The SPS welcomed writer and researcher Tim Locke for a powerful Holocaust Memorial talk based on his own family’s history. After his mother Ruth Locke died in 2012, he began uncovering the story of her childhood in Nazi Germany, drawing on a large collection of family documents that will soon be donated to the Imperial War Museum. Locke shared the lives of Ruth and her brother Raimund, born in Dachau to Hans and Vera Neumeyer, who were persecuted for their Jewish heritage despite being raised as Protestants. In May 1939, the children escaped to England on the Kindertransport, while their parents were left behind in Munich and later murdered in Nazi camps in 1942.
During the talk, Locke played Hans’s music, excerpts from Ruth’s Imperial War Museum interview, and a moving final letter written by Vera as she was deported. Though the story contains deep tragedy, Locke highlighted the kindness shown to Ruth and Raimund by the English family who took them in. Now part of the Holocaust Memorial Day group in Lewes, he shares this history to show how quickly ordinary life can be shattered, and to pass on his grandfather’s enduring message: the importance of choosing ‘not to hate’.
