Hugo Marom - February 8, 2008
Arriving in London II
So, that's one thing. The other thing is what Bill Barazetti and Winton arranged was a home for us apparently with a childless couple where the father wanted to surprise his wife with two children and he apparently died of a heart attack during the time when before we left and before we arrived so his...of course his wife didn't know anything about it, not to this very day and so we were dependent on this hostel coming to pick us up. Uh, this was one of the reasons that Nicholas Winton in his diary and so forth writes that he appointed Bill Barazetti to make sure that parents didn't approach more than one body but this approach was made already at that critical time when apparently certain parents approached the ???, the Salvation Army, anybody...they were hysterical about getting...trying to get the children out. You know how something...news like this spreads that what's going to happen and so forth. And um, and uh, so, um, finally one thing I do remember is arriving at a hostel. It was a Saturday morning...we arrived on Thursday...Thursday, Friday...you can check when we arrived by, you know, all these computers you can get the dates record...what date it was on that particular day...and on Saturday morning we're...we stopped in front of a hostel and he took me to the door of this hostel and a lady opened the door and he asked her...that he'd phone or something like that, he had already been contacted...he brought these boys. And she asked me...not...at that time I didn't realize anything until we left the door if I had any keys in my pocket or any money. So, I said, "Yes, I have a few shillings and keys to the...suitcase keys," and I showed them to her. And of course she said, "We can't...we are full up and we can't accept children because it was a Saturday morning," and here I was carrying keys and money in my pocket. So, those are the type of things that I remember. Of course, after the war I looked for this taxi driver and there was no way through the taxis and police and so forth but uh, didn't succeed in finding him. Most probably he was killed during the war in either in bombing or in the army because he was young enough to be in the army...at least, that's the assumption.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn