Ernst Sondheimer: Grandfather Julius Sondheimer
Ernst Sondheimer: Advertisement poster for father’s business ‘Sondal Glues’, at the time of the Festival of Britain in the Exhibition, 1951
Ernst Sondheimer: With brother Franz
Ernst Sondheimer: Brother Franz (left)
Ernst Sondheimer: Playing table tennis with father on the flat roof of our house in Broughton Gardens in Highgate
Ernst Sondheimer: December 2005
Ernst Sondheimer: December 2005
Ernst Sondheimer: As a baby
Ernst Sondheimer: Mother
Ernst Sondheimer: With fiancée Janet on the river Cam in Cambridge
Ernst Sondheimer: Looking out of the window of his room on the top-floor of I- staircase in the Great Court of Trinity College Cambridge
Ernst Sondheimer: Maternal grandparents’ house on the Marktplatz in Wertheim am Main
Ernst Sondheimer: Wedding photo
Ernst Sondheimer: Janet
Ernst Sondheimer: With his brother and beloved grandmother Sophie in her garden in Wertheim am Main
Ernst Sondheimer: Paternal grandparents’s “rather grand house” in the Heidehofstraße
Ernst Sondheimer
Ernst Sondheimer was born 1923 in Stuttgart
Born: 1923
Place of Birth: Stuttgart
Arrived in Britain: 01/09/1936
Interview Number: 112 (S)
Experiences: Early Pre War Emigration to Britain
Interview Summary
Ernst Sondheimer was born 1923 in Stuttgart. His grandparents lived in smaller villages, Oberdorf (running a chemical factory making glue) and Wertheim am Main, where is grandfather Adolf Oppenheimer ran the local bank. Ernst left in 1936 to come to an English school (Hayley School) in Bournemouth, arranged by Mrs. Franklin Cohn. His parents followed in 1937. His father had opened a firm called Sondal Glues. They settled in Highgate in 1938 and Ernst received a small scholarship to attend University College School. They evacuated to Letchworth. In early December 1941 he was accepted to study Chemistry and Physics in Cambridge. While in Cambridge his colleagues were called up to work on a project connected with the Atomic bomb on uranium isotope separation in Canada. As he was not a British national, he stayed in Cambridge and continued his studies and started to do war work under John Rendall. As a physicist he was part of a protected profession and hence not interned. He continued to study under Alan Wilson and received his PhD at Cambridge. He was offered a lectureship at Imperial College in London in 1951 and then became reader in Applied Mathematics in Queen Mary College and later professor of Mathematics at Westfield College in Hampstead, retiring in 1982.
Place of Birth
[On becoming a refugee] Obviously it had a big impact, didn’t it because I am British and not German. What would have happened to me if we had stayed in Germany, is only too clear. So I have lived to eighty-two, instead of finishing in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. There is very little doubt that that’s what would have happened. There are some who survived, but not many.
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