It’s a grey, chill day in November 2023. My wife Anne and I have ventured to Lohhof, a district of Unterschleissheim, a far-flung dormitory suburb of Munich. It’s not exactly tourist territory. The friendly local who helped us make sure we had the right S-Bahn ticket from central Munich had never heard of it. The reason we’re here is because of a badly faded photocopy dated 2 April 1965. It’s part of a sworn statement made for my mother Ruth in her compensation case against the Bavarian government for the losses the family had incurred under the Nazis while living in Dachau. The statement con ..read more

November 8 1938: fifteen Jews evicted by the Nazis from their home town, Dachau. November 8 2023: seven descendants from those people are in Dachau again at the invitation of the town. They are from three former Dachau families: Jamie Hall from the Wallachs, Alex and Mark Tittel from the Jaffés, and Tobias Newland, Stephen and Nic Locke plus myself, Tim Locke, from the Neumeyers. It is the first time we have all met each other. Our Dachau antecedents lived a few hundred metres from each other: a stroll along Hermann Stockmannstrasse passes the Stolpersteine (memorial brass plaques) to each of ..read more

Losing the Neumeyer family home and its contents, loss of livelihoods, arrest and murder of my grandparents Hans and Vera Neumeyer as well as Vera’s father Martin, wearing the yellow star and loss of education: these were all subjects of a long correspondence with lawyers that, unknown to me, stretched into my childhood. All I knew was that my mother Ruth and my uncle Raymond had managed to get some compensation after the war from the Bavarian State Compensation Office. What wasn’t covered by compensation was the mental suffering through the emotional loss of having parents murdered and having ..read more

The Neumeyer family photo album is full of happy pictures of a seemingly idyllic life, a childhood to cherish: walks in the mountains, playing in the garden, dressing up for home-made theatricals. Strange as it may now seem, Dachau was a good place to grow up before the impending catastrophe of the Third Reich. The town’s name was not yet tainted: it was primarily known as an artists’ colony. There’s tantalisingly little in the extensive family archive about the early years of darkness, in particular when Hitler came to power ninety years ago, in 1933. My mother Ruth said to me that her parent ..read more

This post concerns a remarkable 8,000-word, 11-page typed report made by Dela Blakmar, my grandfather Hans’ secretary (and, it now appears, lover). I am publishing it a few days before Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD), 27 January 2023 for a very specific reason, that the national theme for HMD this year is Ordinary People. People who were victims as well as perpetrators, and people who stood by as well as those who helped those in danger. I’ve only just discovered and translated the report and it illuminates ordinary lives – of Dela, as a Jew in Munich and Berlin, and what she saw around her durin ..read more

On 1 September 2022 my brother Stephen and I were among several hundred people on the quayside at Harwich to witness the unveiling of Safe Haven, a memorial to the Kindertransport, at a highly moving ceremony with speeches and the Tendring brass band providing the soundtrack. There were some thirty surviving Kinder (people who came as children on the Kindertransport) present, including a married couple now well into their nineties, and the veteran politician and peer Alf Dubs. Our mother Ruth and uncle Raymond were among the 9,300 children who escaped almost certain death in Nazi-controlled Eu ..read more

Tatty scraps of paper bearing something written in German long ago, in pencil or crayon, with abundant crossings-out… I had filed these away not realising their importance. I’d taken them to be the fruits of someone’s Sunday afternoon copying out a very long poem. Then last year I gave them a second glance. There was unmistakably a Star of David drawn on one page. Then – how could have I missed it? – the inscription ‘Irma Kuhn B09’. Irma Kuhn was the elder sister of my grandfather Hans Neumeyer. The mystery figure – my mother and uncle didn’t tell me anything about her. All I knew was that she ..read more

Earlier this year I had an email from Marianne Hellman in Sweden that completely bowled me over. We knew nothing of each other. Marianne and her husband Mats had been clearing out their basement in Bjärred in Sweden – a village near the city of Lund – for the installation of a heat pump when they discovered a box of old letters. They were all addressed to Dela (Adele) Blakmar (maiden name Mankiewitz), with whom they had had a family connection many years ago. Dela was secretary and friend of my grandfather, Hans Neumeyer. Both were Jewish. Dela, probably in the 1930s [click on the arrow to a ..read more

One particularly gratifying aspect of writing this blog is the connections that I have made with readers. Ron Kammer from Pennysylvania read the account of my grandmother being deported in 1942 to certain death somewhere in Nazi-occupied Poland, and the letter in which she described her friendship with the woman sitting next to her as one Malwine Porsche. That woman was Ron’s aunt. The internet has reunited two descendants of women who may well have been murdered just hours later in Auschwitz, perhaps dying in each other’s arms. Then Jan Qvick explained that Dela Blakmar, secretary to my music ..read more

[Note: those looking for my interview with BBC1 Southeast Today for Holocaust Memorial Day 2022, click here] It has taken over six years in the making – longer than the Second World War itself. But certainly worth the wait. London’s Imperial War Museum has completed its largest ever project, the Second World War and Holocaust galleries, opened 20 October 2021 at the cost of over £30million. The day before its opening to the public, I had my first sight of the new Holocaust gallery, at a preview event for those who contributed their family stories to this massive display. The fourth photo in th ..read more