Betty Bloom

She [sister Ruth] overheard a group of girls talking about going on the Kindertransport to Belgium. With a date when they will be leaving and the stations they were leaving from. She went home and said, "Mutti" that's what we called my mother, "there's only one solution for us. You buy us a ticket- to Betty and myself a ticket for England so that we can say we are joining our uncle and aunt who were by then were in England and we will join this Kindertransport and we will follow them to Belgium." And my mother agreed to it.

Summer wasn't too bad, but the winter was awful because all we had was straw and one blanket each. And I always suffered from the cold. I've never suffered hunger. I only suffered cold. Ruth was always warm. She was hungry but she had terrible boils on her legs from nutrition, you know... I was, I had lice so I just shaved my hair off and there's a photo with my hair shaven, which to me was the second most traumatic thing because my hair was, I liked my hair.

The guide took us to his home & said, "We can't cross tonight because they caught some people crossing the border. So, we'll have to wait for another day.' The next day very early in the morning he took us [Betty + 2 others] to the border, across two barbed-wire fences. The border was in Annemasse, on the border with Switzerland. And he said, 'There's a third one you have to cross.'

We went straight across & we heard some German. It was the French-Swiss border, so we knew that's no good. So we quickly came back & decided to take the left or the other way round. Anyway, we got this, we managed to get over the third barbed wire. We were in Switzerland where we immediately got a welcome from the Swiss border guards. They said, 'You're very, very lucky because you almost ran into-' They saw it all. 'You almost ran into the arms of the Germans.'