My grandfather, Manny Freeman, was an amazingly generous man.
A penniless refugee, he came to Britain at the age of two after fleeing with his blind mother and older brother from the grinding poverty and relentless persecution of turn of the century Romania.
Once settled in Nottingham, Manny grafted his way from penury to success — a trajectory experienced by many of the Eastern European Jews who sought sanctuary in this country.
At the age of 12 he left school to work on the market stalls. By the time I was born, 46 years later, he was proprietor of two ladies fashion shops and a factory, owned a Bentley and was comfortable enough to pay for my brother John and I to attend Uppingham, a public school in Leicestershire. My grandpa wanted us to have the best — there was no limit to his charity.
Yet though I remain enduringly grateful for my first class education, I remain even more proud of the chance my grandfather`s generosity gifted to another young boy: a Kindertransport refugee named Harry Kornhauser.
To this day, Harry, now 89, still talks of the debt he owes to my late grandparents. In the year that marks the 80th anniversary of the Kindertransport, it’s especially poignant to hear the testimony of this elderly gentleman — one of the 10,000 Jewish children brought to the UK to escape Nazi Germany.
Indeed, when Harry recounts his story, I often think of the astonishing disparity between the way he and I both reacted to leaving our loving families at such a tender age
Now living in London, Harry was born in Germany and still remembers clearly the impact of the encroaching Nazi jackboot: he talks of the SS marching through the streets of Berlin, and children crying in class at his (Jewish) school as parents went missing.
His departure on the Kindertransport was presented as a fait accompli. But how did he cope with being separated from his family?
I suffered crushing homesickness when I went away to boarding school. It took two years for me to be able to say goodbye to my parents after their monthly visits without sobbing. How could he bear to leave his family for a strange country?
Harry told me: “I was ten years old and it all seemed very exciting. I had a small suitcase and the only thing I really remember is that, because I was very into boxing, I took a pair of boxing gloves with me and they were confiscated at the German border.”
Anyway, he added, he squared up to his journey to England on the basis of an imagined future in which he would be reunited with his mother and father.
On arriving by liner in Southampton, Harry was met by Frank Freeman— my late father’s older brother. Frank, a strapping 16 -year- old, took him back to the family home in Nottingham where the maid, Gladys, served fish and chips. “I’d never had chips before,” Harry told me. “It was then, as I tried to eat I just started to cry.”
Life with the Freeman family, however, proved to be extremely happy. My grandma, Jean was a warm, comforting , beautiful woman who, says Harry, was determined to make him part of the family — especially since my father, Keith, was only six months older . Keith, by lucky coincidence, was also a lover of boxing.
Harry was enrolled at the local non-Jewish school where he avoided being teased and berated by his classmates by saying he was from Bavaria rather than Germany.
Over the years he has told me of the many happy times he enjoyed with my grandparents. Yet he also witnessed tragedy too, since he was at home on the day a telegram arrived to say that Frank — who he’d come to adore — had been killed on D Day at the age of 22.
As for Harry’s own parents, somehow they managed to escape from Germany, travelling first to Spain and then to Portugal. However, perhaps because of the stress or the loss of her two children, Harry’s mother died at the age of 34. It was my grandma Jean who comforted him when the terrible news arrived.
After the war, Harry’s father came to the UK and took his son to London. Harry began his working life in the offices of a textiles factory before deciding he wanted to set up on his own. Over the years his business flourished, and he went on to marry and have a family.
Recently he told me that he feels very lucky. “The Freemans were a fantastic family. They were the kind that make the world a better place.”
Eight decades on his gratitude to Manny is palpable. And I am grateful to him too. Not only for my time at Uppingham. But because he was determined with my grandma to give a nine-year-old refugee the chance of a new life.
Such kindness and compassion provide, perhaps, the greatest education of all.
