HISTORY “Losing a limb
meant Philipp couldn’t take over the family’s farming and horse breeding business, so he was sent to Cologne to be an interpreter for the foreign office.
” He was then sent to the Eastern
Front to fight the Russians which is where he had his own foot shot off. With everyone dead around him, he laid in a crater for three days with only a cigarette butt to chew on. His leg became rotten and was forced to chop part of it off with his army issued axe, before he was found by the opposition who amputated his leg below the knee at their field hospital. But gangrene had set in. As Philipp could no longer continue his military service, he was sent home where he underwent a further amputation above the knee. Losing a limb meant Philipp couldn’t take over the family’s farming and horse breeding business, so he was sent to Cologne to be an interpreter for the foreign office. His father worried his son would never marry or have children due to his disability, so he arranged a marriage to a girl called Herta from north Germany, the couple had one child, Rolf. With her new husband away working in the city, Herta wanted to open a village shop to keep her busy. “My grandad was very religious and told my mother she could only turn the front of the house into a shop if it closed on Saturdays – the Jewish Sabbath. But everyone knows
Rolf and his Jewish Classmates
Philipp
Saturday is the busiest trading day, so she said if she couldn’t open then she wouldn’t marry his son. He had no other choice but to let her.” When Rolf was growing up in the early 1930s, the Nazi party’s fascist ideologies were rife as Hitler rose to power. Rolf knew from an early age that he his strict orthodox upbringing was different to that of the Christian ‘Aryan’ children. No child is ever born hating others, but Rolf experienced unimaginable animosity from other young children who had been conditioned into following Hitler’s antisemitic views.
“I would wake up in the middle of the night to steal sweets and chocolates from my own mother’s shop just to prevent getting a beating from the Hitler Youth. But they still got me. I remember being around eight and having a large boil on my arm. My mother wanted me to be seen by a doctor, but I refused until the pain got too much to handle. When
Philipp in the trenches
the doctor asked me to take my shirt off, my chest and back were black and blue from all the beatings I’d received.”
Rolf’s father died in 1937 aged 44 from gangrene that had laid dormant for almost 20 years, leaving Herta to raise their young son by herself. But Rolf says he will always be grateful that his father never had to witness what was to follow.
When hyper inflation hit Germany following WWI, Rolf’s grandfather had been wise enough to draw half of his capital out of the bank which he used to buy 80,000 gold coins equivalent to British sovereigns. Within six months, his remaining money was worthless. But worse still,
Hitler took the gold from him. Today, the value of those gold coins would be in excess of £27 million. But the Heymanns lost everything, except for three gold coins which Rolf found in the bottom of the original trunk they were stored in when it was returned to him some years ago.
“It did me good to have nothing as I’d have been a real spoilt brat if it wasn’t for Hitler. My grandad spoilt me rotten as he never thought he’d live to see the Heymann name live on.”
After the horrors of Kristallnacht, Germany was no longer safe for Jews, and Herta was desperate for her only son to escape persecution by the Nazis. At just ten years old
“At just ten years old and
with a ten-shilling note in his pocket (about 50p), in June 1939 Rolf boarded the Kindertransport bound for Rotterdam where he then caught a ferry to seek asylum in Britain, never knowing if he would see his mother again.
”
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