My father and his first wife came from Poland to Germany with their seven children for a better life. His first wife died in 1917 and he went back to Warsaw to find another wife with whom he had four more children. In 1936, 1937 some of my family immigrated to Palestine, two of my half sisters married two Brazilians who were originally from Poland and had gone to Brazil.
I was working for a German family in Hanover, Germany as a nanny. When the Nazis came for us in Hanover, I hid in a bathroom. I took a train to Minden to be with my family, but found that they had been rounded up. The house had been looted, windows broken. Neighbors saw me and called the police. I got on the roof, and tried to escape. I was eventually captured and put in jail.
The local rabbi was able to get me a document that said I had seven days to leave Germany. My mother had been able to get me a permit to leave for England as a domestic. I went to the British Consulate with this document. They help me flee to England in July, 1939. I left for Putney, England, never to see my family again. My family wound up in the Warsaw Ghetto from which they perished.
During the war,in Oundle, England, I met an American GI, Kenneth Robert Jackson from Grayling, Michigan. I had no family left in Minden. I married and moved to Grayling with my new husband.