My friend Erika Brooke, who has died aged 95, travelled to Britain from Czechoslovakia in 1946 and lived in the UK for the rest of her life, working mainly as a seamstress.
Her last job before retirement was as supervisor of the sewing room at Poole general hospital in Dorset, which, among other things, made privacy curtains for patients and altered nurses’ uniforms and doctors’ white coats.
Erika was born in Rudolfov, a village in the České Budějovice district of south-west Czechoslovakia. Her father, Frantisek Jenne, was a smallholder, and her mother, Marie (nee Fischbäckova), a factory worker.
She was still a child when German soldiers occupied her village during the second world war. Her older siblings were involuntarily co-opted into the German army and its support services, and two uncles by marriage were taken to Dachau concentration camp. But as a child of a German-speaking family who could provide evidence of non-Jewish ancestry as required by the occupying authorities, Erika personally experienced little change.
In 1945, however, victorious Russian troops arrived, beginning a campaign of looting and raping. Erika hid in a hayloft for several weeks, but had to come out of hiding to help her mother during the birth of her younger sister, at which point she was discovered, assaulted and beaten.
Her parents, fearing for her life, moved her to a rural area without Russian occupying forces as a temporary measure. Then her mother’s sister, Annie, who, had earlier been helped to settle in Bournemouth, Dorset, by the International Red Cross, was able to travel to Czechoslovakia and return with Erika.
Initially unable to get a work permit until she was 18, Erika helped Annie in her job as a seamstress and in keeping a lodging house in Westbourne, a suburb of Bournemouth.
Once she had her permit, she became a cook/housekeeper, first for an elderly couple and then for a family who owned a dress shop. Once she had married Ronald Brooke, who worked in flight refuelling at a local airstrip, in 1953, she got her first sewing job, making candlewick bedspreads in a factory. Thereafter sewing became Erika’s main occupation; it was something she could continue to do after her two daughters, Tania and Kim, were born and after her marriage ended in divorce in 1980.
Once her children had grown up, Erika worked for a number of years as a freelance, doing alterations for dry cleaning companies and in the clothing shop Country Casuals, alongside one-offs for private clients. She joined the Poole general hospital sewing room in 1985, working her way up to be supervisor, retiring in 1995.
Having come to the UK expecting her stay to be brief, she soon fell in love with the country, taking great joy in life and finding humour in any situation.
She is survived by her daughters and three grandchildren.
