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Here's the Mancunian Way for today:
Hello,
Earlier this week I had the great privilege of meeting Anne Super. She was just a toddler when her family were forced from their home by Nazis to be taken to a concentration camp - but there are moments of that night she still recalls vividly.
Anne’s story of escape and survival as a hidden child is extraordinary and I feel incredibly lucky to have heard it first hand.
When I arrive at her home in south Manchester I’m greeted by a very vocal Siamese cat and Anne, who is warm and kind with impeccable manners. Both cat and owner have piercing blue eyes.
It’s clear from the paintings, prints, books and antiques that adorn Anne’s home that she has lived a full life and she’s good enough to show us around. Our photographer Kenny spots a lovely conservatory filled with greenery and Anne agrees to pose there while I covetously eye the glorious houseplants that trail and bloom beneath the glass and fuss over the cat - who has taken a keen interest in my shorthand notepad.
It’s a crisp Monday afternoon and Anne’s lively eyes sparkle in light. It’s not the first time she’s been pictured in this space. Her son John is a photographer too.
And she was recently pictured with her family by Simon Hill, president of the Royal Photographic Society, for a new exhibition about Holocaust survivors at the Imperial War Museum North. Simon felt the plants in Anne’s conservatory hark back to greenery, which played a huge part in the story of her escape during World War Two.
We’ll be discussing that moment and the life that followed in this edition of the newsletter to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. But first I’d like to recommend that you look up the work of The Fed - a Jewish social care charity which gives survivors the means to tell their stories through the My Voice project. Anne is one of many who have written their life stories thanks to My Voice.
In the course of that afternoon at Anne’s home she describes herself as ‘normal’ several times. I know she means ‘normal’ despite the unimaginable loss and trauma she faced in those formative years. But to an onlooker, there is nothing normal about this charming woman, who survived the Holocaust and beat the Nazis against all the odds.
‘Nobody realised that I would never see them again’
A flash of green behind the bars of a cot.
That vivid, abstract moment is Anne Super’s first memory.
In fact that green was a German officer’s uniform. Though she was too young to remember much, she knows her mother was crying, bags were being packed and the soldier ‘took up all the air in the room’.
Minutes later the family were forced from their home and rounded up with other Jews.
Fearing their fate, her mother pushed Anne through a hedge into the arms of a local milkwoman who was waiting nearby. She grabbed her, took her under her arm and ran.
Her parents' decision, heartbreaking as it was, saved Anne’s life.
“It was just a moment, it was nothing else,” she says now, more than 80 years later.
“Nobody realised that I would never see them again, that they would never see me again. We were just walking and she said: ‘Go!’. And I went.
“If they were able to think at all, there was no other decision to make. We were going to a death camp. Finished.”
The moment is imprinted on Anne's mind. She remembers seeing lots of other people with suitcases and Germans with guns. But in truth, she was far too young to understand what was happening.
That moment, in 1941, was the last time she ever saw her parents. She knows they were taken to a concentration camp and murdered.
Anne was probably around three at the time, though she does not know her exact age and has only recently settled on a birthday. What she is certain of, is that the woman who grabbed her that night saved her life.
She is sure it must have been pre-arranged.
“She was standing there and she wasn’t just there to look because it was a horrible sight. These people were desperate. She grabbed me, she literally grabbed me and ran.”
But the milkwoman - a mother herself - was perhaps not the Good Samaritan you would imagine.
“She certainly saved my life, nobody can take that away from her,” says Anne. “But she didn’t like me.
"Her husband did. I remember being ill and he carried me around all night."
Anne and her new carers would eat milk, potatoes and, ‘as a great treat’ radishes - something Anne still loves to this day.
“They had several children and therefore having me was another mouth. And believe me in those days another mouth was a curse," she says.
"So I don’t blame her one bit for wanting to get rid of me. Having food at all was nothing short of miraculous in those days.”
Anne lived with this family for several months as a hidden child ‘in the back of beyond’ on the Polish-Russian border. She believes she survived only because of her blonde hair and blue eyes.
But her time with this family was temporary. The milkwoman took the contents of her parents' home as payment. And after around a year, she decided she could care for Anne no longer.
Finding a postcard from the child’s aunt, the milkwoman asked a local scribe to write to her, threatening to put her ‘out on the street’ unless she sent more money.
Anne's aunt - who worked in a jam factory but was a Classics teacher - knew a pupil whose father worked on the railways. He had a travel pass.
“This incredibly brave man, who could have been killed for what he did, travelled all the way to the Russian border, picked me up and travelled back with me - on the top of the train,” Anne says.
“Can you imagine? With a three-year-old? Because inside the train belonged to the Germans.
“He put his life on the line for some child he didn’t know. People did. People were absolutely wonderful. And utterly completely horrendous.”
From then on Anne lived with her aunt and cousin in Włochy, a suburb of Warsaw, still hidden from the Germans.
When the war ended, life in Poland was extremely difficult.
Anne developed tuberculosis and was sent to a sanatorium far from her family. She vividly remembers that time, at the age of around eight, being tied to a bed each afternoon in the busy hospital.
“It was an incredibly traumatic experience because there were so many children,” she says.
“There was this sanatorium in which we were housed and there was another up the mountain and if you went there you didn’t come out alive. We knew that.
“If a child had lost weight they would scream all night. It was horrendous. But I did survive.
“They were so busy and there were so many children dying left right and centre. It was a horrendous place.”
During that time, Anne says she escaped by reading the Classics, Dickens and Shakespeare. She is still a voracious reader and says she first learnt English primarily because she wanted to read Shakespeare in the original language.
