Walter and Elizabeth Sharman Memorial ARchive

Walter Sharman

Click on the name above to access Walter's Story. Here is an excerpt from it :

Transcript:

Third, fourth, fifth, sixth generation or more, they’re descendants of immigrants, obviously. See, Sunderland goes back to middle of the Eighteenth Century, almost 250 years. So they’re not an immigrant community as such, not as many of the ethnic communities. I come across this sort of misconception, now and again people start off from researching or wanting to do something for ethnic members of ethnic communities in the area and somehow seem to think that the Jewish community comes under the same category, for the purpose of trying to help members of ethnic communities by applying the experience of the Jewish community, to some extent, if that is possible. I suppose each case differs. But, it isn’t quite so; the Jewish community goes back further. In some cases, in Sunderland, it’s probably the oldest in this area, its well over two hundred years, two hundred and fifty years. If you take a generation; thirty years, so it’s about eight generations, roughly. Newcastle…. the official date is 1830, that’s one hundred and sixty years now. There was a congregation foundation of the Jewish community here…1830. There was… there were prayer rooms hired and then there was a cemetery acquired, I don’t know whether you know about it…in Thornton Street. Yes there was something about it, now and again it comes up… Thornton Street. A very small cemetery, what’s left of it. But in 1838 the first purpose-built Synagogue was erected in Temple Street… was just around the corner from the cemetery and the history started from then onwards. That was the first manifestation of organized community. Jewish families have been living here in Newcastle earlier; there’s evidence before eighteen hundred. There were one or two. There are street directories and families with Jewish sounding names well before then. But, you’d better ask me w….

Elizabeth Franks

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Transcript:

Well I was born in June 1932 in Munich which was the first place of the Nazi movement and Hitler came to power in January 1933 when I was just a few months old, so it was a very difficult time starting, we were Jewish so that really made it difficult for us. My earliest days were lived under the direct threat of Hitler and the Nazis and obviously as a very small child I wasn't aware of the governing power. Life in Munich was very pleasant in the early 1930's, it's a beautiful town with a Town Hall and a glockenspiel with moving figures when the hour strikes and I always loved watching it…and also it was a great treat to go by tram from the sort of leafy suburb where we lived into the town and there were many fountains on the way with sparkling water, there was large shops with high escalators to ride on and a wonderful university that we passed and I was told I would go there one day, my mother always pointed it out to me and said "one day you'll go to university there" and you could see all the students and it was very lively. And we often visited cafés, you know sort of on the continent there's this big café life where I was treated to an ice cream and large portions of whipped cream which they thought was good in those days at the top of the milk. Often in the afternoon I was taken to a park, it's a natural park, not set out and it's beautiful and they called it the English Gardens and it was quite near our flat and it really was a nice park and in the evenings my parents and I frequently took a picnic supper to the local beer gardens and we used to have a table and brought this table and we'd set it all out and I'd play with the other children there and I watched with amazement as the waitresses carried quite large glasses of beer in each hand (?) and of course people drank it as well. Also the famous Munich Beer Festival, the Octoberfest was great fun, even for me as a child and I loved to go on the rides, it was a bit like the Hoppings here but more drinking. The entertainment was marvellous, the shows and there were huge spits turning the roast meat and that was a wonderful experience and I enjoyed it and we lived in a very pleasant block of flats with a quadrangle in the garden where I played with my little friends from the other apartments, most of them were Jewish.

Werner Mayer

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Transcript:

So if we start at the beginning. I was born in 1930 in Berlin, lived there with my parents and my brother and attended, well when I was 5 years old attended a Jewish day school in Berlin which was when the first signs of Nazi domination became evident. I came to school one morning and it was half burnt down with a Swastika flag stuck in the middle and that was the sort of life they were beginning to …..make us lead, in other words once I became 6 or 7 years old I became very much aware that one was under threat and there was a danger and one kept ones head down. While one was walking to school, one would disappear if one possibly could and there were incidents like being picked up from school and going to a coffee shop, my mother and brother and I like most families would as a treat and when we sat down and took our coats off and put our satchels on the floor and the waitress came over and said "Have you seen the sign?" and the wording of the sign was that Jews were not welcome. Now as children we didn't know what we had done and what we were responsible for, however, the humiliation was having to get up, put ones coats, you thought the entire world was watching and to walk out. There quiet conversations at home with the adults and low whispering, doorbells ringing late at night. Sometimes it was the Gestapo. They always seemed to be 7 ft tall with a long raincoat on enquiring where my father was and if my mother knew where my uncle was and they'd called at his house and he wasn't in and they'd called to arrest him. So as children it wasn't a very pleasant sort of memory and then I remember my mother saying that the Gestapo had called and said that our house was no longer our house and as from the beginning of next month we would be paying rent for it, and that was our own house which my father had virtually built himself so it was taken over by the State and we were forced to pay rent on the premises. My father had got word that on Tyneside there was a new trading estate, I mean Tyneside was a huge area of unemployed. The Jarrow March, e.t.c.The government built a trading estate in Gateshead, it's called the Team Valley Trading Estate and someone from this area, I think it was a councillor on Tynemouth Council had heard of the problems with Jewish industrialists and manufactures in general and there was no light industry, there was no history of light industry in the North East at all so they put up all these factories and they had nobody to run them. So my father had experience in industrial work and got an opportunity to come here and start a factory on Tyneside but he fled, I think he went to Holland and paid a farmer to take him out in the back of his hay cart across the border and of course after that there were frequent calls "Where's your husband?" and "When have you seen him?" and "Has he phoned?", etc, etc, etc. So he came here but he had no permit to bring his wife and 2 children to UK because first of all he had to prove that they wouldn't be a burden on the State but he couldn't do that because a) he couldn't speak a word of English, b) he had just arrived here himself and time was getting shorter in Germany. However, to cut a long story short, eventually my father got a permit to have his wife and children and the persecution things, there was the famous Crystal Night when they smashed all the Jewish shops and put the Star of David on clothes and employee was turning against employer and if you had a small shop selling haberdashery the woman who ran it for you said "as from now I'm in charge and you no longer have anything to do with it because you are Jewish and you don't rate anymore" Then there was the burning of the synagogues, the burning of the books. It was a State industry set up to….. genocide really, set up with the purpose of destroying. It wasn't only the Jews they were, I think there were Romanies they were against, there were ..... they started much earlier with people who had physical disabilities. They started casting and eliminating those because what they were looking for was the pure Arian, blond, tall, blue eyed race that would dominate the world eventually.

Sharman Archive

Walter Sharman

Elizabeth Franks

Werner Mayer