Newmarket Refugees Project: A conversation between Adam Corsini, Jewish Museum London Hannah Salisbury,Suffolk Archives, & Sandra Ball
Museum: Can you tell us a bit about how this project came about?
Sandra: During COVID, I didn’t have much work, I didn’t have much to do and I thought I needed a project. My grandfather Fritz died in 1976 and about 30 years after that, my aunt gave me a manuscript written by him, which was about his time in Germany. No one in the family had ever seen it before ad originally, I tried to get it published but that didn’t work. But I picked it up again last year and I thought I should write something about his cello. In his manuscript he writes that he was in Suffolk in this refugee centre, and that he had concerts and that he got good reviews. So I thought, let me see if I can find something about these reviews, and I contacted Hannah, to ask her if there was any kind of way I could look at the newspapers to see if I could find some of us. And the rest is actually history.
Hannah: It started for us in the summer of 2020 when Sandra sent us an email. My archivist colleague was really excited about it and then I read the manuscript too and I could see why. It was a bit of Newmarket history that we had no record of. So for us this was a new story that we didn’t have recorded in the archive anywhere. And the manuscript, the way it’s written, you feel like you’ve met Fritz, you feel like you’ve had a chat with him – there’s bits of it that make you cry, bits that make you laugh. He’s even quite insulting about Newmarket in a few places, which was quite funny. Just reading somebody’s first impressions of coming to live in a new place, being surrounded by a different culture, and the things that he notices as somebody who hadn’t grown up here is so fascinating.
We’ve currently got funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, to support the building of our new archive centre, The Hold. We’re also able to run lots of community engagement and learning projects. So luck of timing meant we were able to pick up this manuscript and use it as the basis for one of our ‘Sharing Suffolk Stories’ projects.
Museum: What’s the link to these items?
Hannah: Fritz describes people and places but he doesn’t actually name them. He describes having a view in his room over this beautifully looked after stable yard. And we managed to establish quite quickly that the place he was talking about is today the National Horse Racing Museum. When we contacted them they’d heard rumours that there were refugees living there during the war, but they didn’t know any details. Very little research had been done into the subject. Then one of the next things we did was look up Fritz and Eva on the 1939 register. And of course, we find them at Palace House Stables in Newmarket. And it’s not just them. There’s 25 people living in the hostel so this is quite a big operation.
We’ve had fantastic volunteers working on the research finding out more about those other people; we’ve had some names, including children who were living in other addresses around Newmarket who were there as unaccompanied child refugees. And then more recently, my colleague spotted a whole cluster of very Jewish looking names of men joining the Suffolk regiment in 1943. And that’s sparked another line of investigation as well.
Like Sandra said the cello is an important part of the story. In the new year, we’ll be working with Orchestras Live to start the music side of this project. So yeah, Sandra’s email in summer 2020 has sparked off a whole a whole chain of events.
We did actually find some reviews of Fritz’s concerts. There’s really lovely things about him, saying what a talented cellist he was. And it also transpires that there were other very accomplished musicians in Palace House Stable as well; there was an Austrian opera singer, Frieda Hartstein, and a pianist called Kate Fischler, and they all performed together at these concerts. Our volunteers have had to do the research the long way round, manually working through microfilm, scanning every page of seven years of newspapers, but it’s very exciting, especially when you’re doing it that way. It’s even more exciting when you find the bits that you’re looking for that you’re hoping will be there.
Museum: I love that this small musical Jewish community ended up in Newmarket. What do we know of their Jewishness and the way they saw their Jewish identity?
Sandra: I never really thought that my family considered themselves particularly Jewish until they were forced to be considered Jewish. I mean, I know that they in Berlin before the war that they mostly were in Jewish circles, but my father always said “Hitler made us Jews”. My father and my uncle were fortunate to also get to England on the Kindertransport. They were very lucky to all be there as my understanding is it was rare for Kindertransport children to see their family again. My father really wanted to stay in Britain, but the rest of the family really wanted to go to the United States which was their original intention.
Museum: what do you think Fritz would make of what’s happening now and their story being presented?
Sandra: I didn’t know my grandfather that well but I think that he would laugh – he would think it was too much of an honour for him. And he would be very, very happy that the music plays such a central role. A rabbi told me that a memorial is only that you are remembered, that’s what’s important, that people tell your stories. And that was important for me – to keep telling this story. I’m so thankful that Fritz is a vehicle to tell a much larger story too, not only about the Holocaust and the Jews, but it’s that it’s about refugees in general, and how they’re welcomed, and then not so welcomed; because he was also arrested and interned in the Isle of Man. So it wasn’t only a warm welcome in Newmarket.
Hannah: There’s moments when the refugees first arrive, it’s before the war and it’s summer, and they’re invited to lots of Garden Parties – they’re kind of the toast of the town, and they’re a novelty. And some of it starts to tip into feeling a little bit patronising at times. But hopefully people just meant well and would have wanted to do nice things. But then there’s a sudden turn when the war does ramp up and people become scared about what might begin to happen.
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Read more about the Research Project at:
www.suffolkarchives.co.uk/sharing-suffolk-stories/we-have-to-move-on/
