Bob Spratt
As a child, Bob lived in a house in Beech Street in Windermere, which was, for a time, a billet for the workers at the Shorts factory at White Cross Bay and then an RAF Sergeant’s Mess.
In 1945, as a child of fourteen, he remembers seeing the child Holocaust survivors in Windermere, and in later life became acquainted with Mayer Hersh, who had been one of the children.
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- Ref.Number: FB027
- Date: 29.3.07
- Interviewer (I): Liz Rice
- Subject: Memories of the child Holocaust survivors
- Period: 1945
I
So how did the Jewish children arrive? Can you remember?
B
Well that I cannot recall, you see it’s 60 odd years ago. And I mean I can remember all sorts of other people arriving like senior German Generals at the end of the war, but I cannot remember how they arrived. I more remember them walking around the streets, sometimes two or three of them together. And we used to look at them and wonder quite where they came from. And nobody told us, so we couldn’t quite make out who they were.
I
So can you sort of explain or describe to me what… how they looked so different? What they looked like.
B
Yes, I think some of their mannerisms… possibly because we lived in a village and we all knew one another. And perhaps just because they were strangers. At that time it wasn’t like now when lots and lots of people come. And I think sometimes they would do rather strange things or you know if they saw a bicycle maybe they would borrow it. And things of that kind.
And there used to be a little bit of chuntering as we called it in this part of the world, by some of the… I remember an old man who used… we used to stand on street corners quite a lot and he used to… he had strange ideas, I’m not quite sure what they were, but he chuntered because they weren’t local lads and ours.
I
Had he any idea where they’d come from?
B
I don’t think he had much of an idea at all no. I can’t remember his name or what he was like. But they were very much the topic of conversation, among lads and lasses who used to stand on the street corners, which was what I was about in those days.