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From left, Association of Jewish Refugees members Lili Freeman, Erich Reich, Sigi Faith, Henry Brook and Rolf Weinberg
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Son tells how parents who sent him to safety died in Auschwitz
Holocaust Memorial Day event hears moving account of Kinder Transport escape
IT is almost impossible to imagine the pain Mina and Zeigmund Reich must have suffered when faced with a heartbreaking dilemma – send your three sons, all aged under 10, to a country they have never visited before, or let them stay in Poland as the Nazis threatened invasion.
When the couple said their goodbyes in 1939, the decision would save their children’s lives, but they would never see them again.
The story of the Reich family was just one of many painful memories recalled at Belsize Synagogue, in Belsize Gardens, on Thursday, the annual Holocaust Memorial Day.
Now in his late 60s, Erich Reich, a charity tour organiser based in Highgate, barely remembers the day when as a four-year-old he travelled by boat from a Polish port, across the Baltic sea to land in the East End, where his brothers Ossie and Jacques had gone before him.
He reached London on August 29, 1939, to be met by workers for the Jewish Free School. His parents, originally from Vienna, were trapped in the Warsaw ghetto and their children were to hear only one piece of news from then again, via an uncle who received a letter through the Red Cross. It said they were in Auschwitz, where they were to become two more victims of the Nazi genocide.
Speaking at the Memorial Day event, Mr Reich, who escaped from the Nazis on the last ‘Kinder Transport’ ship, said: “I was so young I do not remember leaving Poland, so I hardly remember my parents.”
He was taken to Dorking in Surrey, where the Duke of Newcastle had given over Burchett House for the care of refugees.
There were six children and 10 families living there, and one non-Jewish family. They took him in.
His adopted mother and father were a Mr and Mrs Kreibicht, socialists from the Sudentenland who had fled when it was annexed by Germany.
“I did not know they were not my mum and dad,” he recalled.
His new family took him to Sunday School and church, but his Jewish identity was reaffirmed when he was 10 years old.
“I was playing outside my home when a teenager appeared and asked me if I knew where he could find the Kreibichts.”
Erich led the stranger inside – and it turned out he was Jacques, his older brother.
Others at the synagogue event included Rolf Weinberg, the highest decorated Jewish officer in General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Army.
He had fled his home in Westphalia to head for South America in 1938, and then came to Britain in 1941 and fought under de Gaulle’s command.
The synagogue was established by refugees from Germany and Austria in 1938 – and many of them still visit regularly.
Rabbi Rodney Mariner said: “Many of the people here are members of the Association of Jewish Refugees, and there are some survivors of the camps.
“The importance of the Memorial Day is to remember the past and hope we learn for the future.”
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