Lilian and Andrew Levy |

They are a lovely couple, Lilian’s parents, Adolf (Dolf) Dreifuss, born 1906 in Frankfurt/Main and Hedwig (Hedy) Dreifuss, née Allerhand, born 1905 in Vienna: young, full of joie de vivre and plans for their future

Dolf works in the company of his father and uncle, “B. Bohrmann, Nachfolger” (successors), a well-known factory in Frankfurt which manufactures and delivers silverware for hotels, restaurants and private households. Hedy is a milliner and works in her own fashionable hat shop.

The photo taken in 1937 shows a carefree and happy young couple. But the optimism of their happiness will definitely be destroyed by the November pogrom in 1938. As many other Jewish men Dolf is arrested in the course of the November pogrom; he is interned in the camp in Dachau. This was the final impetus to leave Germany as soon as possible.

Around the turn of the year 1938/1939 Hedy and Dolf first flee to England/UK where Hedy’s sister Alice Deutsch and her husband have been living since 1938, in a suburb of London. But in the course of 1939 Dolf and Hedy decide to emigrate to the Netherlands.

Hedy also comes from a middle class family. She was born in Vienna, but her family moves after the World War One (the Great War) to Frankfurt.

Young Hedy in Frankfurt .

Hedy as a self-assured milliner.

After her marriage Hedy quits her job as a businesswoman working in her own hat shop in Kronberger Str.6 in Frankfurt.

Her decision might have been influenced by the fact that she and her mother Rosa had been mentioned in a Nazi-boycott-brochure in 1934/1935 in a defamatory manner. Here a cutting from the edition of 1935: The “editor” justifies the publication of the brochure from the Nazi perspective (translated): “A response to the increasing atrocities and boycott by Jews abroad”

According to Leo Otterbeek Lilian is taken to his brother-in-law; her parents are offered a hiding place at a farm in the Hilversum area where they stay separately from their daughter. A very desperate situation for the young parents. In addition to that there are the worries about their relatives in Germany.

They might have had a chance to survive in their hiding place on the farm. But a radio announcement by the occupying forces at the beginning of 1943 gives them hope that they may have a chance to emigrate to the UK: They follow the announcement that promises British citizens to be exchanged. For the Dreifuss family with a child born in Britain and therefore a British citizen this offer might have been the possibility of a safe exile in the UK and – above all – the end of the separation from their beloved child.

A fatal trap – as it turns out. Ms Seligmann, a family friend from Frankfurt, remembers (translated): “When I arrived at their flat on May 1st in 1943 I witnessed that four Gestapo officers arrested Mr and Ms Dreifuss together with their four-year-old daughter Lilian.”

Even from Bergen-Belsen Hedy sends optimistic “signs of life” to her sister in London. But the living conditions in Bergen-Belsen are unbelievably disastrous: The ration for the day consists of a watery turnip-soup plus a small piece of black bread. Diseases such as typhus spread extremely fast – and more so because the inhabitants of the camp are afraid to take a shower: The fact that showers are misused as deadly weapons are common knowledge in the camps by then. And with finally 60 000 people in the camp and 6-10 people in one sleeping bunk the camp is tremendously overcrowded.

Dolf Dreifuss dies on December 24th, 1944, his wife Hedy only one month later, on January 26th, 1945. Both die from hunger, exhaustion and untreated illness. And until their end both parents try to rescue at least their little darling daughter – sparing their food rations for her. Shortly before his death father Dolf asks another inhabitant of the camp, Yehoshua Birnbaum, to take care of Lilian. Lilian survives malnourished and seriously ill.

He even manages to get into contact with Lilian’s Aunt Alice in London. But because of a severe illness of her husband she refuses to take Lilian in for good. So Lilian is taken to her house by Leo Otterbeek but is only a short time later, in July 1946, adopted by Frieda and Dr. Henry Davidson, a pediatrician in London.

As German Jews the Davidsons had emigrated to the UK as early as 1933. Their daughter, 20 years senior to Lilian, had already left her parents’ home before the adoption. Neither Lilian’s Aunt Alice nor her new family communicate with the traumatized child about her experience: “No, no, my dear child, I can’t tell you” (translated), says Aunt Alice to Lilian and also her adoptive parents keep silent due to false consideration.

