My father was born one of five children in Łódź in Poland in 1920, into a very poor, Jewish family. He had no formal schooling and about the age of 11 he started to work as a tailor, and when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Łódź actually was one of the first ghettos, so right from early on in the occupation he was forced to wear, as all Jews were, the yellow star, confined to the ghetto and had to do forced labour.
In the early months of the Occupation they weren’t actually murdering any Jews, what they were doing was rounding up and hanging the active Communists and because my father had had a kind of a Communist association, he realised that things were going to get very dangerous for him. So in early 1940 he and his older brother escaped from the ghetto and went towards [1:06] which was the border crossing into the Russian-occupied part of Poland, and that would be the last time he’d see his family. They did get through to the Russian zone and he naively thought that things would be better and he’d find work, but of course it wasn’t, and what the Russians actually did was basically round up all the Jews and send them to Siberia in a prison camp to work in the salt mines there. The conditions were so severe, sub-zero temperatures, that his brother was one of many people who died around him.
In June ’41, the Nazis invaded Russia and the Russians released all of the Poles into what was the Free Polish Army, under British command. And he went and fought the rest of the War in the Middle East Campaign and eventually to Italy and he was decorated in a number of campaigns. And at the end of the War he went back to Poland to see what had happened to his family and there were no survivors from his family, his family had been murdered as part of the Łódź ghetto extermination, so there was no way he was going to stay in Poland.
All those in the Free Polish Army were offered naturalisation into Britain in about 1947. I believe he eventually came down to London, to the East End, and he started work as a tailor and he actually worked all his life in those sweatshops. In 1948 one of the people he worked with was my mother’s aunt and she introduced him to my mother and they were married in 1950 and they moved to where I was born, which was to Stepney. It was just two rooms, there was no bathroom or toilet. I was born in ’56. In 1962 we moved to Ilford. My uncle had bought a small house for my grandmother and we went to live in that house and compared with what we had been, it was luxury.
In the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, Redbridge and Waltham Forest, there was a very large Jewish community, one of the largest, I believe, in Western Europe, but most of that’s gone now. At home my parents used to speak Yiddish, but it was increasingly English that was spoken, so we had a perfectly happy childhood. I passed the 11+ and went to a grammar school, I went to LSE, university and I became a mathematician and I’m now a professor, something that gave them unbelievable pride.
I must have been about five or six I really first learnt about what happened to them during the War, because he used to have terrible nightmares, so often, more or less every night, you would hear him screaming at night. Growing up in the Hebrew school, there were very few who had a parent who was a Holocaust survivor. I had a strong thirst to find out everything about what happened during the Wars. I’ve never, incidentally, had the desire to go back to Poland and see the ghetto where his family perished, I don’t need to go there to feel and understand what it was about.
