I think I got married two years later (1946) , but we were still together. We had to change our job and we did some covers outside the town where we had to do some travelling but we coped with those things very well. And there were some other people very near us because Mrs Gibson had a habit sometimes to say at 9.00pm would you like to go out for a couple of hours and of course we never refused. First of all we were two of us and one gets used to walking in the dark with our torches. Of course the news from Germany got more and more difficult once Holland had fallen (1940.) So we couldn’t get any letters anymore. All what we had then was Red Cross messages which was really very little. We all kept in touch with each other so if one got a message we notified all the other ones that our parents were alright until in 1943 we all got a message saying that they were moving to Poland and they were moving away with great confidence in God. It was a very sad message and that was the last that we heard from them. By that time with all the atrocities and things one was almost numb with messages and it’s hard to explain how it really affected us. It was also very good that while we were working we were it took us all our energy and we were very busy doing our jobs and looking after ourselves. We had very little time to think about things. When you came home at night you were exhausted and some of the things did not register as much as they would have now if you lived a normal life. I only heard after the war from a lady that came back from Auschwitz ( Concentration Camp) who was in the same transport and she was a very efficient shorthand typist. When she arrived in Auschwitz they took her aside and she got into the office and this saved her and she gave us the report about all our parents, because it was my parents and all my fathers brothers and their wives, all went to Auschwitz. Only the children of every family was saved. And that’s why we have always been all very very close because we were the remainder of the family, except for the people in South Africa where the whole family managed to get out to South Africa.

## Pat Anson – Settling In

The food on the Isle of Man was very British which our landlady cooked – we were all dying for potato salad. Whenever we had to peel the potatoes we kind of pinched one or two potatoes and put them inside the gramophone and when our landlady went for the day to Douglas we took them all out boiled them and made some lovely potato salads. And of course some of us got (food) parcels, and there was one girl who got a lot of sausage sent which was absolutely delicious with our potato salad. For our tea we really had most of the time lettuce and something – we were all a bit tired of the lettuce and the girls in the house next door, they got for their tea always soups so in the end we decided that we would pass on our lettuces to them and they would pass on their soup to us so we all had good changes. It was a very pleasant atmosphere on the Isle of Man and the people were very considerate to each other. Eventually they (authorities) arranged a kind of Tribunal where every body had to appear and people were going to get released. The Tribunal was alphabetical, so with my name being Einstein before Irene Mendlick – so I came before and I came back to Bradford. We were very lucky that Mrs Gibson took us back possibly because she never had such good maids before, and she got rid of her other two English maids and took us back. We stayed there for another year when we really felt we had had enough domestic work and we joined the War Work.