Biography
Hans Robert Levy is the son of Salomon (Sally) and Helene (Weinberg) Levy. He was born on February 2, 1927, in Gladbeck, Germany, where his parents owned a grocery store. His older sister, Elsbeth, was born in 1925, and his younger brother, Oskar, was born in 1928. During the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933, the family store was vandalized. Soon after, the Levys sold the business and moved to Hamm, where Sally started a job as a travelling wine salesman. Hans and his siblings attended the local school, where they were tormented for being Jews. Five years later the family moved to Herzebrock, where they lived with relatives. During the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9, 1938, their house was ransacked and Hans' uncle was beaten. Immediately afterwards Hans' father and uncle fled to the home of another relative in Dortmund, returning only in mid-December. The Levys then registered their children for Kindertransports to Holland. Elsbeth, who was thirteen at the time, left on January 12, 1939; Hans and Oskar left one week later. The boys were moved several times before arriving in Amsterdam in the fall of 1939. Elsbeth stayed in Dribergen initially, but later moved in with German refugee relatives living in Amsterdam. On February 17, 1940 all three siblings were present for Hans' Bar Mitzvah celebration. On May 14, four days after the invasion of Holland, Hans and Oskar sailed for England on the SS Bodgraven with sixty other Jewish refugee children. A few days after their arrival in Liverpool, they were taken to Manchester, where for the next eight years they resided in a hostel while attending school and working. Soon after their children left Germany, Sally and Helena moved to Dortmund, where they were arrested in July 1942 and deported to Theresienstadt. Elsbeth, who was stranded in Amsterdam after the German invasion, also arrested in 1942 and sent to Theresienstadt, where she met up with her parents. Subsequently, she was transferred to an ammunitions factory labor camp. From there, Elsbeth was deported to Auschwitz, where she learned that her parents had arrived on October 17, 1943 and had been killed immediately. Elsbeth survived the war, and soon after the liberation returned to Holland to marry her fiancé, Fred Kaufman, whom she had met in Theresienstadt. After a brief search she located her brothers in England and arranged a reunion. Elsbeth and her husband immigrated to the United States, while Hans and Oskar remained in England.
