Growing up between 1939 and 1945

When the war began I was one year old and living with my parents in London. My father was a German refugee from Hamburg and was interned in the Isle of Man. My mother came home one day and found his keys on the table — he had been detained; he was in the Isle of Man for several months and he didn’t speak about what happened to him. I think he suffered a lot. Eventually my father was released and joined the Pioneer Corps. My mother followed him around the country — initially to Cheltenham where I used to follow the soldiers training with my “rifle” (my spade), as they marched or paraded. When my father was called up he became naturalised and I started going to school with my mother to tell them of our change of surname — from Gruuberger to Greene.

I remember going to school with my Mickey Mouse gas mask, and once on the way home the sirens went off and I knocked on the door of a stranger’s house and asked to go inside: I stayed there for one hour and my mother was frantic that I hadn’t come home!

When my father came home on leave I didn’t know who he was. I said “Mummy, there is a soldier at the door”!

I remember my Uncle who was a warden, coming in at 6am and falling asleep on the couch — complete with his tin hat and boots! The house across from ours was flattened by a bomb and all the family were killed. Every time I visit the cemetery I see the huge obelisk memorial with all the names of the family engraved on it, and I realise how lucky I am to have survived intact with my family.

Some of my father’s family who were from Germany perished at the hands of the Nazis — we never discovered exactly what happened to them. A niece of my grandfather’s survived Auschwitz and Berger Belsen — she was 21 at the time of liberation.

I am now a councillor in Newcastle Upon Tyne and am Chair of the Holocaust Memorial Day Working Group, which we commemorate every January, to send out a message that all peoples should work together to support peace among all cultures and races.

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