In 1942 Bertha Bracey received the OBE for her work for refugees.
In March 2010 the first ever recognition of Britons who saved the lives of Jews and other persecuted groups during the Holocaust was bestowed by the Prime Minister. The awards were the first to recognise the acts of civilians who showed extraordinary acts of courage during the Holocaust in order to help their fellow man.
The award is a silver medallion inscribed with the words 'In the Service of Humanity'
It was posthumously awarded in 2010 to Bertha Bracey (1893-1989), a Quaker, who made a large contribution to the rescue of victims of Nazi oppression.
Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem and a British university are to give the first recognition to British Quakers who saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust. The initative comes after an eight-year campaign by a 79-year-old Jewish refugee.
Jack’s parents were boirn in Galicia, Poland. Poverty was extreme. In that area 5,000 Jews died each year through starvation. Many emigrated to Germany to live with other Jews with whom they shared a common language. He was born there as one of three children. After the death of his mother through a miscarriage he was placed in an orphanage who, after Kristalnacht, organised the their emigration on the Kindertransport.
When 14 he got a job as an apprentice with a jeweller in Henley on Thames. After a year, following a government edict to close gem factories he got another job producing ‘striker pins for torpedoes. After the factory was bombed he worked as the assistant to the mechanical engineer at a subsidiary of J Lyons. He took the RSA (Royal Society of Arts) examinations in mathematics, physics and technical drawing. He loved technical drawing and was desperate to become a draftsman and found a temporary job in a drawing office.
After the war he completed a Degree and a Ph.D. in Mathematics.
This is from a letter written by Sir Richard Attenborough to Sydney Samuelson
You asked me to let you have some gen about my two adopted sisters. My father chaired a committee when Principal of Leicester University College devoted to bringing Jewish refugees out of Hitler's Germany. In a large number of cases it merely meant housing them for a relatively brief period of time while they obtained visas to go to relatives in either the United States or Canada (this applied particularly to children). My mother went to London to collect two girls whose father was one of the medical officers for Berlin. They arrived back home, Irene aged 12 and Helga 9, the former with a dreadful nervous mannerism and the latter almost covered in sores.
It was mutually agreed that the two girls should remain with them for as long as the war lasted and until they could rejoin their family. This would mean that they now thought of themselves not as a family of five but as a family of seven.
This devotion has lasted for over 50 years
Monday 1st December 2008 marked the seventieth anniversary of the first train carrying Jewish children away from Nazi persecution to leave Berlin.
Quakers, who played a key role in this evacuation, commemorated this anniversary with an event at Friends House in London, bringing together survivors and families who cared for the children.
Quakers were involved at all stages in the Kindertransport. In London they joined Jewish delegates in persuading the government to relax immigration requirements, making it easier to evacuate people from Nazi Europe and accompanied children on the long journey to safety and many families and Quaker schools provided homes. Click here to go to their stories
Following a harrowing time my mother managed to procure a transit visa for herself and my father to go to Palestine via Great Britain. We all traveled on a cargo ship and arrived at the London Docks the night of 30th August 1939. As war was declared on 3 September, we did not continue our journey and Britain became our home.
Twins, born in Germany in 1933 they have written a very detailed account of their increasingly hard life in Germany until they managed to escape a few days before war broke out in 1939 thinking that they would be going to relatives in the USA. They arrived in Liverpool Street Station, London with hardly anything, unable to speak English and no one to meet them Representatives of the Jewish Refugee Committee came and put us up in a hotel.
Our parents had received a loan for permission to enter England. We moved to Chiswick, where a small private school accepted us free of charge. Unable to speak to anyone. We were soon in tears, a girl who could speak some German came to our rescue. This started a friendship, which still lasts .
We moved to Eastbourne where my parents were, officially, not allowed to work as we were swaiting for transport to America. We soon made contact with other refugees and welcomed at the locaal Baptist church who welcomed Jewish refugees and provided afternoon teas and a meeting place. Two years after the war ended they held a reunion in London of those they had helped. Shortly afterwards my father was interned with other Germans and Austrians living along the South Coast to counter the fear they could assist enemy aircraft by shining torches. We then moved to London with our mother.
We should have been allocated a boat to the USA but the authorities at Bloomsbury House thought it too risky, especially with young children. Many of the ships crossing the Atlantic were torpedoed and civilian traffic was eventually stopped. Eventually we were both accepted to Oxford and in 1948 we became naturalised. On being called up for National Service we became officers in the British army.