Lore Segal - Kindertransport and Life in England

Kindertransport and Life in England

An only child, Segal was born in Vienna, Austria, into a middle-class Jewish family, her father a chief bank accountant and her mother a housewife.

When Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, Segal's father found himself jobless and threatened. He listed the family on the American immigration quota, and in 1939 Segal joined other Jewish children on the first wave of the Kindertransport rescue mission, seeking safety in England. Her number was 152. Before they parted, Segal's father told her, "When you get to England and meet an English person, say, 'Please get my parents and my grandparents and my Uncle Paul out.' " Segal undertook this task with a youthful gravity. "It seemed to me that it was something I should be doing constantly, constantly. That I should be doing without doing anything else...When I caught myself laughing, I would feel a shock to the heart that I was laughing instead of asking somebody to save my parents," Segal said in an interview.

Though Segal knew little English when she arrived, she picked up the language in six weeks. She campaigned tirelessly, writing letter after letter to the Jewish Refugee Committee and various British authorities. The day she turned eleven years old, her parents arrived in England on a domestic servants visa.

Forbidden to reside with her parents in their new places of employment, Segal lived with different foster families, five in total. This experience inspired her as a writer. "I hardly know another situation in which you experience the inside of the class system of England. The Jewish furniture manufacturer in Liverpool, the lady who employed my mother in Kent, the railroad stoker, the milkman's family. The lesser nobility, the upper class of Guilford. I mean, who gets to be a child in so many houses, north to south of England, and gets to experience how you live when you are a member of the household? Not a tourist, not a visitor, but a member of a totally different class...I was an anthropologist. An unwilling anthropologist," Segal said years later.

Her English foster parents never seemed to understand the situation in Austria, and one day, tired of their irrelevant questions, Segal found a purple notebook and started writing, filling up all thirty-six pages in German. It was the beginning of a novel she would eventually write in English, Other People's Houses.

"One thing to do when you leave your parents is to howl with horror," Segal said in an interview. "The other thing is to not howl and think, 'Wow, I'm going to England, this will be an adventure.' Which is the one I did."

Despite his refugee status, Segal's father was labeled a German-speaking alien and interned on the Isle of Man where he suffered a series of strokes. He died a few days before the war ended. Segal then moved to London with her mother. She attended Bedford College, the women's division of the University of London, on a scholarship and graduated in 1948 with an honors degree in English literature.

In 1951, after spending three years in the Dominican Republic, their American quota number came through. Segal and her mother moved to Washington Heights, New York City, where they shared a two-room apartment with her grandmother and uncle.

Segal and her mother, Franzi Groszmann, appeared in the film Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of Kindertransport, directed by Mark Jonathan Harris, which won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature in 2000. Segal's mother was the last survivor of the parents who placed their children in the Kindertransport program. She died in 2005, one-hundred years old.