By Miriam Bosiljevac
“I’m not going back.”
Kitty Wintrop was 12 years old when WW2 started, and like many children living in London, England, she was sent to the countryside. Port cities like London, Leeds and Birmingham were expected to be targeted by the Germans and schoolchildren were quickly packed into trains to be fostered by families in safer locations.
When she arrived with her schoolmates in small village, she immediately felt singled out. Her new foster family pressured her to go to the church and didn’t understand that she was Jewish.
“So [Mrs. Baker] said all right you stay home, and you set the table for lunch,” Kitty relayed. She became upset as she remembered they were served ham. “We were quite Orthodox in our house. And so, we didn’t eat anything that wasn’t kosher. So, we didn’t eat… much.”
The difficulties didn’t end there. She was told to help with the housework.
“Well, I’d never done that,” Kitty said. “We were told to do the housework because she said her chore lady had to go.”
After barely a few months, Kitty left the small village and took a train back to London to find her parents. It was the first time she lied to get onto the train, saying her mother was meeting her on the other side.
She stayed in London for the remainder of the war and dropped out of school, preferring to stay with her family. She worked at the County Hall until the end of the war.
But despite being happy to be back home, she experienced hardship.
Going to a nearby shelter during an air raid, there was a time bomb. “So we had to run out of there… We got to Liverpool Street station and that was full. So we took the subway. Oh, on the tube, as we called it, to the next station, it was the bank and the bank was full. The next station was Saint Paul’s. And then supposedly there was some space and there we stayed for the whole of the war.”
“Every night we’d go,” Kitty said, describing how they slept on the floor until beds were constructed along with storage for their bedding.
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