My uncle Raymond and his sister my mother Ruth arrived in Britain together on a Kindertransport in May and rapidly had to adapt to a new way of life, a new language, a new adopted family, a new country β and much more. They went through the war years not knowing that their parents were dead, but with each week that passed the chances of the family being reunited must have seemed smaller. Over a hundred letters β in German and English β from Raymond to Ruth, whom he nicknames as Ta, have survived, from to , with the vast bulk of them dating from his time in the British army.
Thanks to my brother Stephen for translating many of these fascinating letters. I did not realise this correspondence existed until his widow Ingrid passed them on to me in And quite a remarkable eye-opener they have proved to be. They flesh out detail of his life β which I have previously written about in another post on this blog. Much more so than anything Ruth wrote, they are full of raw emotion and contemporary detail.
Ingrid told me that Ruth had handed them to him during his final years: as his dementia took a grip he seems to have wanted to think about earlier stages of his life β these letters evidently helped the process of revisiting the past. At that late stage in life he made lists of events in his life, including exactly where he was during the war and in his military service. So the story may not yet be at an end. I hope that I can soon join Civil Defence.
It was either the Infantry or nothing, so I chose the former. I must report to Glasgow on 16 December. To begin with, I will just be in the General Service Corps. The danger is quite a big issue. Constant thoughts about the safety of his parents haunt him. This letter from 16 November suggests a conflict of opinions between him and his sister about the need to wage war:. The news from our parents is clearly not very positive, and we can be certain that at very least they are living through a very unpleasant time.
He is called up just before his 19th birthday. He is told that a man called Raimund Neumeyer cannot serve with the British army with such a German-sounding name, and so is handed a phone book and told to find another name.
