Escaping the Gestapo:

Jewish Refugees on a Wartime Island

Words & Research: James Rayner

Illustration: Lauren Fry fter Hitler came to power in 1933, tens of thousands of German Jews fled abroad to escape the repressive Nazi regime. By 1938, Jewish minorities in Austria and the Sudetenland (a Germanspeaking region of Czechoslovakia) also fled as Nazi tanks rolled into their regions. Amongst these refugees, some found a safe haven on the Isle of Wight, staying in the homes of everyday Islanders, including a doctor in Ryde and a retired police constable in Totland — much like our Ukrainian refugees today. Some only stayed on the Island briefly, to rest, recover and begin a new life elsewhere, whilst others chose to call it their new home forever.

The first Jewish refugees to reach Island soil began arriving as far back as 1935, and by the outbreak of war four years later their numbers had grown significantly. In Bonchurch, former Austrian shop owner Marianne Salzer stayed with Horace Lane and his wife at their home Upper Ward, whilst over in Arreton, Ilse Sara Kottlarzig, who had previously been a German school teacher, was the guest of Mary and Elizabeth Lyster at Stickleworth Hall. In Ryde, a former Munich bank manager, Robert Schulmann, found a place to stay with Major Harcourt at his grand seaside mansion of St. Clare, and over at 107 George Street, local doctor John Pridmore took in Berlin publisher Viktor Goldschmidt and his family.

During their time on the Island, some of the refugees took up work and adverts appeared in the County Press offering their services. One from 1939 stated: “German Jewish Refugee (23) desires work as domestic help in boardinghouse or school, or family, experienced in general housework, plain cooking, preserving, sewing, washing”. In Chale, four Jewish men lived at Tuttons Hill and worked on local farmland collecting potatoes. One of them was Benno Bejkovsky, a 29-year-old refugee who had previously been an iron merchant in Czechoslovakia. At a Ryde Rotary Club lunch in September 1939, he was invited to be the guest speaker, and

Aexplained to his audience how he’d been imprisoned by the Nazis for three months before managing to escape to Poland — his father, however, was still behind bars. Meanwhile, others chose to seek new opportunities in other parts of the country, including Margot Zlotnitsky, who had initially stayed with retired London Postal Service employee Mildred Eldridge in her red-brick semi at 90 Wilton Park Road, Shanklin. Originally from Berlin, Margot had almost completed her medical training when new Nazi laws prevented her from finishing the course and barred her from working in the profession. After resting and reviving on the Island, by 1941, Margot was working as an assistant nurse in a Cheltenham hospital and applying to the British Federation of University Women for funding to resume her medical training.

When the war took a turn for the worse in 1940, some of the Island’s German-speaking Jewish refugees, including Robert Schulmann and Viktor Goldschmidt, were sent to internment camps on the Isle of Man as the government became increasingly concerned about potential Nazi spies. Younger men were temporarily shipped off to camps in Canada, including Viktor’s fifteen-year-old son Michael, who set sail for Québec on the former Polish passenger ship MS Sobieski. As the situation improved over the following years, Robert, Viktor and Michael were gradually released and started new lives for themselves in London and Kent.

Back on the Isle of Wight though, other refugees chose to settle permanently and make the Island their home forever. One was Josef Maneth, who had worked alongside Benno Bejkovsky on a South Wight farm in 1939. He continued to work in agriculture and, when he passed away in 1989, he was living at Blackhouse Cottage in Chale Green — less than two miles from Tuttons Hill where he had first stayed on his arrival to the Island, fifty years earlier.

Another was Carl Prausnitz, a doctor and pioneering bacteriologist. He was born in Hamburg in 1876 to a father who worked as a German army doctor and a British mother who originally came from Bonchurch. He studied medicine at the German universities of Leipzig, Kiel and Breslau (a city now in Poland and known as Wrocław). In 1926 he became Professor and Director of the Institute of Hygiene in Breslau, but by 1934 was forced to retire because of his Jewish ancestry. The next year, Carl had moved to Bonchurch, changed his surname to his mother’s maiden name Giles and (aged sixty) began work as a GP. Much loved by the people of Ventnor, when he retired from the NHS in 1960, the locals presented him with a cheque for over £300, which he used to buy a Zeiss microscope. He continued his research on bacteriology and immunology throughout his life, and when he passed away in 1963, the 11th of May issue of the British Medical Journal not only printed an obituary notice for Dr. CP Giles of Ventnor, but also his most recently submitted piece of research on the subject of hypersensitivity and hypnosis.