My name is Ernst Sondheimer and my experience as a refugee has shaped my whole life. It is the reason I am here to tell you my story. It is the reason I lived to reach eighty -two years and the reason I did not finish in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. It is the reason I am British and not German.
I was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1923. My family was Jewish but not observant; the Jewish aspect of things did not mean a lot in our family. My father and my mother mixed with well-to-do people and my father had a good business running a glue factory. We were a good bourgeois family with a nanny and holidays, and this provided me with a very comfortable childhood. I spent many of my early years with my best friend Günter. When Günter and I took the tram to school, we used to stop at the ice cream shop and buy the most delicious ice-cream. I have good memories of that time in Stuttgart, I was happy then. However, when I was ten, my grandparents moved into Stuttgart when it became intolerable for them to be Jewish in a small town. They felt life in a city would be better.
My father was a good patriotic German who had fought on the western front in the First World War. He thought ‘this Nazi nonsense’ would not last long. Then one day in 1935, two gentlemen came to our house and took my parents away for interview. These men were Gestapo and I believe this was a red light to my parents, a warning to them that they had to get out of Germany. My father decided England would be the best place for us to go since he had a branch of his business there. So in 1936 I was sent away to a small preparatory boarding school in Bournemouth. My mother accompanied me on the journey. I was very unhappy at that school at first. I was so homesick, I did not speak English, and I was not prepared for boarding school life. I missed my family and I missed home. But thank goodness I learn quickly, and soon I could speak English. The next year, my father managed to get the whole family out and everyone came to England.
In London my father developed his business, Sondal Glues which supplied glue for the Mosquito aircraft. It was hard for my parents to settle in London – they could not learn English as quickly as me and they had only friends among other émigrés. We stayed in London through the Battle of Britain and the blitz, sleeping in the corridors of the flats in Hornsey Lane because my parents said it was as safe as the tube station. Then the whole family lived in one room in Letchworth and every weekday I took the early morning train, the workman’s train, back to school in Hampstead where I was preparing my Higher Certificate.
I did well in my exams and went up to Cambridge, taking the entrance exam in December 1941, just when Pearl Harbour happened and the US joined the war. I wanted to study chemistry but the director of studies said ‘no, the country needs physicists now and you are good at physics’. I got a first, passing my final exams in December 1943. Most other students I had been with were called up in the summer of 1942. Later I found out that they were sent to Canada to work on the atomic bomb project, but because I was not a British citizen I could not be allowed to do secret work. In fact, even though nobody could have been more against Hitler than us, we were classed as enemy aliens.
The tribunal at the start of the war classed me category C, which stood for ‘friendly enemy alien’. In the summer of 1940, when all aliens were to be interned, I think my school might have written a letter for me because I was over16 but was not interned. My grandfather was sent to a camp near Liverpool. My father managed to get himself into hospital just at that time, so he was not interned. We were very fortunate as some people were sent away to Australia or Canada.
I stayed in Cambridge after graduating and worked in a reserved occupation under John Randall during the war. It was in Cambridge I met my wife Janet, an Anglican, historian and teacher. In 1960 I became a professor of mathematics at Westfield College, London, and I have been teaching for twenty years. I found teaching very enjoyable, in fact, more enjoyable than research. At that time, I also developed an interest in botany and in Alpine plants in particular. In many ways I have had a fortunate life. I have travelled in the Himalaya, Bhutan and South Eastern Tibet and had some wonderful experiences. If you have had good fortune such as mine you must be grateful. You must be grateful for your opportunities-- watch out for them, try to seize them.
After the war I became naturalised as a British citizen. I took an oath of allegiance to King George VI. Being British means a lot to me, more than if I just happened to be born into it. I think of myself now as English but European too. But I have kept my love of German classical literature and I know many of the Schiller ballads by heart.
After the war I went back to Stuttgart and I saw our house, still there in spite of all the bombing. I saw the vineyards, the forests, and the Jewish cemetery where two of my grandparents are buried. I looked up Günter’s name in the phone book and rang his number. I felt very emotional when he answered, when I heard his voice. We have been friends ever since.
