Meet the charitable Edinburgh household that offered a lifeline to a family of Jewish refugees during the Second World War.
The story of Gertrude Black and her family begins to take shape through snapshot images and quotes, and The Association of Jewish Refugees' AJR Refugee Voices Testimony Archive is shining a spotlight on an incredible story of one woman’s strength and resilience in the face of terror.
Gertrude Black and her young family fled to Edinburgh from their home in Germany during the Second World War.
"On our wedding day, two years after we were married, we left Munich for Edinburgh with the baby, a lot of luggage and no money. One pound for my husband, one pound for myself & ten shillings for the baby,” Gertrude recalled in 2004 during an AJR Refugee Voices Testimony interview.
After fleeing persecution, prison interments and fear, Gertrude recalled arriving in Edinburgh feeling “like the last dirt on earth".
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However, the kindness of one Edinburgh family offered her strength and hope to carry on.
“The Moncrieffs were unbelievably good with a tact that really needs remembering,” she said.
“The first day we came [...] You have no money; your language is very bad; and you have nobody. You have no doctor; you have no uncle; you have no aunt; you have nobody, in a strange city, in Edinburgh [we] had no relatives."
She said Mrs Moncrieff came with her son Peter to pick Gertrude’s family up from the train station.
“Peter was thirteen, and he had to give up his beautiful room overlooking the castle and Bruntsfield [for us]. I’ve always got on well with him. He’s in Edinburgh still,” Gertrude remembered.
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“[On our first morning in Edinburgh, Mrs Moncrieff] lays the breakfast table for me, my husband and Hannah, who was nine months old, in the lounge. Wonderful!”
Gertrude had written to the Edinburgh Friends House while she was in Nazi Germany, desperately searching for a way out. Mrs Moncrieff worked for the charity, and she and her husband decided to help Gertrude’s family.
“British people are very very charity-minded, much more so than I’ve ever seen anywhere,” Gertrude recalled.
Gertrude recalled other details of her journey to Edinburgh, including watching the Nazi party rise to power.
Gertrude moved around to various places for schooling and education as a young woman, and she recalled being in Berlin watching the Reichstaf burn with her own eyes in the early 1930s.
“One of my friends [...] phoned me up and said, ‘Come quickly the Reichstag is on fire.’ We were all going to see it, and we saw the Nazi hordes singing in the street: ‘The Reichstag is burning. We don’t need a Reichstag; we can govern this ourselves’” she said.
“That was the end of our life in Germany. After that we had only one wish: how can we escape and how can we build a new life?”
Gertrude met her husband around 1936 while working for a lawyer in Düsseldorf. They were married in May 1937, and their first daughter was born right before the Second World War broke out.
In 1938, the Nazi regime coordinated a wave of antisemitic violence known as Kristallnacht, or The Night of Broken Glass, and Gertrude’s husband was imprisoned at Dachau.
"I sat there now with my husband still in the concentration camp. I had to get him out. I was completely fearless at the time. I went right to the Gestapo place. I said: ‘Why is my husband interned? He hasn’t done anything.’”
However, she was unable to get him home, and she was stuck at home with a young baby. One day, Gertrude said a tax man arrived at her front door.
“He said, ‘Where's your husband?’ I started to cry, I said he's in Dachau, I was very upset obviously. He said: ‘Don’t upset yourself, I'll get him out.’ I thought he was talking rubbish, but never mind. So he went away,” she said.
A few days later, on Gertrude’s birthday, the stranger went to Dachau and managed to get her husband out of internment.
“A miracle,” she said.
“He took my husband to the tax office. My husband rang up and said: ‘I’m coming home.’ He was home within a quarter of an hour.”
"He'd lost about 2 stone. They'd shaved his hair all off and he was changed, very, very frightened. If you live for four weeks under such mental and physical pressure and see people running against the electric wire to commit suicide it does stay with you. Before my husband was very jolly and very easy-going, but after that he was [different.]”
The family fled to Switzerland where they had permission to stay for three weeks.
“All the Jewish passports at that time were signed with a J for Jew. So was ours. After the 20th day we stayed in Sankt Gallen the police came and said if you’re not out tomorrow we have to intern you and send you back to Germany,” she recalled.
And so the family flew the next day to London, and they subsequently arrived in Edinburgh about a week later.
Gertrude and her family eventually moved to Glasgow where they made their home after the war, but she fondly recalled the warm welcome she received in Edinburgh more than 60 years after she moved to the UK.
Gertrude’s story was recorded by the AJR Refugee Voices Testimony interviewer Anthony Grenville in October 2004 in Glasgow.
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