthen feel insecure and Kurt
decided to " 'Go West' - as the Americans put it!" In
1928 he went to a small town near Berlin but a year later obtained a
job as an accountant at a grain importer and exporter in Munster, a
town in Westphalia near the Dutch
border. With the rise of the Nazi party conditions for Jews became more
difficult. Munster was Catholic and not too bad but when Hitler became
Chancellor in 1933 "the real trouble started". His neighbours remained
friendly and he had no problems at work but his colleagues warned him
that things would get worse. In 1935 mobs gathered outside the
homes of Jewish families shouting and chanting and "conditions became
unbearable".
There was a boycott of Jewish shops and the SA, the "brown
shirts", stopped people from entering. The Police were powerless to prevent this and the ordinary people did not dare protest, the SA "were like hooligans". In September he went on a business trip in a chauffeur driven company car to Emden on the North Sea coast close to a concentration camp with “high walls, barbed wire and soldiers saying outside with machine guns”. The atmosphere
in the hotel where he stayed was very bad and when he returned he told his boss he was leaving.
Jews could leave Germany but were not allowed to take any money with them. He
left Munster on Christmas night with all his money taped on the underside of the car and on crossing the Dutch border was
given permission to stay for two weeks. He claimed political asylum at the Police Station in Enschede the
following morning and since he had sufficient funds was allowed to stay but was not given a work permit and made a living by trading
in leather goods. The local people "were helpful and understanding in every way". Between
the Nazis coming to power in Germany in 1933 and 1938 about twenty five
thousand Jews left Germany to seek refuge in the Netherlands. There
were very few refugees to begin with but they increased rapidly,
especially in 1938. Unless they managed to reach Amsterdam which had a
large Jewish community they were turned back or interned at Camp
Westerbork which in 1942 became the transit camp from which Dutch and
German Jews were sent to the extermination camps at Auschwitz and
Sobibor.
Kurt met Frieda
in his leather shop early in 1938,
they got engaged at Easter and he was 31 when they married the
following year.
Frieda Munzer
Elfrieda Gurtz
was born in the small town of Hohenstein, sixty miles south east of
Danzig in East Prussia, not far from the Russian frontier. Her family
had lived in Germany for three generations and moved to East Prussia
around 1900. In 1945 the Germans were expelled from Hohenstein and
replaced by Poles, mostly from parts of Poland seized by the Russians. Hohenstein is now the Polish town of Olsztynek.
Hohenstein was a small place "like living in the country" and her parents had a grain import export business. Frieda was born on the 9 January 1920,
the second of four children. She never knew her father who survived the
fighting in the Great War on the eastern front but died the year she
was born after an appendix operation. Her mother, Metha Sara Heimann (neé Zweig),
remarried when Frieda
was eight and took the name of her second husband.
The
family were wealthy with a large house full of servants and Frieda grew
up without any knowledge of cooking or domestic chores. She was told by her mother that the author, Stephan Zweig, who brought to life the final
years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in his autobiography, The World of Yesterday, was a distant cousin.
For Frieda "everything
was wonderful before 1933", she had lots of non Jewish friends and was
very happy. People said "things are going to change, but not for you,
for the others", meaning Polish Jews. And when she was twelve things
did change - for her especially. She was the
only Jewish child at her Gymnasium and had to sit on a separate bench
in class and at assembly and the other children were forbidden to
speak to her. She begged her Mother to let her leave. She left
the school at fourteen and from then on was tutored at home
with her elder brother.
The
boycott of Jewish shops ruined her father's business. The customers were driven away and the staff left. The SA took
down the name of one of her friends trying to enter their shop and
threatened her with prison.
The family moved to Berlin in 1936. "Berlin was wonderful, I was
sixteen, people did not know I was Jewish, I did not look Jewish" and
she had a good social life. Her father could not work and lived
off his savings and they heard about people who "disappeared" into the
Camps. She became an apprentice in a photography shop.
