Weekly Roundup May 13

Frank Henderson's UK Visa

This week the Association of Jewish Refugee's commemorative plaque scheme went international with the unveiling of a plaque outside the UK Embassy in Berlin to honour the embassy personnel who issued visas to German Jews living under Nazi rule, enabling them to enter the UK and start new lives away from danger.

To mark this event we looked into the archives and found one such visa among the photos and documents kindly shared with us by our interviewees. This belonged to Frank Henderson, born in Gotha in 1916, who moved to Berlin in 1935 to train as a fitter in the hope of finding work abroad.

Here's a picture of Frank (centre) in Halle in 1938 with his brothers:

After Kristallnacht the course organiser, Leopold Huh, organised for twenty of his students to go to England to help prepare Kitchener Camp for the reception of refugees. Frank got his visa from the UK Embassy in Berlin and arrived in England in March 1939. He was given twenty-four hours to prepare the camp's hospital section, and then worked with the camp's doctor. He stayed at the camp for three months and then went to Manchester, where he had a friend. 

Here is the visa, granted in Berlin:

Frank's mother died in Theresienstadt and his father died in Auschwitz. Read more here.

We posted the visa image on social media in response to a tweet from the UK's ambassador in Berlin:

Other social media highlights:

We learned about Lillian Heyman's Jewish handball team on parade in Berlin, 1936:

We featured Peter Frankl's father Tibor playing the accordion in a Hungarian labour camp:

And we discovered that Annie Frankl's beloved grandmother Mimmi sewed beautiful yellow stars for her family in Budapest during the war: