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Ilse Mayor - Nazi-survivor who fled to Britain
A 101 year-old woman labeled one of the first “refugees from Nazi oppression” by the British government has died from heart failure.
llse Meyer’s Jewish Communist family were forced to leave Germany when the Nazi’s came to power. She came to England on October 1, 1933, and lived with her husband Ernst, an accomplished composer, in Hampstead before settling in Parliament Court in South End Green.
With no permit to stay or work, both Ilse and her husband had to reapply to remain in the country every six months, and there was always the fear they would be expelled.
She was evacuated to Cambridge with her daughter Eva Simmons during the war, later returning to the borough to work as a translator and English and German teacher until she retired in her seventies.
With the end of the war, Ernst returned to Berlin to marry his second wife, leaving Ilse behind in England.
Ms Simmons, a 68-year-old retired BBC journalist, told the New Journal: “There was such a bond between us. She knew everyone that I know.
“I used to correct her English and she taught me German. I suppose it helped me develop a feeling for language.”
The “other love of Ilse’s life” was trade union official John Carter, who died suddenly in the 1970s when he was in his sixties.
A regular contributor to the Morning Star and the Camden New Journal’s letters pages, Ilse was an avid supporter of the Communist Party, the Ethical Society and the Humanist Association.
Paying testimony to her mother’s strong personality, Ms Simmons recalls how she had fallen two weeks before her 90th birthday but refused to see the doctor until a few hours before her party.
Despite discovering her leg was broken, she had the party as planned but needed a walking stick for the rest of her life.
“It was so typical of her determination to carry things through. She was determined to live to be 100. She was such a strong person,” said Ms Simmons.
Isle’s move to a Cambridge care home came only on the insistence of her daughter when in 2006 she was diagnosed with a heart condition.
“She would walk everywhere, lugging her trolley on and off the bus and up and down the steps in Parliament Court. I think that’s what kept her going,” said Ms Simmons. “She was not just a little old lady. She was a very special person, courageous, intelligent, sometimes difficult but very loving. She adored her family.”
SARA NEWMAN |
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