Audio clip from an interview with Ellen Kerry Davis, a Jewish refugee who lives in Swansea, conducted by the USC Shoah Foundation on 6 May 1996: Their home in the synagogue is set on fire

Description

This audio clip from and oral history interview with Ellen Kerry Davis was recorded by the USC Shoah Foundation on 06 May 1996. In the clip, Ellen talks about the night their home in the synagogue was set on fire.

Ellen Kerry Davis - a short biography

Ellen Kerry Davis was born on 1 September 1929, in the town of Hoof in Kassel, Germany.

She grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family and her father worked in the family’s business (a Jewish butcher). The anti-Jewish laws of the Nazi government during the pre-war period barred the family from running this business and earning a living . Ellen’s home was seized by the Nazis and the family was forced to live in one room in the town’s synagogue. In 1937, when Ellen was eight, a group of Nazi youths burnt down the synagogue at night and attacked the family with bricks. They were rescued and hidden by a local non-Jewish family. Ellen’s father was imprisoned in the Dachau Concentration Camp but subsequently escaped and joined the Pioneer Corps and later lived in Australia.

On 30 June 1939, Ellen boarded the Kindertransport to the United Kingdom and was adopted by an elderly, childless couple in Swansea.

In December 1941, Ellen’s mother and six siblings (the eldest was aged 11, the youngest two) were deported to Riga and were shot and killed on arrival.

Transcript

And one, one night in the middle of the winter, my father must have smelled smoke and went outside and saw the synagogue aflame, with us in it. So, he managed to get all of us out - and my mother, again, pregnant and a babe in arms. And there we could see a group of Nazi youths with bricks in their hands. They were determined to exterminate us as well as the synagogue.

The synagogue burned down. And in the, whatever it was, with the fires going and the people shouting, some Jewish - some non-Jewish people got us away. And we were in our nightclothes and no shoes. And they hid us in an ice cellar, which in those days was a hollowed-out hill filled with ice - there were no such things as fridges.

We were - these people who lived in the big house put us into the ice cellar when there was virtually mass hysteria because they couldn't find us and they wanted to kill us. And we knew they wanted to kill us. But the rest of the day of that night is a complete blank. Actually, it was only four years ago that I saw this - the ice cellar. And I met the daughter of the people who saved us.

Interviewer: Now, how did you get - how were you saved?

Well, as I said, in this mass hysteria they smuggled us away from the fire, these non-Jewish people, and they hid us in the ice cellar...

Interviewer: Oh.

...until next day. And by next day, of course, the hysteria, which - when a group of Hitler Youths get together, they wind one another up, as we now say. And it's just one hysteric mob. And all they wanted to do was kill us.

Sources:

Davis, Ellen Kerry, Kerry’s Children (Bridgend: Seren, 2004)

USC Shoah Foundation, Ellen Kerry Davis, interviewed by Helene Elkus, video testimony, Visual History Archive, 6 May 1996
https://vha.usc.edu/testimony/14724?from=search [11 December 2023]

Depository: USC Shoah Foundation.

• https://collections.ushmm.org/search/ (link opens in new window)