Sometime in the 1970s the BBC showed a 2 part documentary about the Holocaust. It focussed on the family of a physician in Berlin in the late 1930s. He was a popular Doctor and the family were well liked in the community. Then came Hitler and gradually patients stopped coming-they were afraid- and one day the younger daughter didn't come home. A happy young women who had learning difficulties had been abducted to be killed.
The parents decided to send their elder daughter to England for safety; their own lives ended in a concentration camp.
Not long after that documentary was shown, I was about to chair a plenary session at a nursing research conference. The speaker as it happened was a BBC producer and I was very nervous, so I wasn't happy when Marian insisted on talking to me. She could have chosen a better time I thought. She was very distressed and angry; she too had been sent from Berlin to safety in England in 1938 and never saw or heard of her parents again. The story told in the Holocaust programme was her story- and I was trying to get away to start the session and introduce the waiting speaker and so I cut her short. I did not get another chance to listen. Some years later she died of cancer.
I wish I had not been so anxious; I might have arranged for a later time when we could all have listened to her story; perhaps it would have eased her bitter anger.
So many brilliant people came to us from Germany and Austria at that time and were channeled into service professions like nursing. I think of friends like Dr Hockey, Dr Shrock and Professor Annie Altschul; Annie took an Honours Degree in Mathematics the year she retired from the Chair of Nursing in Edinburgh University. She might have been a Maths Professor in Vienna; instead she was nursing scholar who did mathematics in her spare time! They are all gone now and we celebrate them, but could more have been done to help those who came here in such traumatic circumstances even though it was wartime?
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