Lilly Lampert

Lilly Lampert was born in July 1929 to parents Arthur and Josefine Rosenbaum née Löwi in Vienna. She lived in a flat in Novaragasse 20 until she came to England on a Kindertransport. Her mother was a homemaker and her father worked in an office and took Lilly on Sunday walks in the Prater. The family was not religious and didn’t often go to synagogue.

Lilly liked playing with her doll and making clothes for her. Her cousins Hansi and Franzi lived in the same house and they played in the garden a lot. She remembers that life in Vienna changed after the Anschluss and antisemitic songs being sung in the street.

Lilly’s sister Gerti was nine years older. She had piano lessons and was later sponsored by an English opera singer, Alfred Pickerver, to come to England. Gerti left Vienna first on a domestic visa and tried to get domestic visas for her parents. Lilly left on 13 June 1939. She remembers that her mother marked every bit of luggage with her name. Gerti was waiting for her at Liverpool Street Station. They went to Bloomsbury House together where a place was found for Lilly at The Beacon in Tunbridge Wells, a hostel for girls.

At The Beacon, Lilly met another girl from Vienna called Mella. They knew each other from the Jewish school in Vienna. Gerti joined Royal Army Medical Corps of ATS as a nurse and from then couldn’t visit often as Tunbridge Wells was in a restricted area and she needed police permission. Gerti later settled in America. Lilly had the opportunity to emigrate to the US too, arranged by an uncle; but by then she didn’t want to start all over again in a foreign country.

Soon after her arrival in England, the war broke out and she could only write and receive Red Cross letters from her parents. Lilly and other children from The Beacon were evacuated to Harrogate where they lived in Nissan huts. Later, Lilly lived for a while with an English family, the Rose family, but didn’t like it and returned to The Beacon where she felt better being together with other refugee children who were by then her friends and substitute family. At the age of 14, Lilly started working in a nursery and kept living in The Beacon. In 1947 she moved to London where she lived in a hostel in Willesden and looked as a nanny after a little boy. Then she worked in a factory that produced swimsuits and also modelled them.

She met her husband Martin in the Lyceum Ballroom at a dance in 1949 and they got married in 1949 and had three children. Martin was a fellow refugee from Mukachevo (present-day Ukraine).

At the end of the interview, she is joined by two of her children and reads a letter from her mother which she wrote 1943 in Theresienstadt and gave to a relative who survived and sent it to Lilly after the war.

Keywords: Vienna. Löwi. Kindertransport. The Beacon. Tunbridge Wells. Willesden hostel. Harrogate Nissan huts. Scotland. Lampert. Mukachevo. Alfred Pickerver. Lyceum Ballroom.