Max Heinz Nathan, a Jewish Holocaust Survivor
Creators: name: Project Team, Their Finest Hour
Publisher: name: University of Oxford
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 430304
subject: British history
classificationCode: 430308
subject: European history (excl. British, classical Greek and Roman)
classificationCode: 430316
subject: International history

description: My father, Max Heinz Nathan, was a Holocaust survivor from Berlin. Born on May 5, 1920, Max's parents, Werner and Grete Nathan, were determined to protect their only child by ensuring he acquired technical skills which could provide him with a means of survival once he left Germany. They enrolled him in a vocational training school as Jewish children were banned from schools. There Max learned plumbing, electrical work and welding. Max was also forced to do slave labour for an armaments firm. Max was one of roughly 100 men selected to refurbish Kitchener Camp in Sandwich, which was soon to house 10,000 German-speaking Jewish men. At just 18, Max left his parents and grandmother in Berlin, and arrived at Kitchener Camp in March 1939. He dug trenches and laid gas and water pipes for four straight months. As the war progressed, Max enlisted in the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps (AMPC), followed by the RAOC, and the REME. These German-speaking Jews were invaluable to the war effort and later dubbed by Churchill as the "King's Most Loyal Enemy Aliens". They wanted to show their gratitude to Britain for having taken them in and saving their lives.Meanwhile, back in Berlin, his parents and grandmother were deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp in December 1942. For six long years, Max had no news from his family, no idea if they were still alive or not. In 1945, he found out through the International Red Cross that his parents had survived. Barely. His grandmother Julie had been starved to death. He then sent his parents a photograph postcard of him in his Pioneer Corps uniform on the one side, and, on the reverse, he informed the censors he hadn't seen his parents in six years and that "his card would pass any X-ray".In 1946, he enlisted with the American occupying forces in Bavaria, in Intelligence, in order to be near his parents, who had been placed in a displacement camp for survivors. For two years, he tried to get them out of Germany but it was not to be. Werner had severe medical issues and no country would take them. Max never spoke about what exactly he did during those two years back in Germany, as he was sworn to secrecy for life. However, it appears very likely he was translating documents to be used in the upcoming Nuremburg trials. He had a very high IQ and German was his first language, both of which were requirements for this task.In 1947, Max's parents were transferred to an old age home for survivors in Wuerzburg, where they lived out the last few years of their lives and are buried in the Jewish cemetery there. In July 1948, Max met his wife Feige Mendzigursky, a Holocaust survivor from Leipzig, Germany, who had escaped with one sister on the Kindertransport in August 1939, at the coffee shop in the famous Cosmo Restaurant in Finchley Road. This was like a sanctuary for German-speaking Holocaust survivors. Max asked Feige (by then known as Fay) to dance, and three months later, they were married! Ironically, Feige's father, Peisech, had also secured a place at Kitchener Camp, and was the only other family member to survive. Max and Fay struggled penniless as a married couple. Max couldn't find a decent job because he hadn't been able to complete his education in Berlin. He suffered from depression, triggered by his anxiety for his parents and grandmother during those wartime years.When I was born in 1951, we lived in a slum bedsit in Maida Vale. Max was unemployed and he and Fay often went hungry so I wouldn't. Three years later, my sister Jacky was born. Max was still plagued with depression. He worked for a ladies’ coat manufacturer, who wanted to make him a partner. But Max didn't have the money for that, and the German government refused to loan him any money. And he still hadn't received the restitution money Germany had promised him. His parents in Wuerzburg were in the same situation, waiting for restitution money that never arrived. Eventually, Max became a life insurance salesman and things started to look up. We moved to the outskirts of London. However just seven years later, Max died suddenly of a coronary thrombosis. He was just 42.