Susanne (Susi) Liebermann

Susanne (Susi) Liebermann was born in early-20th century Vienna. With two young children, Eva and Albert, she and her husband Ludwig could see no future in their homeland after the Nazis took power. They were among some 74,000 Germans and Austrians, predominantly Jewish, who were able to come to Britain to make a new life – which for this family began in Wembley – in the run-up to the Second World War.

Whatever relief they must have felt on arriving here was soon undercut by the outbreak of war. They were, technically, enemy aliens. The British authorities had to evaluate what threat, if any, each technically-enemy alien represented. The small number who were judged clear security risks were interned immediately, many on the Isle of Man. As the threat of invasion intensified, however, the authorities began interning the much greater number of borderline cases.

The Liebermanns got caught up in this. In June 1940, Ludwig was interned on the Isle of Man, and Susi and the children removed to Holloway prison, which stood on Camden Road. They were kept in the hospital wing initially, away from convicted prisoners. The prison as a whole, however, was not deemed suitable for children. Eva and Albert were soon separated from their mother, ending up in a children’s home in Kent. Susi, now incarcerated in an ordinary prison cell, found the prison environment – on top of the separation from her children – a living nightmare.

In all, some 3,600 women, half of them officially classed as refugees, were sent to Holloway before being removed to internment camps on the Isle of Man. Some were able to keep their children with them throughout, but Susi was not alone in having her children taken away from her initially.

Eventually Eva and Albert were reunited with their mother in one of the Isle of Man internment camps. But they still could not see their father, who was in a different camp there. It was not until they were all freed in 1941 that they were finally able to live a more ‘normal’ wartime life back in Wembley.