Frieda Munzer was seventeen and an apprentice in a photography shop in Berlin when these "Cinephotos" were taken in 1937 Courtesy of Baroness Henig
Her Mother looks less relaxed than her playful daughter in
the second strip photograph Courtesy of Baroness Henig
Her
stepfather, Hans Israel Heiman, had three brothers living in the
Netherlands which made it
easy to arrange to move there. The family moved to Enschede near the
German border in February 1938 and she met her future husband on her
very first day in
Holland, in the leather shop he ran with his partner. Frieda was young
and more interested in living than settling down to married life but
her Mother suggested that in such unsettled times it would be sensible
to marry and have a more secure future. There were a lot
of wealthy Jewish people in Enschede but they mainly mixed with fellow
refugees. She started her
own photography business, taking "Cinephotos" (Polyphotos) and
producing enlargements. There was a lot of business from émigré Jews
needing photographs for permits and she sometimes worked until four in
the morning. She learned to speak Dutch within three months and found
the Dutch to be very friendly.
Kurt and Frieda photographed at Enschede in 1938 (in centre photograph with Kurt's father) Courtesy of Baroness Henig
The wedding photograph outside the Synagogue in Enschede
The two children, "Heini" and Ruth Heimann, her step brother and sister by
her Mother's second marriage, were 15 and 12 when they were put to
death at Auschwitz on the 15 October 1942 Courtesy of Baroness Henigand Wikipedia (the Synagogue)
The young family did not feel
safe so close to the German border and decided to move to The Hague.
Frieda's parents stayed in Enschede to continue running the business there and Frieda started a new photographic business.
They were already living in The Hague when Chamberlain issued his
ultimatum on the 3 September and Britain
found itself at war. The Dutch expected to remain neutral as in the
previous war but if the
Germans did invade they planned to hold up their advance by letting the
sea flood the land. They had not expected the Germans to drop
parachutists or anticipated the bombing of Rotterdam. The
invasion began on the 10 May and within three days Queen Wilhelmina
left her country abroad a British destroyer and at 7 pm on the 14 May
Frieda and Kurt heard the broadcast surrender of Dutch forces.
Frieda's
mother and sister were visiting them. Frieda admitted becoming
"completely
irrational", screaming that
they must get away. Kurt knew "there was no way out other than by the
sea" and “did not expect to get away, it looked
hopeless" but went to get their car. When they left he told her mother
they would
soon be back. Foreigners were not allowed out at night and they were
stopped several times at road blocks manned by Dutch soldiers but Kurt
spoke perfect Dutch and when he explained that his wife was pregnant,
had become hysterical and insisted they drove to Scheveningen and walk
along the beach they were sympathetic and let them through. The ten
minute drive
to Scheveningen took more than an hour.
They hoped to buy a place on a
fishing
boat to England but nobody was willing to take them.
They "found three boys with a little lifeboat" in which to go to
England. "Would you mind if we come with you?" "No, not at all". They
told some youngsters, "take the
car, here’s the key, just tell our Mother we’ve got away." The message
wasn't delivered, the car was found wrecked and her parents
assumed the worst.
There was a blackout when the Zeemanshoop left at 9pm but the lighthouse came on at midnight. There were 46 men and women, no conveniences, very
few seats; the women sat and the men stood holding the rails and
looking out at sea. It was cold but the sea was calm. Some passengers
had brought
poison to kill themselves if captured. The
following afternoon they spotted smoke on the horizon, a British
destroyer,
HMS Venomous. They were taken aboard and given tea in the sailors mess.
They landed at Dover around midnight and the refugees from
Germany and Austria, about one third, were taken to the police station, interrogated and
held there overnight. The next day they were taken by train to
London where the married couples were
separated. Kurt and the other men were taken to Pentonville prison and
Frieda and the women to Holloway. Kurt described having to strip naked
and hand over the contents of his pockets including six or seven
hundred guilders. They were locked in prison cells. Kurt complained to
the Governor and it was agreed that
the doors of their cells would be left open. They were not to cross the
threshold but could exchange news with men in the other cells on their
corridor. Kurt was surprised to have a Professor as a neighbour,
probably Otto Neurath. They were treated no different from German
nationals living in Britain, all of whom were suspected of being fifth
columnists, spies or saboteurs.
