Audio clip from an oral history interview with Evelyn Ruth Kaye: 'Father's internment and deportation', August 2007

Description

This audio clip is from an interview with Evelyn Ruth Kaye, recorded by the Imperial War Museums in August 2007. In the clip, Evelyn talks about her father’s internment as an ‘enemy alien’.

Evelyn Ruth Kaye came to Britain from Vienna in Austria on the Kindertransport. Her father, Walter Finkler, was arrested and sent to Dachau concentration camp after Kristallnacht but was released and managed to flee to Britain on a forged visa. A musician and journalist, on his arrival he stayed briefly at Kitchener Camp, a welcome camp for Jewish refugees in Kent. In 1940, he was arrested and interned on the Isle of Man. Evelyn went to school in Builth Wells in mid-Wales during the war. Her mother had also escaped on a domestic visa and worked in London and the Isle of Wight. The family were reunited in England after the war’s end.

Transcript

Oh, we had one bad moment. You know they sent some of the people from the Isle of Man to Australia, and we had a letter from my father to say he was being sent to Australia, and the ship was sunk, and only ten people were saved, and the BBC announced the names, and my father’s name was amongst them. And we waited for about a fortnight, and then he was only allowed to write once a month and he wrote, he had got on the ship, but being absent-minded he’d forgotten his passport so they turfed him out.

Source.

IWM, Kaye, Evelyn Ruth (Oral history) [accessed 9 June 2022].

Depository: Imperial War Museums, catalogue number: 30250.