The text below is the speech delivered by Monica Lowenberg, daughter of Holocaust survivor Ernst Lowenberg, at the Association of Jewish Refugees’ Kristallnacht Commemoration in London on 11 November 2025.
“Good afternoon my name is Monica Lowenberg. Thank you for inviting me to speak today. I am deeply honoured and also very moved.
On 30 December 1995, thirty years ago, aged 30, I took the courage to ask my father to tell me something about his life, for he had lived through probably the most traumatic and historic of times the world has ever known. He typed a statement, in German, never mentioning any reference to Hitler and the Nazis. It was 24 lines long.
‘I , Ernst Josef Georg Lowenberg, (the translation reads) was born on the 28th December 1922, in Halle an der Saale, son of the factory owner David Lowenberg and his wife Marianne nee Peiser. In 1929 my father went to Berlin. He had for the past five years been separated from my mother, and my brother and I stayed with our father. Shortly after the takeover, my father’s business slowly came to a halt. Financially, it became impossible for him to look after my brother and me and so we were taken to the second Jewish orphanage in Berlin Pankow where I stayed until 1938.
‘I went to the boarding school there and then to the ORT technical training school in Berlin Moabit, where I was prepared for evacuation and trained as a mechanic. Due to the efforts of Jewish ORT in London it was possible for the Berlin ORT School, with 100 pupils in August 1939, to move to England. The school was built from scratch in Leeds, in Yorkshire in the North of England and I continued my training there until 1941. I then worked as a mechanic helping to make spit fires until the end of the war.
‘To be able to find out what had happened to the rest of the family, who had stayed in Germany, I worked from 1945-1948 as a translator for the American Army. On returning to England I trained as a bookkeeper/ accountant and worked in this profession to this day. I got to know my wife Rosemarie Lessing in 1959, we married in 1960 and our daughter Monica was born in 1964.’
These were the facts but of course my father in his quiet, modest way had omitted any feelings he had had surrounding the past, they were simply too painful. When my father lay in St Luke’s hospice, and the cancer, that had been fighting his body since 2008, was finally taking its final hold, it became clear how much the past had always remained in his present.
In the same week that my father died two other ORT boys died as well. Another daughter of a former ORT schoolboy noticed that in her late father’s diary the Berlin ORT boys had meant to escape Nazi Germany on the 26 August 1939 but due to complications their escape was postponed to 29 August and 3 September 1939. Dad was one of the 106 boys who were fortunate to leave on the 29th; it would seem that that date and the 26th stayed within his subconscious, for my father died at 10.21am on Tuesday, 26 August 2014; 75 years later.
The first ORT vocational school was opened in Berlin in 1937 with the help of German ORT and the World ORT Union. However, between the years of 1931 and 1934, ORT had already established in Berlin seven vocational courses providing training in woodwork, motor repair, and other crafts. The school, located in an empty factory in the northwest of Berlin, Siemenstrasse 15, offered vocational training to Jewish youth between the ages of 15 -17, boys who were unable to attend a state or municipal trade school. One hundred and one students were enrolled for training in woodwork, two-thirds of whom came from Berlin, and 13 adults in courses in gas and water plumbing.
Louis Wolff, the last chairman of ORT Germany before the second world war, stated that the total number of pupils, or ‘Lehrlinge’ as he named them, attending the school was by the end of 1938 in the region of 200 and administration and teaching staff approximately 20. The Berlin technical school, or ‘Private juedische Lehranstalt fuer handwerkliche und gewerbliche Ausbildung auswanderungswilliger Juden der ORT Berlin’, was heralded as the most important institution of professional training for German Jewry and apparently allowed to open with Adolf Eichmann’s personal consent on the condition that it was exclusively for Jews, who were willing to emigrate.
A number of boys, when interviewed, spoke of the pleasure and sense of satisfaction they found in learning a craft. Helmut Gruenewald decided to become a toolmaker under the watchful eye of the beloved Max Abraham, a former employee of the machine factory Ludwig Loewe who had dismissed him on the grounds of being Jewish.
From 6th February 1939 the Council for German Jewry discussed how to get the Berlin ORT school boys and their teachers out of Nazi Germany and to Britain. There were many delays due to financial matters that needed to be arranged among Berlin, the British government, and British funding bodies. On 1st May 1939, an agreement was finally reached on the funding. But then the Nazis put a spanner into the works and refused to have the school equipment removed and transferred to England, equipment which had been purchased on behalf of the British ORT.
