Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Hugo Marom - February 8, 2008

Being Evacuated to Bedford

What was on the label?

The number...

Just a number?

...the number...the name and number...similar to the label which we carried...you must have seen in the diaries of Nicholas Winton some of the typical labels which had no name but a number and uh, apparently the Germans were always busy with numbers.

This is true.

Yes. So here we were, we got on a train and got off an hour later perhaps. The entire group...full train of children...and we got off at Bedford Railway Station and at Bedford Railway Station if I remember correctly we must have been there a few hours. People from Bedford came and chose children which they...English children...Lon...the evacuees...so-called evacuees. So we basically became overnight dropped refugees and became evacuees because that's how we were treated in Bedford...as evacuees. Only people who were very close to us realized that we were just a complex type of evacuee, that we were basically refugees from a country that they...Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Slovenia, all these "ia's" were to the English people in a relatively intelligent town with time and tome of high ranking officers in the British Army and Air Force. So, that's how we ended up in Bedford. Um...

Who took you?

We were, we were...my brother and I...I insisted that we would not be separated and a family by the name Chancellor...C-H-A-N-C-E double L O-R, I think...who lived at number 13 Bower Street in Bedford which is a street in the, I would say, the poorest section of Bedford, very close to the River Ouse and the park...Ouse, O-U-S-E, River Ouse, the famous river in that...which flows out into the wash on the east coast, the east coast of England.


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