In the post-war years, Anne’s maternal uncle believed his entire family had perished in the war - but he put out a message on Red Cross radio nonetheless.
Incredibly someone heard it and told him his niece was still alive.
“He was going to turn the world upside down to try and look for me,” she says.
From that point onwards, things began to change. It took more than a year for Anne’s paperwork to be arranged, but in 1948 she was eventually able to travel with her aunt and cousin to be with her uncle in South Africa.
The trio travelled first to Paris - a journey she remembers every minute of.
“It was so wonderful to go on a plane and then we got to stay in a hotel in Paris for a few weeks because the papers still weren’t quite right,” she says.
“I saw girls with bows in their hair, I saw bananas for the first time - all sorts of things. And we went to the Louvre every morning. It was magical.”
In particular she remembers being ‘rooted to the ground’ when she saw the Venus de Milo to for the first time.
On the flight down to Africa, she saw herds of elephants and giraffes. When they landed, they were welcomed by her uncle, his wife and their daughter who picked them up in a huge Hudson car.
“We hadn’t seen anything like it” she says. “That’s when life began.”
It was at this point that Anne began to understand her Jewish identity with the help of a local family who took ‘a great interest’ in her.
“They were wonderful,” she says. “The father would spend hours talking to me about Judaism.
“I am the most irreligious Jew but with a very strong, powerful Jewish identity.”
It was at this time that Anne first met Maurice. They eventually married and had three children - Michael, John and Beth.
“There was not a moment’s doubt in his mind that I would make the perfect wife, who would make him the perfect children and we would have the perfect life. And we did. And I miss him,” she says.
The family moved to England in 1978. Maurice - a clinician specialising in cystic fibrosis - established a genetics department at Pendlebury Hospital, while Anne set up her own opticians' practice, in Cheetham Hill.
Maurice died 17 years ago, but it was he who encouraged Anne to tell her story
“I never said a word about it for years and the children knew nothing,” she says.
Now, she has written the story of her life with the help of Jewish social care charity The Fed, as part of the incredible My Voice project.
She has also given talks about her experience of the war years in an effort to further Holocaust education. And she currently features in a new photography exhibition at the Imperial War Museum North, which opens today.
Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors is a collection of 60 original contemporary portraits of survivors and their families.
The images capture the special connections with the younger generations of their families, shining a light on the full lives they have lived and our collective responsibility to ensure their stories live on.
It’s those stories that Anne knows are so important. And though she is a reader by nature, she is pleased to have finally put her own down on paper.
Her children have read the book with their own children and discussed Anne’s incredible life.
Speaking about the importance of Holocaust education Anne says simply: “It must not be forgotten."
Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors is a free exhibition opening at IWM North on January 27 until the summer.
Light a candle
Holocaust Memorial Day is dedicated to the remembrance of the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust alongside the other victims of Nazi persecution.
People are being encouraged to take part in HMD Trust’s worldwide initiative of lighting a candle and taking a moment to “remember all those who were murdered for who they were and stand against prejudice and hatred in the world today”.
You can light a virtual candle here.
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Weather etc
- Saturday: Cloudy changing to mist in the afternoon. 6C.
- Road closures: M56 Eastbound exit slip road to the A34 closed due to roadworks at A34 Kingsway until February 5.
- One lane closed due to carriageway repairs on M56 in both directions between J7 A556 Chester Road (Bowdon) and J5 (Manchester Airport) until February 18.
Manchester headlines
Under investigation: Almost 100 police officers in Greater Manchester are under investigation for sexual misconduct. GMP is investigating 82 officers for sexual offences or misconduct with investigations for a further 16 concluded and the officers currently awaiting a misconduct panel hearing. The figures - representing around one per cent of the force - were revealed by Greater Manchester's deputy mayor Kate Green at a police, fire and crime panel. It comes a week after former armed officer David Carrick - who admitted to 49 offences including 24 counts of rape - was sacked from the Metropolitan Police. The new deputy mayor said GMP is 'very committed' to openness and wants to assure the public that police officers who are found to have abused their position will be 'rooted out' from the force. More here.
Approved: Three Manchester developments have been given the green light by the council's planning committee - including two in the city centre. A 10-storey aparthotel and a five-storey block of flats in the Northern Quarter are among the plans approved, alongside new affordable housing at Didsbury Point. Full story here.
Strike: Around 500 workers at a Department for Work and Pensions centre and a benefit centre in Greater Manchester are set to go on strike next month. Members of the Public and Commercial Services Union will stage a series of walkouts over 20 days in an escalation of a dispute over the pay, jobs and conditions of civil servants. Members at the Department for Work and Pensions contact centre in Stockport and a benefit centre in Bolton will be some of those taking action. More here.
Buses: Andy Burnham has promised to 'pull out all the stops' to save bus services under threat in Greater Manchester. It follows Diamond's decision to pull around a fifth of its bus fleet from Bolton with a dozen routes affected. The move comes after the operator missed out on the first large contracts under the new bus franchising system set to be launched in Bolton and Wigan this year. The company won seven smaller contracts in the two boroughs and parts of Salford and Bury, but Go North West will run most services from September. However, Diamond said that due to the 'uncertainty' created by the decision, it would have to reduce the frequency and partially withdraw some services. This includes commuter routes such from Bolton to Salford and Manchester. More here.
That's all for today
Thanks for joining me. If you have stories you would like us to look into, email beth.abbit@menmedia.co.uk.
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