Ruth Boswell

“I shared a bedroom with their daughter. The first thing I remember is that it rained during my first night there, and when it rains on the grass in England, it gives a wonderful smell. I don’t know if you can imagine that. I remember it very clearly. I spent the first evening with them, and the next evening they took me to the school together with their daughter and it was the end of the term or half-term or something like that and they had some performance there. I had no idea what was going on but at the end they sang ‘God save the king,’ because they had a king at that time, and when I heard the music I started to cry and I cried every night for the following two months. I was very unhappy.”

“My mother arranged it with the wife of one of our friends who was already in London. She was going there to join him, and she was to pick me up in Prague and take me to London. From what I remember it must have been in the old Wilson Railway Station. I’m shocked by the state it is in now, it is completely neglected, and the old parts have been removed, which is very sad. But anyway, somebody – I don’t know who it was – took me from Brno to Prague. I said good-bye and I went with this lady into the train. She had a first class ticket. When the conductor came, it turned out that my father had bought a third class ticket for me. She didn’t pay extra for me. And so I was taken to the third class carriage. You cannot imagine what the third class carriages looked like in the 1930s. They were awful. They had wooden planks like this, and they were very uncomfortable. I was alone in this third class carriage at night passing through Germany. At one point I fell asleep and when I woke up there was an SS officer sitting against me in the carriage. He talked with me for two or three hours. He must have known I was a Jewish child fleeing from the Nazis. Then he left and I joined this lady again. We eventually got to London.”