So Lilian is thrown back on her own fragmentary memories of her parents and life in the concentration camp: “I didn’t know who I was… I didn’t belong to anybody, came from nowhere and was going nowhere.”

Only after her aunt’s death does she learn about letters written by Yehoshua Birnbaum which shed some light into the painful darkness of her memories. And only in 1981 is Lilian able to meet the Birnbaum family together with her own family. She gets to know that Birnbaum took care of about 50 children at Bergen-Belsen including his own six children. And he remembers little Lilian very vividly even after such a long time.

Father Davidson was a pediatrician, mother Davidson a housewife. As they don’t live according to religious rules, Aunt Alice takes Lilian to a synagogue in London. The leading rabbi there is Dr. Salzberger who also emigrated from Frankfurt and it is especially because of him that this London synagogue becomes a new home for many German Jews. And astonishingly it is only in 2017 that Lilian discovers that he and his family used to be neighbours of the Dreifuss family in Frankfurt, living in Eschersheimer Landstraße 67.

In this synagogue in London Lilian finds a stable youth group – and eventually her husband, Herbert Levy, a Kindertransport-Kind from Berlin.

Lilian completes a training in the commercial field. She marries Herbert in 1961 and becomes the mother of two children: Andrew (born 1964) and Hilary (born 1967) – and is able to live the happy family life she has longed for, knows at last where she belongs to.

Herbert Levy writes in his biography “Voices from the past” (1995) about his family and his life story. In his life he was connected with the theatre in many ways although he earned his living in the textile business. After retirement he accompanies the travelling exhibition “Anne Frank” across the UK on an honorary basis.

Julius Jonathan Allerhand, born in 1865 in Hanau/Hesse, marries Rosa, née Jenner, born in Vienna (or Krakow) in 1870. Their two daughters, Alice and Hedwig/Hedy were born in Vienna. During World War I the Allerhand family leaves Vienna due to economic reasons to take refuge in the (then neutral) Netherlands; according to the family Rosa worked in Vienna as a pianist and piano teacher. After the war the Allerhand family moves from the Netherlands to Frankfurt/Main.

In the addressbook for Frankfurt in 1928 Rosa is said to be living at Eschersheimer Landstr. 152 and subsequently in Kronberger Str. 6, as her daughter Hedy who had her atelier at the same address. Later she lives at the Jewish retirement home on Zeil 92 (nowadays premises for a Karstadt department store). On the date of her deportation to Theresienstadt on August, 18, 1942 she was a patient at the Jewish Hospital in Gagernstr. 36 – today the premises of Jewish retirement homes. From Theresienstadt Rosa Allerhand, then 71-years-old, is deported to Auschwitz on September 23rd, 1942. She is declared dead with effect from May, 8th, 1945.

The former home of Lilian’s parents and grandparents in Escherheimer Landstr. 69 has been torn down and was replaced by a new building in the late 1950s. But in spite of that the week in Frankfurt, organized by the City of Frankfurt, visiting the grave of Julius Jonathan Allerhand, Lilian’s grandfather at Rat-Beil-Cemetery and visiting places where her grandmother Rosa Allerhand had lived, leaves Lilian deeply impressed:

The encounter with and in Frankfurt “gives me a new feeling of roots in Frankfurt… I am from somewhere now”, says Lilian at a meeting with students of Anne-Frank-School in Frankfurt-Dornbusch.

The students of AFS, 10th grade, are extraordinary impressed by Lilian’s life story. It is Lilian’s first time speaking about it in front of such a big audience. One student expresses her thanks and gratitude to the eye-witnesses Lilian and Andrew Levy (UK) and Yona and Tova Dreifuss (Israel) for speaking to them so frankly and openly.

Because of that some students feel encouraged to speak about their own family stories, most of them stories of migration, but one student recalls the suffering of her grandfather at a concentration camp.

On behalf of the second generation visitors 2017 Andrew delivers a very much appreciated speech at the fare-well party at the Römer (Andrew Levy’s speech – sound recording). And he declares – in unison with the other participants and according to J.F. Kennedy in Berlin – that he feels that he is now a Frankfurter which delights the people from Frankfurt very much!