Frieda was taken to Holloway, the women's prison. One of the refugees
tried to help by telling a warden Frieda was "expecting". She was
taken to a special ward, became hysterical and was given bromide to calm her down. Frieda
thought they were trying to abort her baby and dashed the pills from
the warden's hand. She was relieved to be returned to the others after
a few days. The ordinary prisoners asked why she was there and were
shocked when she told them she had done nothing. She shouted through
the bars of her cell that she was innocent and ought to be
freed. They were allowed out for half an hours exercise each
day. They had no change of clothes, had to wash their things in the
cells, there was nothing to read except the English Bible and they were
not told what would happen to them. They were at Holloway for
three weeks.
After a week Kurt and the men were moved from Pentonville to an
army camp at Sunbury
on Thames where he was robbed at gunpoint by an officer of his 700
Guilders. Two weeks later they were put on a train to Liverpool and
after staying overnight at a Sailors Home were marched
through the town to the docks. It was the 3 June, the day Paris fell to
the Germans, but they heard that Churchill was still Prime Minister so
they knew there would be no surrender. They boarded a ferry which took
them to Douglas on the Isle of Man
and were marched up the hill to
Onchan Camp, a street of requisitioned hotels, where enemy nationals
from all over Britain were interned. Kurt was placed in House 18, which
was quite small with about eight rooms (but only one bathroom) and
eighteen internees. The man on kitchen duty, an Austrian, had been head
chef at the Savoy Hotel and did his best to make their rations
palatable, often kippers for breakfast and kippers for dinner! There
were two Nazis in their house who warned them, "You
wait, Hitler will come here!" Kurt met many interesting people at Ochan
Camp, a future chemist at a factory in Manchester, a man who became a
diplomat at the
German Embassy in London and a Professor.
It was two weeks before he learned that Frieda was in the Rushen
women's camp at Port Erin or Port Mary in the south of the island.
Frieda had never heard of the Isle of Man when she got on the ferry at
Liverpool. She was put in a boarding house with four
to a room. They arrived in June still without news of their husbands.
After two weeks they were told they could write to each other once a
week. These letters, written in German in fine script, are kept by the
family despite them not being able to speak or read German. Kurt
composed a lengthy letter to Queen Wilhelmina complaining that while
she had left for England in comfort aboard an English destroyer he and
his wife, five months pregnant, had fled for their lives on a tiny
lifeboat and were left with nothing. He was touched to receive a parcel
containing a beautiful set of baby clothes as a gift from the Queen.
Freda recalled that many of the women had been working in
domestic service in England when they were interned but as many
as half were Nazi supporters. Everybody in the women's camp
spoke German. They could wander freely
through the villages, she "clambered around from morning to night and really enjoyed it", but everybody was
terrified that the Germans would invade. There were plans to send many
of them to Australia but because of a kidney problem Frieda was not
considered and all such plans were abandoned after the sinking of the Arandora Star by a German U-boat while taking German and Canadian aliens to Canada on 2 July 1940. Her
baby, Grace Evelyn (known as "Evi"), was "born in a
wonderful maternity home in October" (the Jane Crookall Maternity Home
in Douglas). The men in House 18 collected 18/- for Kurt and he was
given an armed escort
to visit Frieda. She and her baby daughter were given a room of
their own.
A studio portrait of Kurt and
Frieda Munzer with their first child, Evi, (left) and a cartoon
drawn by one of the residents in House 18
"House 18 wishes Miss Munzer and her proud parents 'Masel Tow' " - and points out that Kurt's window has a badly drawn blackout blind! Courtesy of Baroness Henig
The women could not understand why they should not live with
their husbands in a mixed camp but the Commandant of the Rushen Women's
Camp, Joanna M. Cruickshank, indignantly said, "If our women can't be
with their husbands, why should you?" Eventually, mixed camps were created where husbands and wives could
live together and Frieda lost her freedom to wander at will but they
were able to live together as a family at Bradda Glen, Port Erin.
