Mom's Memoirs:

...in 1933 there was serious discussion of whether I should stay with them [Aunt Franka and Uncle Tramer] (Hitler situation). Inquires were made about school etc but the plan was not carried out

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In January 1936[1] I was sent to a Jewish Boarding School in Brighton, England. The reason for that was that in England you could take “matric” (matriculation) at 16 ; You took that “matric” for the University of your choice, and if you passed you were automatically accepted at that University. I took mine for the University of London, and passed “with honors” (top 10 %) (very much to the surprise of our headmaster who predicted my failure). hence the U of Geneva had to waive their age restriction (minimum 18 years) and admit me. They called it a “dispense d’age” . By all accounts I looked barely 16! The main purpose of this exercise was to save school years, the downside was that my preparation in math and the sciences was miserable and then I opted for Chemistry as my major.

The choice of a Jewish boarding school was not accidental: we heard about it from a couple of girls in Berlin who went there, and we knew that the school wanted to help Jewish kids to get out of Germany: There were restrictions in Germany on the amount of money you could transfer abroad and this school helped us by accepting the amount we could transfer as full payment, even though it was not! Aunt Franka sent me pocket money.

The school, “Aryeh House School” was pretty crazy: it was an experiment in co-education, but essentially boys and girls were kept apart except for classes, the buildings even were a block away from each other. The headmaster was not married, he had his mother “Madam” with him (she ruled the kitchen) I believe he was much younger than we thought, because he was bald he looked older; the ruling power was “Matron”, at least for the girls; I don’t really know what she was; a nurse? I think my parents were under no illusion what the school was like, but they did prepare us for the exams, and since I passed them the purpose was accomplished. I think I have not mentioned yet that it was supposed to be an orthodox Jewish school, although the staff were all non-Jewish; most of what I know about Judaism derives from that experience. The Sabbath was strictly observed, we went to Services at the Synagogue every Saturday morning, we kept every holiday ,(with the minimum ritual we could get away with.) On Yom Kippur we (the Seniors) were supposed to fast, but there was no supervision in Schul, so four or five of us simply took off and went to a tearoom for something to est! The rebels were mostly the kids from Germany, the English ones conformed; but then there were also a few girls from Palestine – they were different from all of us. I really never heard much about the school any more, nor from my classmates; there was just one guy who I know of (from Breslau of all things) who ended up at the University of Dublin and became a physician. (I tried to google him, but without success, he may have died years ago).

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My father was an incurable optimist and was confident it would all blow over! But by January 1936 he felt uncomfortable enough to send me to England. English had been my first foreign language in school (starting in fifth grade) and with the help of private tuition for a few months in the fall of 1935 my English was good enough to be able to continue school work in English. Even though there were a number of German kids in the school we did speak English most of the time. There were two or three girls from Israel in the school, Palestine in those days, British Mandate, but as far as I remember these girls were “Sabres”, born there, I don’t know where their parents came from. I think one of them was in my Senior class. I hated the school, never made any friends there, except one exceedingly ugly, but nice, boy who came from Breslau (turned out Dad knew who they were, but not much more) and he later went to Dublin to study Medicine, but after the war broke out I did not hear from him any more either . His name was Heinz -nickname “Moppel” – Scheyer [2]. One of the oldest girls was Hungarian. I seem to remember that being older than any of us she had some special privileges. The school was simply an escape route, the principal (and owner?) was a Mr Eliassoff, bachelor, bald-headed and probably much younger than he looked, whose mother lived there and sort of supervised the kitchen; she was known, and addressed as “Madam”.“Matron”, the school nurse, was responsible for our physical well being,. I remember the cure-all was gargling with potassium permanganate solution which colored everything purple. When I had the misfortune to contract German Measles, a childhood disease which one had to live through in order to gain immunity (nowadays practically disappeared due to immunizations) and which I had escaped in the early school years when most people got it (I had had chicken pox and whooping cough – Dad had had Scarlet Fever!) we. i.e. 4 of us, one of us a much younger girl, were put into splendid isolation: nobody but Matron was allowed in the room, which was insulated with a curtain soaked in disinfectant fastened to the door; toilet facilities were chamber pots! Quarantine: three weeks to the day. I was the last one in the room (last one in, last one out); the day I was released I first had to take a bath in permanganate,(can’t remember what they did with my clothes, we wore school uniforms), and then I was sent to a little park opposite the school – it was fenced in and the school had a key to it, (don’t remember who it belonged to and what it was used for) for “airing”. After several hours of that I was considered aired enough to be reintegrated into the general population!

