In partnership with The Association of Jewish Refugees, Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies and Insiders/Outsiders

About the event:

Join us for the launch of this new volume by Bea Lewkowicz and Anthony Grenville, who will speak at the event. The event will also feature a short film screening and live interviews with some of the children of the refugees featured in the volume.

In Émigré Voices Lewkowicz and Grenville present twelve oral history interviews with men and women who came to Britain as Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria in the late 1930s. Many of the interviewees rose to great prominence in their chosen career, such as the author and illustrator Judith Kerr, the actor Andrew Sachs, the photographer and cameraman Wolf Suschitzky, the violinist Norbert Brainin, and the publisher Elly Miller. The narratives of the interviewees tell of their common struggles as child or young adult refugees who had to forge new lives in a foreign country and they illuminate how each interviewee dealt with the challenges of forced emigration and the Holocaust. The voices of the twelve interviewees provide the reader with a unique and original source, which gives direct access to the lived multifaceted experience of the interviewees and their contributions to British culture.

The event will also feature a short film screening and live interviews with some of the children of the refugees featured in the volume: Tacy Kneale (daughter of Judith Kerr), Julia Donat (daughter of Wolfgang Suschitzky) and Tony Balacs (son of Doris Balacs).

About the speakers:

Dr Bea Lewkowicz is a social anthropologist and oral historian and is the director of two oral history archives, the AJR Refugee Voices Testimony and the Sephardi Voices UK Archive. She is a member of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her research interests include oral history; trauma and memory; diasporas and displacement; and nationalism and ethnicity. She has worked on many oral history projects and has directed and produced a wide range of testimony-based films. She has also curated several exhibitions, such as Continental Britons, Double Exposure, Sephardi Voices, and Still in Our Hands: Kinder Life Portraits. Among her publications are ‘The Jewish Community of Salonika: History, Memory, and Identity (2006) and ‘This is the Story of my LIfe’: An Interview with Julus Carlebach’ (2020). More information about Bea’s projects at bealewkowiczarchive.com.

Dr Anthony Grenville, son of Jewish refugees from Vienna who fled to London in 1938, was born in 1944. He lectured in German at the Universities of Reading, Bristol and Westminster from 1971-1996. He has worked for many years with the Association of Jewish Refugees and was Consultant Editor of its monthly journal from 2006-2017. With Dr Bea Lewkowicz, he was responsible for creating the exhibition ‘Continental Britons’ (2002) and the first part of the AJR’s ‘Refugee Voices’ collection of filmed interviews (2003-2008). He has been Chair of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, University of London, since 2013. He has published very widely on the history and experience of the refugees from Hitler in Britain, including Jewish Refugees from Germany and Austria in Britain, 1933-1970: Their Image in ‘AJR Information’ (2010) and Encounters with Albion: Britain and the British in Texts by Jewish Refugees from Nazism (2018).

Event guidelines for those joining online:

1. The Library will send you a Zoom link and joining instructions via email prior to the event. Please check your junk email folders.

2. Please try and join 5 minutes before the event start time and we will let you into the room (do try and bear with us if this takes a few minutes).

3. If you would like to ask a question during the event, please type your question into the chat function, and we will endeavour to answer as many questions as possible during the Q&A. Your webcam will not be seen during this event.

4. The event will be recorded for the Library’s YouTube channel and will be shared at a later date.