By Dorothea Shefer-Vanson in Mevasseret Zion, Israel
In 1916 my father, Manfred Vanson (van Son) was born in Germany, in the port city of Hamburg. His great-grandfather had moved there in 1823 from Deventer in Holland where his family had lived for many generations. My father grew up in a cultured and musical family, surrounded by uncles, aunts and cousins.
When Hitler made life in Germany impossible for Jews, my father managed to find refuge in England in 1939. His fiancée, my mother Franziska Hirsch, joined him there, and in 1940 they were married. The story of my father’s escape from Germany after what was formerly called ‘Kristallnacht’ but is now known as the ’Reichspogrom,’ is etched in my memory as I heard it from him several times.
At the time he was a young man of 23, living at home with his widowed mother. In the course of that day, they received phone calls from relatives informing them of what was happening in the city and warning them to stay at home with the door locked. This my father duly did and eventually heard the sound of boots on the staircase leading to the apartment where he and his mother lived. He could hear the S.S. men approach the door, then decide that the name v. Son was not a Jewish name, and they went away. The next day his mother, my grandmother, sent a telegram to her cousins in London, asking them to save her son.
My father left Germany, but had to leave his mother behind, hoping that he would manage to bring her over to England, but that turned out to be impossible. For the rest of his life my father lived with the sense of guilt and remorse at not having succeeded in rescuing his mother, who perished in Theresienstadt from malnutrition and neglect. After the war my father refused to set foot in Germany and declined every invitation from the authorities in Hamburg to visit it as a former resident of the city.
My two sisters and I were born in England and grew up there. We benefited from its education as well as from the national health system and the general atmosphere of ‘live and let live.’ Our family life as orthodox Jews seemed happy and normal to us, and we considered ourselves loyal subjects of British society. We received a good education, attended university, were avaricious readers of the books on offer at the local lending library, attended plays and concerts and acquired both Jewish and non-Jewish friends.
We may not have realized it at the time, but it was a privilege to grow up in London, even though our residence in a distant suburb meant that we had to endure long journeys by train and bus as well as on foot to get to school or work, as well as to go to the theatre or the main shopping area in town (Oxford Street).
After my father’s death in 2003 I began to receive an annual report from the official body representing the renewed Jewish community in Hamburg. In addition, my father had been involved in a project to publish the letters his mother had managed to smuggle out to him and his sister from Hamburg and the Theresienstadt camp, and this continued. This book was eventually published in 2005 in German by the Ministry for Political Education in Hamburg as ‘Aber Seid alle Beruhigt; Letters from Regina van Son to her Family, 1941-1942’, edited by Jurgen Sielemann. For its publication the Hamburg municipality invited my sisters and myself to the city to be present at the official launch of the book.
To be present at that event meant overcoming whatever sense of reluctance I might have had in order to acknowledge the effort that had been made to bring the project to fruition even after my father’s death. We were made to feel welcome by the Hamburg municipality and could enjoy our visit to the city where our father had once lived.
There is no denying the fact that Hamburg is a beautiful city, with fine buildings and plentiful greenery, as well as its lakes and canals. Its temperate climate is very similar to that of London, which also helped to make us feel at home there.
After long deliberations, this year my husband and I decided to accept the Hamburg municipality’s invitation extended to former residents and their children to visit the city and participate in the special visitors’ program. And so, in June 2026, we flew to Hamburg and joined the group of individuals like ourselves who were descended from former citizens.
The group consisted of some 30 people, most of them no longer young, coming from various parts of the world. A few were also from Israel, but others were from the USA, Argentina, Brazil and Australia, indicating where people, usually grandparents, had managed to find refuge from Nazi Germany.
The organizers of the program had shown a great deal of care and consideration in planning the various activities, including formal and informal dinners, boat trips and tours of sites of interest to us as former members of Hamburg’s Jewish community. In my case this involved arranging for a wheelchair as my health situation deteriorated and I found participating in some activities too tiring. We were also informed that the group would be accompanied by armed guards as well as an incognito police presence throughout our visit.
I felt touched and privileged at being asked to give a short speech in English at the official dinner held at the imposing senate hall. I managed to say a few words in German, told the audience about my father’s experiences in Hamburg and my family’s life in England. I ended by saying that I felt very much at home in Hamburg.
It is true that I felt at home in Hamburg and could share my father’s resentment at having had to leave the city which had been his home. Currently, the municipality and other authorities are involved in the project to rebuild the imposing Bornplatz synagogue, which was destroyed by the Nazis. Nevertheless, I certainly can’t complain at having lived in London, which also has many advantages.
I sometimes wonder what would have become of me if I had been able to make my life in Hamburg, but that is mere idle speculation. I think that many of my father’s good qualities – tolerance, kindness, generosity, sense of humor – reflect something of his upbringing in pre-war Hamburg, and hope that something of that spirit continues in me. But, like my father in his day, though I still have fond feelings for my former home, my permanent home is here in Israel.
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Dorothea Shefer-Vanson is an author and freelance writer based in the Jerusalem suburb of Mevasseret Zion, Israel.