As I mentioned the sole purpose of the boarding school stay for me was to cut short the number of school years before I could go to University (there is really no equivalent to “college” in Europe – except maybe Oxford and Cambridge) In order to accomplish that I first took the Junior Cambridge (I think that was the name) Certificate in mid-summer and then the London University Matriculation, which is actually a University entrance exam. This was scheduled for mid-January 1936 if I remember correctly. When I was going home to Berlin for the summer vacation, the headmaster protested, claiming that I needed every available minute to prepare for the exams, but I went home anyway! This last term or semester was not quite as unpleasant as the previous one: we were the “Seniors”, had classes in what was the “sunroom” a small bright room, and were kept pretty busy with home work and were entitled to some privileges, like “free walk”

I can’t remember how often we went to the beach, in plain view from the school, but it was the same rocky shore as most Channel beaches. We did go swimming, ever so often but had to wear school bathing suits!! They were NOT designed for girls with developing boobs, and even though we were supposed to have those school suits for “distinction”, I can assure you there was nothing distinguished connected with them. They were one-piece, of course, pure wool, the bottom was blue and the top blue and white striped, there may be a photo somewhere. I can’t remember what the supervision was, sure don’t remember a staff member in a bathing suit, but there must have been some one around. In a black one-piece suit I suppose

Although this was a Jewish school, orthodox to boot, only one staff member was Jewish. A nice young woman, I vaguely remember her looks, but neither her name nor what she taught. For very many years I did not remember ANYTHING about the school, repressed memory, but now I can remember some. Saturdays we went to Synagogue in the mornings . “in line” i.e. two by two; the girls were upstairs with the women and no-one seemed to care or know how much attention we paid. The boys downstairs with the men. I can’t remember seeing the “head” in Shul. Saturday night, we went to the movies in town, always a double feature with an intermission. I think that was the highlight of the week and I saw many good movies, which with some luck can now be seen on TCM! Otherwise Saturday was awful, because we were not allowed to do anything except read (no writing!!) Radio was not available to us. When Edward VIII abdicated we sat on the back stairs, trying to listen to the radio which was playing in the headmaster’s office. Sundays were bad too, because the general population observed Sundays pretty strictly, so we were not supposed to be too noticeable. I think we were allowed to play tennis and cricket on our playing fields, neither one very delightful: tennis was on lawn, very different from the surface I was used to, and cricket is just about the most boring game ever invented (luckily the Americans converted it into base ball): a game can take as long as two days! I seem to remember sitting most of the time on the grass, with not much to watch… I seem to remember that we also went to an indoor skating rink, where you skated around and around to music; I suppose you were supposed to dance, but my skating was not that advanced; my ankles always were somewhat weak,.my parents made me go skating i.a. after the polio as another form of exercise; I owned a pair of skating boots with skates attached (in my younger years I had skates that you attached to any kind of boots and tightened with a key). In Germany we had skated either on frozen lakes or watered down tennis courts, but in Brighton they had a proper rink; that did not make the sport more attractive to me but I went, because that excused me from other activities, such as a walk “in line”. Strange, how vague ny memories are: seems that we occasionally could go shopping, because I remember Marks & Spencer? (A pickpocket stole my watch there! It had come undone and I could not fasten it because I did not have a free hand, so I slipped it in the pocket of my macintosh and it was gone! It was the silver one with the little roses my aunt had given me for my eighth birthday! Can’t remember when I got the next watch…

Also we sometimes got to go on the Pier. There were two piers. if I remember correctly: the Palace Pier and the West Pier (??) They had amusements on one of them. In the summer Brighton was quite a tourist attraction. The “front” was very pretty, several walks at different levels, one was a real lovers’ lane, quite an attraction for young teens who regaled in disturbing necking couples!

