Eve Gill

Eve Gill nee Elfriede Gottfried was born in Vienna, 1923. Her mother, Gisela Gruenwald, had come as a teenager from Slovakia and her father, Jakob Gottfried, from Romania. They got married in 1918 in Vienna and owned their own clothes shop called Kaufhaus Gottfried in the Schlosserhofstrasse, 21. Bezirk. This is where Eve grew up. The family lived on the third floor of the same building as the shop. The family kept a kosher home.

Eve went to the local primary school and then to the gymnasium. She recalls that at the gymnasium she had one anti-Semitic teacher. She changed to the Handelsschule in the centre of Vienna. She recalls outings to the Vienna Woods on the weekend, swimming in a tributary of the Danube and going to the Burg Theater.

In May 1938 her father and all the Jewish men from Floritzdorf were arrested and sent to Dachau concentration camp. Her father went first to Dachau and then to Buchenwald. Their shop was Aryanised and a SS officer took control of it. Her mother was instructed to carry on working in the shop under his auspices. Alongside many other Jews, Eve recalls being forced to scrub the pavements with her mother.

On 8 November 1938, on the eve of what became Kristallnacht, Eve was on the way back home when she was warned not to go home. The Nazis had looted their flat and, with many others, they were taken to the local synagogue. There they were informed that their flat was requisitioned and that they had to leave in a few hours. They moved to a small flat in the Obere Donaustrasse. A cousin in Shanghai had organized Chinese visas for the parents and at the same time Eve’s name was put down for a Kindertransport. Eve was reluctant to go but her mother told her that she had to. Her great-aunt gave her a little book and wrote a leaving poem in it (which Eve still has - this booklet became her diary in the UK).

In March 1939 Eve travelled by train on a Kindertransport to Britain. She recalls the arrival in Holland and the sense of relief of being free. She was ill on the boat and they arrived at Liverpool Street Station, where she was met by Mr Levine, a Jewish man from Glasgow. They travelled to Glasgow and she joined the family as an au pair. She was used as a maid, had to sleep in the kitchen and did not receive a lot of food or any emotional support. She felt very isolated and lonely in this family and had to work very hard. Her mother had packed some chocolate for her journey on the Kindertransport and Eve recalls rationing small pieces of the chocolate so that it would last longer. One day a Christian couple, who were friends of a family who fostered another Kindertransportee, came and invited her for tea. When she told them about her situation, they advised her not to stay the Levines and offered her to come and stay with them. Mrs Levine refused to give Eve her belongings and wrote to the Home Office, as she did not want Eve to leave. So Eve moved in with the Cuthberts. After some time she accepted another au-pair position with a Czech family, the Bergs. This was a better situation but there was also a fair amount of argument. On one day the neighbour who must have heard some heated discussion said: ‘Come over the fence, hen, you can stay with us.’ Eve was very grateful to the Mr and Mrs Lochhead who took her in and gave her love and affection. She stayed in touch with them her whole life.

She did some war work and started going to the Refugee Club, where she met many other refugees. She got married to another young Czech Jewish refugee, but the marriage did not work out and they separated in 1948.  In 1948 she managed to get a visa for her parents, and they arrived in London from Shanghai, where they had spent the war. Although she was delighted to be reunited with her parents, this was also difficult as they had not lived together for almost ten years. Nonetheless they re-established their relationship and had a happy family life together. When she describes that her father worked as a packer in a factory, as he did not like to live on charity, Eve gets very emotional, recalling that her father, who was a successful businessman in Vienna, had to do this kind of manual work in London.

Eve started to work in an advertising agency and eventually became a media executive. She married Dennis Gill (an accountant) in 1957 and was very happily married for 47 years. The couple settled in Cheam, Surrey, as it was well positioned for getting to the West End.  She went back to Vienna once together with her husband and some English friends but felt that the moment people found out that she was from Vienna ‘a shutter went down’ and they were very unfriendly. She went to look at their shop which had become a bank and did not want to go into the building.

Eve is very grateful to Britain for taking her into this country and she sees herself as British. She feels in particular a great allegiance to the Scottish people, who were so kind to her and other refugees. She is very involved in the local community and she started to give talks about her experiences four years ago, when she was approached by Sutton Council.