Remember how we were tormented

Jan 5 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

Liverpool is this year playing host to the national Holocaust Memorial Day. Emma Pinch reports

LATER this month, visitors to Liverpool’s town hall will be greeted by a mountain of old spectacles.

They’ll be a real mixed bag of misty Jack Duckworth specs, edgy tick-shaped frames and discreet steel rims.

What each of the 130,000 pairs does have in common, however, is a personal inscription by the owner, and that each and every pair has been lovingly tweaked into position to form a sculpture.

Respectacles, as it is called, will be everything opposite to that other heartbreaking avalanche of spectacles, made of those ripped from their bewildered owners nearly 70 years ago.

It was commissioned as part of national Holocaust Memorial Day, to help people stop and reflect on an atrocity which reduced 10m lives to mere piles of shoes, jewellery and eye glasses.

For Kay Fyne, whose parents were killed in a Nazi death camp in Poland, the event fulfils a plea made by her mother.

She last saw her mother and father amid the smoke and bustle of Frankfurt train station, when she and her brothers and sister were bundled off to safety on August 26, 1939.

“Should we not see each other again in this life, I will say goodbye,” wrote Gretel, in a secret letter stowed away with trusted Christian neighbours. “Pray for us, remember us, and tell your children how we were tormented to death.”

“People should know about the Holocaust,” nods Kay, who settled in Liverpool with her husband, Norman.

“Look what went on in Rwanda, not the same scale but absolutely dreadful. We’ve got to learn to live together, whatever faith we are.”

Kay grew up in a small town called Bad Neustadt, in Bavaria, with her leather merchant father, mother, three brothers and sister. It was a loving and comfortable upbringing. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, she felt her world shrink as the Nazis systematically stripped Jewish people of their rights.

“You couldn’t do this and that and they closed down all our shops,” remembers Kay. “We had a violin teacher who couldn’t come to our house because we were Jews. We couldn’t go to the swimming pool. I was just 13 and didn’t understand much. But I was always aware of having to keep separate from other people.

“The first time I saw a Nazi, it was through the window of our home. I thought he looked funny in his brown clothes, black leather boots and strange baggy trousers. I asked my mother who he was and she pulled me away from the window. ‘If you see anyone dressed like that, don’t go near. On the pavement or the road, keep away, don’t talk to them.’ I remember that very clearly.”

The brooding menace growing around them exploded into violence on November 9, 1938 – Krystallnacht.

“When we came home from school, there were lots of people shouting and we were frightened to go into the house,” recalls Kay in her clear, youthful voice. “Some of our friends were taken to Dachau. My memories are very vivid. I remember people saying, try to get to America, try to get to Italy. They must have heard stories and they knew it was going to get worse. But my father left it too late to get out.”

Kay was child 9,556, out of 10,000 children taken in by Britain, on the last train to safety. Her father had arranged for them to be “sponsored” by “Uncle” Maurice Barton, who owned the Carreras cigarette factory in London.

Her mother’s and father’s strained but reassuring faces as they kissed their children goodbye are etched on Kay’s memory.

“They took us to the train station in Frankfurt and said, ‘we will see you in four weeks or five weeks’, and we believed them,” she says quietly. “It was the last time we saw them.”

In England, they became boarders at a Surrey refugee school, paid for by their benefactor.

“We had a letter in 1942 telling us about their lives. They could send 25 words. They said that everything was taken away from them and they couldn’t do anything. They had to scrub the streets.

“We were hoping we would see them again. When the war finished, my oldest brother made enquiries and found they had gone somewhere in Poland, to the Izbika concentration camp.”

Kay trained as a dressmaker, then moved to Israel, where she met and married Norman in 1948, and they eventually settled in his native town of Liverpool, where they ran a bakery. She’s now a doting grandmother of four and lives in Mossley Hill.

She’s been back to Germany several times, but the ghosts are still there. She won’t be going again, she says. The past is not as divorced from the present as some people like to think.

“The younger people are very nice and couldn’t do enough to help us.” She adds softly: “I couldn’t look older people in the face, that’s all.”

emma.pinch@dailypost.co.uk