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: Why she teaches about the Holocaust

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 explains why she teaches about the Holocaust.

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

I will not sit still and let the past repeat itself - not for my grandchildren, not for anybody's grandchildren. I will do all I can, for whatever life God gives me, for whatever years I've got left, to teach as many children as I can. Because I now have the opportunity to get to children, something I've wanted to do for years.

I've only been able to talk about this for 10 years. But now I can get to the children, because I am the past. They are the future. And you must teach the future. You must teach about - you must teach the future about the past, so that the past must never repeat itself. Other people must not go through what I've gone through and what hundreds and thousands like me have gone through. Because everybody I know in the Kindertransport - they've all got a different story.

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)