Casgliadau Arlein

Oral history recording with Ina Golten 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 1928 in Berlin, Germany. I had two brothers and I was the youngest child. We moved to a little town on the Polish/Czech border called Teschen, and we lived there for a bit and then we moved to Brinn. It was while living here that my parents decided to send us children on the Kindertransport. My oldest brother had already come to England, and I came by train with my youngest brother, Harry. We were supposed to go to an uncle of mine. When we got to the station we had a message to say that my uncle couldn’t have me, so I was placed in a children’s home. I was separated from Peter and didn’t see him for five years. I came from an Orthodox family, but the children’s home was not Orthodox, so apparently I wouldn’t eat, was poorly and cried all the time, but I don’t remember any of that. Eventually I moved in with my uncle and his family in Hampstead Garden Suburb, and I went to school in East Finchley. When war broke out we were evacuated to Lelant in Cornwall. I was eleven then and initially went to the village school, but when I was thirteen I went to the Bunce Court School, a well-known boarding school in Kent, which was fantastic. The school was founded by Anna Essinger, who had moved it to England from Germany during the 1930s, and most of the children there were Jewish and had come over from Germany. I made my first real friend there, and I got a school certificate and went back to London after the war. In 1946 we heard that my parents had survived the war and they were in Switzerland, and I went to Switzerland to meet them. That was not good. They wanted a ten-year-old child and I was eighteen. It was very, very hard because by then I wanted somebody to look after me, but I had to look after them, really. They came to England in 1948 and lived in Swiss Cottage. I lived with them then for about a year until Des and I married and came to Cardiff. My parents never talked about that time away from us. I mean, they had sent three children away but they never, ever mentioned it. I actually blamed them for sending me away, and that coloured my life because I didn’t want to send my son, Danny anywhere at all. Who knows if one is doing the right or the wrong thing? I joined Cardiff Reform with Des not long after I came to Cardiff. I was fond of Rabbi Graf and his wife but I’m not religious. Danny was bar mitzvah, and as long as my parents were alive I did everything my parents would have liked. They visited us a lot and I didn’t keep a kosher household, but I had to keep separate dishes for my mother, not so much my father. My brothers were very gifted. My oldest brother, Bernard, was a musician and conducted an orchestra in East Finchley. My other brother, Harry, was an artist. I’m not known for anything. I had a friend who said to me, “I love your home. Your talent is homemaking,- so that’s something.