My Voice: Ursula Rosenfeld

Time to tell my story

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• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781526186973
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526186966
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

Ursula Rosenfeld was born in 1925 in Quakenbrück, Germany to a Liberal Jewish family. Following Hitler's rise to power in 1933, they were ostracised and thrown out of their home. On Kristallnacht, the Quakenbrück synagogue was burned down, and her father was arrested and beaten by the Nazis. He was transported to Buchenwald and died there.

Ursula and her sister escaped to England on the Kindertransport in 1938, leaving their mother and infirm grandmother behind. In 1940, Ursula was apprenticed to a dressmaker in London and then trained as a nurse. She married her husband Peter in 1946. After moving to Manchester in 1958, Ursula worked as a theatre nurse, went on to become a health visitor and was appointed a magistrate on the Manchester bench.

Ursula's book is part of the My Voice book collection, a stand-alone project of The Fed, the leading Jewish social care charity in Manchester, dedicated to preserving the life stories of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Nazi persecution who settled in the UK. The oral history, which is recorded and transcribed, captures their entire lives from before, during and after the war years. The books are written in the words of the survivor so that future generations can always hear their voice. The My Voice book collection is a valuable resource for Holocaust awareness and education.

Table of contents

• Front matter
• My Voice Project
• Contents
• 1 – Time to tell my story
• 2 – My parents
• 3 – Quakenbrück
• 4 – The first terrible blow
• 5 – Life becomes harder
• 6 – A strange dream
• 7 – Kristallnacht
• 8 – A terrible loss
• 9 – The Jewish orphanage
• 10 – That’s how fate treats you
• 11 – Finding our way to Bloomsbury House
• 12 – Mrs Shepherd
• 13 – School in Sussex
• 14 – Hella trains to be a nurse
• 15 – Beading ball gowns
• 16 – London during the Blitz
• 17 – Living on tea and buns
• 18 – A pale and emaciated young girl
• 19 – Meeting Peter
• 20 – Mother – no parting, no end, no funeral
• 21 – My wedding
• 22 – In at the deep end and along came Ruth
• 23 – George Cadbury’s bungalow
• 24 – Peter becomes a manager
• 25 – A growing family
• 26 – You need roots
• 27 – My sister Hella went back to Germany
• 28 – Coming to Manchester
• 29 – Schooldays
• 30 – Travel
• 31 – My Working Life
• 32 – Peter’s Retirement, and an MBE
• 33 – Losing Peter
• 34 – Werner
• 35 – My 80th Birthday
• 36 – The Spielberg Foundation
• 37 – ‘Into the Arms of Strangers’
• 38 – Edith and I are reunited
• 39 – Lest we forget
• 40 – Visits to Quakenbrück
• 41 – Those who were lost, and those who survived
• 42 – My Children
• 43 – More British than the British
• My Voice volunteers
• About The Fed