"On the occasion of the second birthday that you are no longer with us"

Letter to Beate Hammett (nee Beer) from her father Alex, on the occasion of her 11th birthday in May 1940. Spanning the distance from Berlin to England, Alex wrote “On the occasion of the second birthday that you are no longer with us...” Beate had left on a "Kindertransport" to Southampton in April 1939. Her father illustrated his correspondence with a depiction of children holding yellow flowers.

Beate was born in 1929 in Berlin, “the only and petted miracle of elderly parents” Alex Beer and Alice (nee Davidsohn). On "Kristallnacht", as Chief Architect of the Jewish Community in Berlin, Alex was forced from his bed to witness the destruction of the Prinzregentenstrasse Synagogue in Berlin. Beate’s parents were deeply affected by this experience and made arrangements for their daughter to escape on the "Kindertransport".

"During the first two years of the War, brief communications with my parents continued, on double-sided postcards with a space for a reply… My parents' side of the card made a sad litany of reproaches: for infrequent responses, unanswered questions, neglect”.

Beate’s reflections of her time in Britain echo the experiences of many Kindertransport children. Assimilation into unfamiliar families with unknown customs was, in many cases, traumatic. Cut off from their loved ones, they undertook their own struggles to fit in and re-build lives.

Beate discovered only after the war that her mother had died of cancer in her own home on 5 November 1941 and that her father died in Theresienstadt, on 8 May 1944.