On their first day in the mixed camp Kurt met an old friend from his
primary school in Beuthen. Alfred Silberberg, the son of a wealthy
Jewish industrialist, and his wife Gerta escaped the Holocaust by
getting jobs as domestic servants in Leicester in 1938.
Like Kurt and Frieda they were interned as "Enemy Aliens" in 1940 but
since they had jobs to return to were released much
earlier. After interrogation Kurt and Frieda were classified as
"friendly aliens" but they were not allowed to leave until they
received an offer of a job on the mainland of Britain. They were
interned on the Isle of Man for two years.
Family life in Leicester Their friends, Alfred and Gerta Silberberg, were able to get Kurt a job doing war work, grinding lenses
at
The English Glass Co Ltd. in Leicester. The company had been saved from
bankruptcy by Josef Oplatek, a refugee from the glass producing area
of Czechoslovakia, and most of the male employees were foreigners,
mainly
glass workers from Czechoslovakia.
Frieda and Kurt could only stay with their friends for two weeks and
spent every
night looking for somewhere to live. That was not easy for foreigners
with a baby and no money. They never admitted to being Germans, always
claimed to be Dutch. After eight months in furnished rooms a friend
found them two unfurnished rooms (which were cheaper) on condition that
they left when their landlady's husband returned from the war.
Frieda learned English and obtained a job at a photographer's shop,
Fisher & Potter, working in the darkroom. They had to put up with
comments on buses about foreigners, who should be interned or shot.
They worked on Saturdays so could not attend the Synagogue which made
it difficult to meet members of the Jewish community in Leicester.
Frieda was very worried about her parents. In September 1942 all the
Jews in the Netherlands had been forced to live in Camp Westerbork before
being transported to the Camps. Frieda eventually received a long
letter via the Red Cross which they had written to friends in
Switzerland shortly before they were deported. They had known what was
coming and had given all their treasured possessions to Dutch friends
to keep for Frieda to collect once the war was over.
By then Kurt's widowed father was also living in Enschede and both
families, including Frieda's twelve year old half sister, Ruth Heimann, died at Auschwitz.
In 1943 a second daughter was
born and named Ruth after her aunt. Kurt and Frieda worked every minute
they could, saved every penny and in
1944 were able to borrow money from Kurt's boss for a deposit on their
first house (Otto L Hartheimer, a wealthy jeweller in Birmingham, also
helped) which they bought at auction. They
had intended to return to the Netherlands after the war but now
decided they would remain in England, the country where their two
daughters were born. VE Day was "a glorious time" which they celebrated
with friends and neighbours. In 1945 Frieda started her own
photographic business, her third, which she ran until 1964. The
photograph above left was taken in 1950 at "Foxy Hollow", a favourite
excursion for the children. Frieda
kept
in touch with Marie Neurath
who visited them while the children were growing up and brought them
copies of her illustrated children's books. Whenever she came the
conversation always turned to their escape from Holland on the Dutch
lifeboat and the debate amongst the passengers whether the time had come to take their own lives.
Ruth and Evi Munzer in 1954 Eve was born on the Isle of Man in 1940 and her younger sister in Leicester in 1943
Kurt worked at the English Glass Company for six or seven years before
he finally managed to get a job as a bookkeeper for a coal merchant. To
make ends meet he had two or three jobs, always as a book keeper. He
could not face having to start again, studying to become a chartered
accountant. They
were naturalised in 1947 and it was wonderful to visit Holland and
Germany
in 1951 travelling with a British passport. At Enschede they met by
chance their best friends who had survived by hiding in the woods with
their two children and being sheltered by brave Dutch farmers. They
were grey haired despite being much the same age as Kurt and
Frieda.