The way I am writing this it sounds like the school was very poorly organized, but I believe this is how it was, in fact the powers-that-be were quite incompetent as I remember them. One day one of the Palestinian girls, 16 years old or so, (looked older) had an attack of hysteria or something which ended in fisticuffs with the headmaster! A very dramatic event, I think eventually she got locked up in a room by herself… Everybody wrote home about it[3], many wanted to leave., parents wrote letters.. In the end I think the thing just petered out… Yet seventy years later there’s still a bad aftertaste! However, the goal was accomplished! I went home immediately after the exams results were not known until six weeks later, and the head, being absolutely sure that I would flunk (why??), admonished me to be sure to study while I was at home since I could take the test again in x number of weeks (forgot when). In those days the results of the London matric were published in the newspaper; also you got a letter in the morning mail (three deliveries a day in 1936!); it was a skinny letter if you had flunked and a fat one, with all the registration info for the University if you had passed (that usually came with the second mail). Memory again a bit flaky, but fact: I did NOT get the skinny letter, could NOT find my name in the paper, until I looked in the “First Division”, the top 20% of the results; well, there are I was… the only one from my own school. (I think the only one ever from the school!) . I was alone at home, my mother was out shopping and I remember how excited I was, especially with no-one at home to share the excitement with! Evidently another little drama played out at the school: head looked at the paper, did not see my name and muttered that that’s whate he had expected until a kid yelled: “her name is there in First Division”. Evidently the head, thinking it was a very poor joke was just about to hit the kid when he looked himself! He was so flubbergasted that he picked up the phone and called Berlin (International calls in those days were still quite an event!) to congratulate me! Good Bye Aryeh House School, I never went there again, never saw the head again, never had any desire to. The school later moved to Hove, don’t know whether or how long it continued in existence. I googled it, but could not find anything about the school: however there was info abot the town that was all new to me: evidently the famous piers have gone, the West Pier demolished completely, the Palace Pier was cut in the middle during the war to prevent enemy landing…

So much for my resurrected memories of my boarding school days. O yes, I did not mention that we were FOUR girls to a room, little privacy as you can imagine; I don’t even remember the room mates. One girl was a bit younger I think and had an older brother at school, another one was terribly afraid of thunderstorms; she would try to crawl into bed with someone and I made sure it wasn’t me.

If we had a visitor the visitor was allowed to take us out of school for the day; I remember two such occasions. The first was Eva David and her mother; they lived in London at the time and I had looked forward to be able to see them ever so often, but that was not in the cards ....

After this long diversion (Eva was supposed only to have been mentioned of one of the two visitors I had in boarding school) I come to visitor #2. Uncle Julek

Notes:

1. Mom wrote Aunt Franka from Berlin on January 28, 1936, that she was leaving in the morning (the 29th), and "was looking forward to it."

2. There is more about the Scheyers in a Dublin holocaust memorial: "Dr Ernst Scheyer was born in Silesia in 1890, to a liberal Jewish family who owned a grain business. He fought in the First World War, and was awarded the Iron Cross. He later studied and attained a PhD in law. He married Marie Margareta Epstein and, together with her and their two children, Heinz and Renate, lived a comfortable life. He built a successful legal practice in Liegnitz, becoming an active and respected member of the local Jewish community."

3. Mom's note home, followed by a long letter about the incident, are a couple of the letters preserved. It gives the girl a name: Rhona Salant.

Notes:

I did a blog post about Aryeh House which includes a photograph, and memories from other students.

Notes:

I put this here only because of the timing. While I have no idea who either Gavril or Rosa Bureva (Burevoy?) were, it would seem that Mom's father was getting another contact in London before Mom left for there. Also bemused about a card written Russian sent from Paris to Berlin about a person in London! Also, why was this kept?!