Jonny Gould’s Jewish State

4: My Grandma Olga’s Holocaust story: From Hitler's Vienna to Birmingham's Freedom

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Episode notes

Dov Forman and her great-grandmother Lily Ebert have co-written a book, “Lily’s Promise” about her Holocaust story. But 35 years before, I recorded the same idea with my own grandma.

Grandma Olga’s recorded voice and when and where we recounted her life story will always be my most treasured episode.

This is her eyewitness testimony of leaving Nazi-occupied Vienna for a new and as yet, uncharted home in the UK.

She rebuilt her life in Birmingham where I grew up and where back in 1984, we recorded a chat on cassette in her front room.

At the time, she was 77 and I was just 17.

The motivation to record this way back then was to explain, to my as yet unborn children, who we are and how we got here.

Grandma began life in England as a 32-year-old housemaid in a faraway London suburb before meeting my fellow refugee grandpa at a friendship club in Birmingham.

They got married and lodged in an upstairs room next to Sutton Town's football ground. Eventually, they managed to buy their own home and set up a typewriter repair shop down the road.

I’m so proud of my grandma and grandpa, at how quickly they got themselves together in Birmingham after the disasters which befell their Viennese lives.

Their story is a constant motivation for me. The family history handed down to me was largely happy in outcome, except for the murderous loss of my great grandparents in a Polish death camp. 

Yet every single one of my grandparent’s brothers and sisters survived, fanned around the world to rebuild lives thousands of miles apart - but still close together in contact and spirit.

From Shanghai to Palestine, Nottingham to Vancouver, Chicago to Glasgow, Vienna to Toronto. And of course, Birmingham, where my grandma and grandpa arrived in September 1938 and April 1939 respectively. 

The story of Bela Guttmann, clubmate of my grandfather and great uncle in the legendary Hakoah Vienna FC who hid in a loft in Hungary to survive the war, made me realise that the comparative safety of my own family’s story was at odds with so many others.

As the Churchill movie, which dramatised the imminent invasion of Britain in 1940, my grandparent’s arrival in the UK wasn’t even the end of their escape from tyranny.

Listening to my dear grandma, who told me she ran her own exotic pet shop in Vienna in well to do 1920s society, only to become a penniless chambermaid in Northwood in the 1940s, inspires me to dig deep and accept whatever problems are thrown at me - and to climb back.

Jonny Gould's Jewish State is supported by Dangoor Education. (Picture: Grandma Olga Posaner and my mum, Yvonne Gould, taken in the back garden of their home in Birmingham Road, Sutton Coldfield in 1948)

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