Proud grandparents: Ruth
Henig's mother-in-law, Grace Henig, with Ruth's parents and their first grandchild (left)
Kurt Munzer
on his 80th birthday (centre) and Evi with her mother and her husband,
Martin Peters Courtesy of Baroness Henig
Frieda insisted that their
daughters would continue with their education and not leave school to
bring in money to help support the family. Ruth Henig (neé Munzer), had
a successful academic career as a historian at Lancaster University and
wrote:
"My
interest in history was there from an early age but my interest in
modern European history was stimulated by my parents experiences. I was
able to dedicate one of my books, Origins of the Second World War,
to my grandmother Meta Goetz and Grandfather Oscar Munzer. And my book
on the Weimar Republic undoubtedly benefited from what they told me about
their early lives.
It took my mother a very
long time to recover emotionally from the loss of her family, if indeed
she ever did fully. On my father's side, things were a bit better. His
eldest sister and husband died in Stettin ghetto, but her two sons were
sent to England on the kindertransporten
in 1938 or early 1939, aged 10 and 8. They grew up in England and were
our only known relatives. They are still alive – married with children
and lots of grandchildren. My cousin John says that`s how they got
their own back on Hitler."
Left:
Kurt and Frieda flanked by their two daughters, their husbands and
grand children, celebrate the Golden Anniversary of their marriage at
Enschede
Right: Kurt Munzer on his 85th birthday with his two nephews, John and Wilf Altman, his sister's children Their parents died at Auschwitz but they were saved by the Kindertransport and grew up in Britain Courtesy of Baroness Henig
In 1989 she arranged for them
to celebrate their Golden Wedding Anniversary at Enschede where they
first met in 1938 and were married in the Synagogue the following year.
A Dutch newspaper arranged events for them and published their story.
Ruth described her older sister Evi who was born on the Isle of Man as "very sporty, school tennis champion,
brilliant footballer...and very close to my mother. I always felt my
mother s death affected her profoundly, and in some way contributed to
her own too early death from cancer. She trained as a primary school
teacher but retired once she got married and started her family." Ruth
and Evi each had two sons - no daughters.
Ruth Henig was raised to the peerage as Baroness Henig of Lancaster, in 2004.
Frieda Munzer was 76 when she died in 1996 but Kurt lived for another twelve years and was 100 when he died in 2008
Kurt Munzer with a friend in his garden in Leicester in 2002 when he was 94
*******
This account of the lives of Kurt and Frieda Munzer is based on interviews recorded in 1987 for the East Midlands Oral History
Archive which have been digitised and can be heard on the My Leicestershire
History web site maintained by the University of Leicester. To
hear Kurt and Frieda Munzer tell their own stories
on this site enter Munzer in the search box on the top right of
the page. I am grateful to their daughter, Baroness Henig, for
checking what I have written and providing additional facts and the loan of the photographs on
this page.
Kurt's
story begins at Beuthen, a town in Upper Silesia with a mixed German
Polish population which had been part of Germany for centuries. Kurt was born there
on the 1
August 1908 and was eleven when the peace treaty assigned Upper Silesia to Poland in 1919. Germany
protested and the treaty was modified to allow a plebiscite in 1921.
Kurt never forgot the hysteria in the area leading up to the voting. In
the end, the province was partitioned and Beuthen stayed in the German
part. It was a period of instability that stayed with Kurt for the rest
of his life. Beuthen finally became part of
Poland after the Second World War and is now called Bittum. 
Elfrieda Gurtz
was born in the small town of Hohenstein, sixty miles south east of
Danzig in East Prussia, not far from the Russian frontier. Her family
had lived in Germany for three generations and moved to East Prussia
around 1900. In 1945 the Germans were expelled from Hohenstein and
replaced by Poles, mostly from parts of Poland seized by the Russians. Hohenstein is now the Polish town of Olsztynek. 
Their friends, Alfred and Gerta Silberberg, were able to get Kurt a job doing war work, grinding lenses
at
The English Glass Co Ltd. in Leicester. The company had been saved from
bankruptcy by Josef Oplatek, a refugee from the glass producing area
of Czechoslovakia, and most of the male employees were foreigners,
mainly
glass workers from Czechoslovakia. 
