Eva Schapira, former child refugee dies at 94

Eva Schapira was the only child of Tilde Neuburger and Sigmund Buxbaum. Their home was on Hainstraße, near the park – a generous sized two-bedroom flat with a very large hall, sitting room, dining room, kitchen and balconies. They were a well-to-do family who employed a cook and a nanny. Both Eva’s grandparents owned shoe factories, but while her paternal grandparents, from Würzburg, were very religious, her maternal ones were not.

“When my Würzburg grandmother came on a visit, the food had to be brought in from a kosher restaurant… chicken soup and chicken. But I didn’t eat much. They had to bribe me… with salami and some bread… and my mother did the Friday nights under duress, I think. She didn’t want to. Not really. Wasn’t her… thing.”

Eva was very close both to her paternal grandmother and her father. “And because I didn’t see much of my mother I… sort of thought she was lovely, because she was a lovely-looking woman, but I didn’t see much of her.”

Eva recalled the magnificent architecture of Bamberg, with the Regnitz river running through the park, and the Altenburg café at the top of the hill. With something of a child’s innocence, she spoke of the local synagogue and its fate.

“Such a shame to burn that lovely building down… my father and I used to go there on Sunday mornings. And sometimes my mother would come along with her high heels. And we had to walk slowly. And the Rathaus (city hall) was lovely. And the Dom (cathedral) with the Domreiter (equestrian statue)…” 

But Kristallnacht destroyed that idyllic image for ever.

“The Juden were unerwünscht [not welcome]. But I can’t remember them daubing the windows… I can’t remember that. I can only remember… sitting on the windowsill and seeing the Gestapo go into [the surgery] of the Jewish GP, Doctor Bauchwitz, and bringing him out, and beating him up with an iron rod. And him being covered in blood. I was horrified. All I wanted to do, as a little girl of seven, was to get out of Bamberg and never see it again.”

She had already spent time in a children’s home in Davos, Switzerland, due to ill health, and her parents decided to send her to a paediatric clinic there, where they believed she had TB, though this was later disputed. En route the train passed through Würzburg, and she was moved to see her paternal grandparents were there to say goodbye. It was the last time she saw them before leaving for London.

Both sets of grandparents remained in Germany. Her paternal grandfather died a natural death. And her grandmother was taken to Hamburg by Eva’s aunt from where they planned to go to America. But she died on her birthday. Eva doubted that she had committed suicide, as she was too religious, but her death remained a family mystery. Her maternal grandfather, Philipp Neuberger, died a natural death. But Minna Neuburger was sent to Theresienstadt in 1942, from where, according to the Red Cross, she was deported to the east. Eva and her mother were never able to discover her fate.

In Britain, Eva’s father found a job as manager of a slipper factory in Great Yarmouth where they lived until the outbreak of war. But then her father was sent to Douglas on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien, after which he volunteered for the Pioneer Corps.

Her parents divorced and her father was granted custody of her. Eva was sent to a convent school near Rugby, then moved with her father to Blackburn, where she attended Blackburn High Grammar school.

She only recalled one bad experience as a German refugee. “As we were going to go to Manchester from the grammar school, one girl, who didn’t know I was Jewish, said, ‘Keep your hands on your purses, there are a lot of Jews in Manchester.’ And I looked and I said, ‘I’m Jewish’.”

Eva had nursed ambitions to study history, but her parents disapproved. So she enrolled at Gloucester Domestic Science College and became a domestic science teacher. Then she embarked on social studies at Northumbria University.

After the war her father was asked to represent the British Footwear Association, but lacked the sufficient money to take up the position. He went back to Germany where he reclaimed and sold his shoe factory and worked in the shoe business in Frankfurt. Eva married Ronnie Loble, an electrical engineer, whose family she had known from Bamberg. He had moved his electrical business from Germany to Britain. They had two children, but Ronnie, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, died, aged 42, just 12 years later.

Eva remarried a neurologist from Vienna called Kurt Schapira, who had treated her husband, and they had one more child. Eva always felt at home in Newcastle and never wanted to move to London, where two of her children lived. She frequently returned to Germany to visit her father but always felt British. While Judaism was important to her, she felt it essential to understand other religions and point of views.

In a tribute, Michael Newman, chief executive of AJR, said it was deeply saddened to hear about Eva’s passing. “Eva was proud to be the first of four generation members of the AJR, with her 17-year-old great-granddaughter, Ella Kaufman, signing up to the organisation last year, to help carry the torch of Holocaust memory.”

Eva Schapira is survived by her children, Susan, Steven and Martin; five grandchildren, Oliver, Nicole, James, Charlie and Bella; and four great-grandchildren, Ella, Benjamin, Sophia and Zac.

GLORIA TESSLER

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Eva Schapira: born December 27, 1930. Died March 15, 2025