Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Lucy Glaser Merritt - July 8, 1991

On, on September 1st, on September.

Second.

second, when England became involved in the war what, what were your reactions? Yours and your father's?

I had, well-I wasn't with my parents. I was in the hospital working and they were staying in a home not too far from there. I remember turning on the radio and hearing, hearing this address and I was horrified with the war. And I was thinking of all the people who were left behind. And then I contacted my parents and my mother was frantic about her relatives and my father about his brother and mother and sister-in-law. Because we knew the communication was then cut. We couldn't write from England anymore. But I, I was afraid he would win. They thought he would lose right away and I thought he was going to win. And that would be a close, and then you'd go through the whole thing again.

Yeah.

Especially when it looked like he was going to come across the channel.

Well, when did the bombing start?

Oh it started in the end of '39, by which time the uh, British government had decided that I was an enemy alien. They began to worry about uh, the many people with a German passport. And I was in Exeter, which is a southern town. So they made me quit the hospital and I had to come to London. And my father was interned in England. And there were uh, the village kids were, were throwing red tomatoes and they were shouting German swine which was so funny, it should have been recorded. Anyway, he was interned in England and my mother and I were in London waiting for their passage. And then my mother sent a letter to their cousins here asking him to extend the affidavit to me. And I was at that time twenty and a half and I came over as their minor child because I just missed the twenty-one, see. So they didn't need that much of an affidavit. They just needed a small support statement.

So you left in 1941.

In 19...in November 1940. We came across and uh, I went to the embassy and I had written a falsified letter-maybe that will make my immigration illegal. Saying that my parents had asked me to pick up their papers for them because my father couldn't get out. He was interned and we had to pick up the visa from the embassy. So I wrote myself a letter and I went with that and they gave me the visa. And then I had to go to the camp and get my father out of hock.