Casgliadau Arlein

Oral history recording with Rudi Montrose collected as part of The Hineni Project, an insight into the life and stories of a Jewish community in all its diversity. Hineni was a collaborative project between Cardiff Reform Synagogue and Butetown History & Arts Centre.

I was born in Berlin in 1924 and was an only child. We lived in the western part which was considered the better part of Berlin. My father was Romanian born and I know virtually nothing about his background – he may have been a deserter of the Romanian Army. This picture above my head is of my father’s grandmother who apparently looked after him. When my father fled Romania, he took a passport photo of her with him to Berlin and when he was able to afford it, he had it enlarged and then painted. This picture to me is like the Mona Lisa – it’s beyond value. My father had no formal education and became a businessman who worked in the tobacco trade, and my mother worked as a bilingual secretary for an import and exports company. When Hitler appeared on the scene in Germany, things became very difficult, of course. My maternal grandparents lived in Manchester and I had been over once before, when I was six, to get to know them better. I left Germany for Manchester in August 1938 and my parents followed in November 1938, a few weeks after Kristallnacht. Luckily my parents managed to get out of Germany on a Romanian passport. I think the force behind my parents coming to England was my mother. She said: “Either we go or we perish,” so I think it was the fact that I was already in this country that decided my father to come because he was against it. He didn’t know a word of English so the prospects for employment for him in England were absolutely minimal. He was a very proud man and that’s what he dreaded. My mother was British born, so when my father died shortly after coming to this country, my mother reclaimed her British nationality. When I was nineteen, and by that time a British subject, I was conscripted in 1943. I tried to impress upon the authorities that I was a fluent German speaker. In fact, my German at that time was better than my English but nobody took any notice until the end of the war when I was in Austria, and when someone found out I could speak German, they transferred me to the Intelligence Corps where I spent the last two years of my army career until I was demobbed in 1947. Photography was my passion and I’ve explored all over the world. I met my wife, Herta, soon after the war ended when she was staying in London for a short while from her native Holland. After she went back we decided to write to each other. She wanted to improve her English so I used to correct her letters and that’s how we got to know each other. We corresponded for eighteen months, and during that time we only met three times. We married on Christmas Day 1949 in the Orthodox synagogue in Enschede, Holland, where her father was a warden. We came to live with my mother in Golders Green for five years, which wasn’t very satisfactory, but we didn’t have two ha’pennies to rub together. I qualified as an optician in 1952, as well as Herta giving birth to twins. We moved to Cardiff in 1954, when I was offered a job at Hudson Howards Opticians which came with a house. Herta looked after our three children and was a wonderful housewife and mother, as well as involving herself in synagogue communal work. A remaining legacy of the Montrose family at Cardiff Reform Synagogue is a stained-glass window and a pair of candlesticks that came originally from my home in Berlin.