January 27th 2022 will mark the Holocaust Memorial where Cardiff and Swansea usually have ceremonies for the occasion.
This will be the 3rd in West Wales and will take place online on Zoom, e-mail denisetheolivetrust@aol.com or on our Facebook page; The Olive Trust, Wales.
I will be relaying my family’s story where my Grandfather upon being sent to the UK in the 1930’s, due to his family worrying about events unfolding in pre-war Hungary that had seen long-term restrictions and discrimination for Jewish businesses and jobs for Jews.
When the war started my maternal-grandmother was sent from London to Llanelli as an eighteen year-old and I wrote the story a few years ago where it was taken up by the Carmarthen Journal and The History Society. She always spoke of her love for Wales and I grew up hearing her stories of how the train steamed through villages and the country-side morphed to valleys and lush landscapes.
As she saw the sea her eyes widened as she was taken to a farmhouse and she recalled a grand oak staircase, wood paneling, a warm fireplace and picture windows with views over the estuary.
On a not so fortunate train, my maternal grandfather was in Hungary trying to arrange for our family to leave and travel to the UK for sanctuary where an SS officer on board ordered him to ‘get to the back of the train,’ destined for the camps.
An American soldier told him not to move and saved his life, but his family had the wrong papers, due to a change in borders between Czechoslovakia and Hungary which were created out of the collapse of the Russian empire, and so their papers were not valid.
As my grandmother spent almost a year in Wales, she never forgot the warmth of its people, life beside the sea and fresh produce to eat. Years later as she lay in hospital, she asked me to find the place she had such fond memories of ‘Bwlch y Gwynt’, Llanelli and asked me to find it. I had been living and working in Swansea but moved to Llanelli, so I set about trying to find the farm.
In March 1944, all of Hungary’s Jews that had thus far been protected by their Regent Miklos Horthy were invaded by Germany and forced to give up their Jews. Nearly one million were sent to their deaths with ninety members of our family sent to Auschwitz in the space of three months.
My grandfather never spoke about it, such was the enormity of the trauma where his parents, siblings, family and their children were murdered. We only heard about it through a long lost cousin, George, a survivor who made it to America and whose daughter, Audrey, we are still in contact with.
My gran returned to London almost a year later and in the basement of a tall building a tall, fair-haired gentleman approached her for a light. They were engaged three weeks later and married within six months.
I was pregnant with my son and living in Machynys when walking with my then partner and came across the sign; ‘Here stood the lost community of Bwlch y Gwynt’ right where I had been living for almost a year!
I managed to whisper to her that I had found it before she passed away.
I will be telling my story on 27th January 2022 online, 10.00 am.For tickets, send an email to denisetheolivetrustwales.com, or they are available on Eventbrite. The Hilary Rose Holocaust Memorial. January 27th, 2022.
