Anne Hirschle - July 21, 2006
Planning to Move to England
And uh, so he did everything to investigate how he could leave Germany with his family and by a lucky stroke of luck uh, my mother's brother was in England. Um, he had meanwhile married a um, a Swiss Jewish woman and her parents had said they would only allow the marriage if he would take her out of Germany. They were Swiss and they would not allow their Jewish daughter to live in, in Germany. So he was in England looking around how he could get out. And he heard by chance, knowing that my father wanted to get out, he discovered an old ordinance in England that would allow non...non-English trained dentists to practice in England without going back to school. And this was just serendipity that he heard this and it must have dated back to a time when England was short of dentists and they wanted to get foreign dentists. Anyway, he told my father about this and we were to-my father was to send his credentials to the English Dental Board. And my mother who was a very smart woman said, "Look, the English Dental Board are not going to be interested in reading your German credentials. We're going to have to have these translated into English."
Mm-hm.
And so they did, and he was chosen as one of the few who were given permission to come to England and set up practice without going back to dental school, which he couldn't have afforded. And um, a lot of his friends-he told his dental friends about this, with much better credentials and qualifications were turned down and I'm sure to this day that that was because they didn't translate their credentials. That was a very smart move on my mother's side.
Your parents-both your parents had incredible foresight.
They had great foresight. My mother had had the benefit of-as a seventeen-year-old of going to a finishing school in England, so she knew a little bit about England. But anyway, she realized that sending German credentials to the English Dental Board was stupid.
Mm-hm.
So anyway, that's how we got to England. So my father was able to leave in 1936 and-when I was ten years old-and I followed shortly thereafter-a few months later after they'd established a home. So I essentially grew up in, in England. But he did leave behind um, a brother-one brother and his family who perished in the Holocaust. And he was able-because-with his foresight because he got out so early, he was able to get out one other brother and both grandmothers. And uh, while we were in England, our early years I remember uh, our house was like a boarding house um, people-he, he-my, my parents were instrumental in helping a lot of people get out. And the way they were able to get out at that time was uh, getting jobs as uh, domestics uh, household help. That, that was one way they were given permission to get out. The English gave a lot of permissions to people who came out as domestic servants. So my father, knowing all this, was able to get a lot of people out.
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