When Saying Goodbye Was the Best Choice
Fifteen-year-old Lore Gotthelf boarded a train in July 1939 to escape Nazi Germany. Before leaving, bound for Great Britain on one of the Kindertransports arranged to rescue primarily Jewish children, she had to say goodbye to her parents.
“I remember vividly how my parents weren’t allowed on the platform,” Lore recalled in her 1998 oral history.
Her father, Sigmund, wrote Lore a note of encouragement shortly before she left: “Today is the tomorrow of which you were so much afraid yesterday — and all is well!” It was an expression he came across while learning English, she said. “He wanted to give me confidence that my life would be all right once I was gone from home.”
Lore recalls being terrified and lonely on that trip to England, which took her through the Netherlands, where she and the other children boarded a boat to England. There, she traveled to Northampton to live with the Quaker family who had sponsored her. After a few months, she moved to live with a different family in a rural area.
Her parents wrote to her and shipped two trunks that contained clothing, shoes, photographs, sewing notions, books, a typewriter, a camera, tablecloths, and other items. She said they didn’t want her to be a burden to anyone.
“My life was saved and I had food and shelter. I had enough from my parents. I needed nothing else. And I didn’t complain.”
When Lore was 16, she started working, first at factories and later as a nursery school teacher in Birmingham. “I enjoyed it very much,” she said “I loved kids.”
She attended a synagogue that had a club for refugees. At a dance, she met her future husband, Erwin Jacobowitz, who had also emigrated from Germany. “We had a lot in common so we became friends,” she said. They went bicycling, to the theater, and to the symphony.
Lore and Erwin married in 1944 at a synagogue in London. The ceremony was officiated by a rabbi of Lore’s former synagogue in Frankfurt.
We know the war’s end in Europe meant a lot to Lore because she had her picture taken for the occasion and made a greeting card commemorating V-E Day. While we don’t know to whom she sent the cards, they remind us of how people might take to social media to express jubilance today.
In 1953, Lore and Erwin, who had changed their name to Jacobs, immigrated to Canada, eventually settling in Hamilton, Ontario. They had a daughter and a son and several grandchildren.
By the time Erwin died, they had been married “52 good years,” Lore said. She died in 2019 at 94 — almost 80 years after her parents said goodbye.
Recalling how agonizing that decision must have been for them, Lore notes that they resolved to register her for the Kindertransport program after Kristallnacht, a November 1938 wave of violence against Jews in Germany coordinated by the Nazi regime that also involved destruction of synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses.
Sigmund, a ladies’ hat distributor who had served in the German army in World War I, was arrested during Kristallnacht, sent to Dachau concentration camp, and came home “a broken man,” Lore said.
“After Kristallnacht, life was really sad and that’s when they decided to send me” on the Kindertransport, she said. “It must’ve been a very hard thing for them to decide to send a kid away who’s 15 … a daughter, to send her alone into who knows where.”
Sigmund and Gertrud Gotthelf had hoped to reunite with Lore and had started the long process to emigrate from Germany to the United States. But the multiple steps and waiting lists kept them and many others from that goal.
Lore’s parents were deported in October 1941 to the Łódź ghetto in German-occupied Poland, and neither they nor Erwin’s parents survived the Holocaust.
From December 1938 until May 1940, the Kindertransport efforts brought about 10,000 children to safety in Great Britain.
Learn more about the fates of children during the Holocaust.
