Seeking a new identity: a young refugee in Britain 1933-1948

In 1933, aged 13, Werner David was sent by his parents to Buxton College to escape the antisemitism of his teachers and pupils in his Dusseldorf school. Over the next 15 years he sought to establish a British identity through his education and war work, marriage, naturalisation and name change. During the 1930s he was joined in Manchester by his siblings where they learnt at a distance of the death of their father in Nazi detention and the escape of their mother and her brother and his family to Belgium. His desire to ‘become British’ was interrupted by, what he called, ‘the disgraceful injustice’ of internment in three camps including Huyton. We learn of this story through surviving photographs, his internment journal, records from The National Archives and World Jewish Relief, and memoirs he wrote towards the end of his life to inform his children and grandchildren of an early life he rarely mentioned. The talk is presented by his son, Rob David.