HISTORY
merchants and managed to get him a three-month trial with the company. “I’d been working as a lorry driver for a wine and spirits company earning £4 a week, and even on probation this job was £8 a week. But it was heavy going, stripping down old batteries for scrap and getting covered in acid. I couldn’t hack it and was ready to pack it in. But I finally got the knack after two weeks. After the three months, my wage went up to £12 a week, which was about double the average wage in the 1950s.”
Schoolmates “Herta had originally planned for she and
Rolf to emigrate to Johannesburg where she had family. But the South African prime minister at that time was a Nazi who stopped all Jewish immigration. Instead, they were to join her cousin who was living in Sheffield.
”
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.
She managed to flee Germany a few months after her son, just two weeks before the war began. She was forced to sell their 16-room farmhouse for £400, and the 1,000 acres of land and two orchards for £600 – but it was take it or leave it. With the Nazis confiscating all Jewish gold and wealth, Herta had an ingenious, if not terrifying, idea to get one over on Hitler. “Before she left Germany, my mother had all her teeth pulled out and a set of 14ct gold teeth fitted. How she opened her mouth I don’t know. Once she arrived in Sheffield, she had a set of false teeth made for £5 and sold the gold to the dentist for £165.”
Rolf and his mother lived with her cousin at Embassy Court flats, behind Park Hill in the city centre, where Rolf attended Park School. “It was a very rough school, the kind where the kids would kick a house brick around if they had no football. The only English words I knew were yes and no, but they soon taught me some expletives.” Rolf and Herta were together for two months before the 250 schoolchildren were evacuated, with
Rolf being sent to a farm in Farnsfield near Mansfield. Herta took a position as a live-in maid for a Jewish family and would become a mother figure to the family’s two young sons after the own mother died six months after Herta began working for them. Rolf spent four years at Farnsfield and returned to Sheffield aged 14 to start work. But by the time he reached 21, he’d already had 17 jobs in everything from farming to steelworks and even door-to-door sales. He just couldn’t settle. “You need to have luck in life. In Germany, my father gave us the good luck to evade the Nazis. And in Sheffield, luck came when I met my wife, Jacqueline, in 1950. I met her at a dance at City Hall; she was 19 and had split up from her boyfriend. At the end of the night I asked if I could take her home, but she said, ‘I don’t think you’ll want to when you know how far away it is’. She lived near Deepcar and I was only living on Ecclesall Road, so it would have been some walk.”
The pair married nine months
later in February 1951 and would have celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary this year, but Jacqueline sadly passed away on Christmas Day 2019. Rolf still lives in the house where Jacqueline lived when they met.
Rolf says that he has been lucky that the British have always been very sympathetic towards him and he
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aroundtownmagazine.co.uk Rolf as a child
has never received any antagonism from anyone – anyone except his own mother, to the point where she threatened to take her own life if he married Jacqueline.
“When we first got together, I had to keep the relationship a secret from my mother as she disapproved of Christian girls. But I’d had bad experiences with Jewish families asking what hope, what prospect I really had in life – completely undermining the life I’d come from. I vowed never to marry a Jewish lass.” While Rolf has since denounced his religious upbringing, Herta followed a very devout Jewish lifestyle and feared what people would think of her son marrying outside of his faith. Mercifully, when the couple found out they were expecting a baby six months after their wedding, Herta began to come round to the idea. She lived with them towards the end of her life and couldn’t have wished for a better daughter-in-law who helped care for her.
It is in those seemingly ordinary moments that hold extraordinary meaning. Had he never met Jacqueline at City Hall, his life may never have played out the way it did – and what a remarkable life Mr Heymann has led.
Jacqueline’s father was the manager of Bramall’s scrap
“You need to
have luck in life. In Germany, my father gave us the good luck to evade the Nazis. And in Sheffield, luck came when I met my wife, Jacqueline, in 1950.
”
Rolf struck up a great relationship with the company’s owner, Albert Bramall, who could speak better German than Rolf, having been posted in north Germany with the RAF during the war. The Heymanns used to babysit for Albert’s two sons and would become godparents. Two years after joining Bramalls, Rolf decided to go it alone and start his own scrap business dealing with silversmiths and engineering firms, with Albert behind him all the way. Then at 32, he retired. A couple of years earlier in the late ‘50s, Rolf and Herta were contacted by a solicitor in Germany informing them they were to receive reparation from the German government to compensate them for their losses and exile at the hands of the Nazis. Rolf was to be awarded three lump sums, while his mother was offered £100,000 to call it quits. “The best thing she ever did was turn it down. The second offer was monthly payments four-times that of the average British wage. She lived to be 91 so when she died in 1990,
Jacqueline
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