My mother, Ursula Rosenfeld, who has died aged 93, arrived in Britain in 1939 with her sister, Hella, on the Kindertransport. They had waved goodbye to their tearful mother at Hamburg station as they left Germany for a new country of which they had little knowledge.
In 1998 Ursula recalled her family’s experiences in an interview for the USC Shoah Foundation in California. Her story was one of 12 chosen by the producer Deborah Oppenheimer to feature in a film about the Kindertransport, Into the Arms of Strangers, directed by Mark Harris, which won an Oscar for best documentary in 2001.
Ursula was born into a liberal Jewish family in Quakenbrück, a town in rural northern Germany, the younger daughter of Erna (nee Gumprich), a former singer, and her husband, Leopold Simon, who ran a meat processing factory. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 her world began to fall apart. All her friends were invited to Ursula’s eighth birthday party, but no one came. She had been completely ostracised. On Kristallnacht in 1938, Leopold was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, never to return.
After arriving in the UK, Ursula managed to squeeze in almost two years at school. But the need for an income was imperative, so at 15 she began work as a dressmaker in London. While visiting her sister in Oxford, she was injured in a road accident. In the hospital it was discovered she was malnourished; during her recovery there she was offered work in a children’s residential nursery. At 17 she began training to become a nurse.
Ursula was working at Barnsley Hall military hospital in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, assisting with plastic surgery on injured ex-servicemen, when she received the news that her mother had been transported to and died in Minsk. Hella returned to Germany but Ursula remained in her adopted country.
In 1946 she married Peter Rosenfeld, a German Jewish refugee who was working as a farm labourer. He gained a scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford, after which they settled in Solihull, where he worked for the Workers’ Educational Association. Her career in nursing went into abeyance while she brought up their four children, Ruth, Gillian, John and me. Next they moved to Manchester, where Peter took a role as the first education officer at the Usdaw union. Ursula returned to work in 1964, in the burns unit at Wythenshawe hospital. After taking an Open University course in social psychology, she became a health visitor in 1973.
A keen cook and extremely practical, she did all the DIY jobs in the house, including carpentry, electrics and car mechanics, and no visitor came to the house without being well fed. The unofficial house motto was “never knowingly undercatered”.
In retirement, my mother became a magistrate in Manchester in 1977, and after the release of Into the Arms of Strangers, she began visiting local schools to discuss with children what it means to be a refugee. She felt this subject was sadly still relevant and wanted to highlight the fact that refugees are human beings in need of support.
Peter died in 1993. Ursula is survived by her children, four grandchildren, Kirsten, Naomi, Rachel and Simon, and five great-grandchildren, Jez, Liam, Alexis, Art and Ruben.
