My family's wartime experiences

At the start of the war in 1939, Ruth Zoltobrodzki was 11. Ruth was born in Schwerin, Germany, but she was stateless. The family fled to Birmingham in November 1938 when she was 10. She attended a Jewish primary school, and had hoped to go to grammar school the following year, but her English was not good enough to take the entrance exam, so she had to stay on for another year. At the start of the war, the school was evacuated to Coalville, a small mining town in Leicestershire. From 1941 to 1944 she attended a commercial/secretarial college in Birmingham. In July 1944 she was employed as a shorthand typist. She later became a secretary, taking O Levels at evening classes about 10 years later.

Her parents, Josef Zoltobrodzki and Pessa Kaczka, were married in Poland in 1918 but, because of the antisemitic environment in Poland, left for Schwerin shortly afterwards. Josef later refused to return to serve in the Polish army, so his citizenship was revoked by the Polish government, and he became stateless, as did his wife and children, even though the children had been born in Germany.

Josef was a Schneidermeister (master tailor). In 1938, during Kristallnacht (now known in Germany as Pogromnacht), the tailor's shop was wrecked, but not the flat that the family lived in, on the first floor above the shop. Josef and Pessa were then interned by the Nazis. Ruth, her sister Hella, 16, and brother Ben, 18, were left behind at home. Pessa was allowed home to look after her children, while the Nazis took Ben and released Pessa. All these experiences must have been terrifying for the family. Fortunately, Josef's brother Jack had left Poland for Birmingham in the early 1920s, and had already arranged the paperwork for the family to come to Britain as refugees. Because of this, and the fact that they were not German citizens, they were released by the Nazis and instructed to go to England from Hamburg on a British cargo ship.

During the war Josef worked as a self-employed tailor. Because he thought the surname Zoltobrodzki was too difficult for his potential customers, he traded under the name Josef Joseph. His brother Jack had already changed his own surname to Bentley (after a road he walked down to get to work). Ben was the only one of Josef's family to change his name by deed poll to Joseph. Ben joined the RAF and served as a radar operator in Malta and elsewhere.

Josef's sister, Bella Rivka, and Pessa's sister Ryfka and their five brothers (including Wolf, Mosek, Laib and Joshua), together with their families, who had all stayed behind in Poland, did not survive the holocaust, apart from Joshua's son Avram. Some have been traced to the Lodz Ghetto, before being transported to concentration camps. However, two of their cousin's daughters were sent to Norway as children, and survived the war. They, and Avram, lived in Israel after the war.

Ruth's sister Hella joined the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women's branch of the army). She used to tell the story of her first day, when she was posted to Anglesey. She was told she would be a waitress in the officers' mess, and she replied "I'm not waiting in anybody's mess!" She eventually worked in the payroll section and was promoted to sergeant.

Ruth married Louis Goodkin in 1948. Lou was born in Birmingham. At the start of the war, he was a pharmacy student, which was a reserved occupation. He was articled for 3 years from 1938, but said he no longer wanted to stay at home, so he volunteered for the army in 1942, aged 19. He never talked much about the war. He served as a tank wireless operator in the Royal Armoured Corps. He arrived in North Africa in 1943 two days after the campaign there ended, and went on to Italy, including the Battle of Monte Cassino. He was in three tanks that had been hit. The only story he told, which clearly upset him, was of being in a field ambulance with a lieutenant who had a shell embedded in his abdomen. The driver realised they were behind enemy lines, so they all got out and ran. Unfortunately the lieutenant never made it. In 1946, Lou was in the British Army of the Rhine. Sometimes he had to act as a translator as he could speak some German, but he was actually more fluent in Yiddish - on one occasion he said he couldn't remember the German word for beans, only the Yiddish! His medals were the War Medal, Defence Medal, and Italy Star. After the war he completed his qualification as a pharmacist - not that surprising, as he had been articled to his oldest sister's husband; his next-door neighbour (who later married one of Lou's cousins) was also a pharmacist.

His parents were Joseph Goodkin and Rose Chaikin, who were born in what is now Belarus, and fled from pogroms to come to Britain, Joseph in about 1902, age about 20, and Rose with her family in about 1898, age about 11. Joseph had renounced his Russian citizenship, but never applied for British naturalisation. They were too old to serve in the war, but ran a kosher butcher's shop in Birmingham. Lou's elder brother David worked in Intelligence, a fact that did not come to light until a long time after the war. He was apparently recruited because he was fluent in German and good at cryptic crosswords. He was in North Africa at the same time as Lou, but had been given the rank of Squadron Leader so that any Intelligence orders would be obeyed. However, this meant that the two brothers found it difficult to meet up, because officers were not allowed to fraternise with other ranks!

Ruth's sister Hella married Rolf Daltrop in 1950. Rolf was born in Hamburg in 1914 and came to England at the start of 1939. He worked for an engineering firm in the West Midlands from March 1939, and was granted exemption from internment in 1939. Despite this, such was the fear of possible foreign spying at the time, he was one of many German citizens detained as enemy aliens in July 1940, and briefly interned on the Isle of Man. Jewish and Nazi prisoners were frequently detained alongside each other, leading to intolerable situations. Rolf was one of about 2,000 Jewish refugees sent to Australia on the notorious ship Dunera, where in total over 2,500 prisoners were shipped in squalid conditions, together with 300 guards, in a ship whose normal capacity as a troopship was about half of this. He arrived in Sydney in September 1940. He was later classified as a"refugee alien" and served as a lance corporal in the Australian Army from 1942-46. He acquired Australian citizenship, but returned to Britain in 1947.