ABSTRACT

On 31 January 1939, aged 16, I was granted ‘leave to land in Britain…on condition that the holder registers at once with the police and does not enter into any employment other than as a resident in service in a private household’. I had come from Paris where I had spent an adventurous five months as a completely destitute refugee from Austria after my country had fallen to the Nazis in March 1938. The Anschluss scattered my whole family: first my widowed mother went to England as a domestic servant, then, early in 1940, she and my younger sister left for Ecuador. I only saw my mother once again, for ten days in 1955, and I have never seen my sister in fifty years.