Procedures to transfer the Berlin ORT students and their teachers ground to a halt. It appeared that the transfer would never happen. That is until Col J.H. Levey of British ORT stepped in. Levey went to Berlin to obtain permission to transfer the students and teachers to England, without the equipment, BUT with Adolf Eichmann’s personal consent!
In literally the last hour, a total of 106 boys between the ages of 15-17, with eight instructors and their families left Berlin for England August 27, 1939. They had intended to leave on the 26 August but even that transfer had been delayed on the day! But the following day the 27 August 1939, they left.
The transport was one of the last transports out of Nazi Germany.
A further transfer for the remaining 100 odd ORT boys, who were younger and the school’s director Dr. Werner Simon was planned for the 3 September 1939. However, 3 September 1939 war broke out. The majority of this group including Dr Werner Simon perished in Auschwitz.
As a consequence of the German authorities refusal to allow the schools plant to be transferred, arrangements regarding accommodation for the students and staff in Britain had not been made. Temporary accommodation had to therefore be found for the male staff and students at the Kitchener camp in Kent, and the women and children sent on to Leeds where the schooling of the Berlin boys was to be resumed.
In the Kitchener camp ORT boy Gerd Wolf recalled the following, ‘There were approximately 40 cottages with around 3,600 refugees. All sorts of professions were represented, for instance mechanics, watch makers, cobblers, suitcase makers, photographers and carpenters. Either people worked in the workshops, or they worked in the kitchen, in road construction or otherwise in the sanitary departments of the camp.’ Over the three months the ORT boys were in the camp, the boys such as my father, developed their English skills by also doing odd jobs for the locals, they were struck at the kindness and warm welcome they received.
The hours were long, the work was hard but the weather was glorious and for the first time in many years they felt safe.
Even though my father had gone through terrible life experiences he was nevertheless a compassionate, rational and level-headed man. A man I was blessed to know and love. A man who always retained a twinkle in his eye even though everything he had known had been destroyed. By 26 September 2012, my father had with me established what had happened to 35 members of his family, including his father and older brother Paul, he accepted their murders stoically, which only years of suffering and Vorahnung could have prepared him for, that same year we said Kaddish for them.
Nevertheless, my father would not want his life to be defined by the Shoah and cancer, the latter took his body but his thoughts and his spirit were to the bitter, sweet end free. He was one of my best teachers, I have not yet mastered all of the things he taught me and certainly not his woodwork skills, (a joke that friends of mine here will appreciate after seeing what happened to my Habitat bookshelf recently) but just by being him, by setting the example, he taught me how to remain calm when all around is not, he taught me to accept difference and to make conclusions using facts and reason and encouraged me in all of my educational endeavours no matter how small or grand.
He taught me to laugh and crack jokes in times of adversity and to always try to find the time to offer a listening ear without any need to comment but simply listen. He taught me how to manage my accounts and run my business, the beauty in keeping one’s affairs in order and fighting for what is right and not giving up at the first hurdle. He taught me to move with the times but to not lose oneself in the process. He taught me that love does not consider race, religion, identity, achievements, failures, for it simply loves. I am certain that much of these things if not all he learnt at ORT.
My father lived with my mother happily in North Wembley for fifty four years and even though they lived in a small maisonette it always seemed very large to me as it was always brimming with people from all walks of life, all religions and all races, people who with my father enjoyed my mother’s fantastic cooking: home baked Kuchen und Torten, mitteleuropaeische Kueche, central European kitchen tossed with the occasional Asian and Jamaican spice.
Their flat regularly resounded with lively discussions and debate , whether it was with the voices of members of the Labour party, teachers and support staff from Wembley High School, the Edelweiss dance club, the AJR, the ORT, the Jewish Waisenhaus in Berlin , Second Generation Network, the National Trust, University of the Third Age, friends from France, Germany from their walking club holidays in Schoppenau in Austria, friends from the churches my mother attended – Stonebridge Evangelical and Sudbury Baptist Church – religious Jews, non-religious Jews, atheists and believers, socialists and conservatives and campaigners against the rewriting of history currently taking place in Lithuania and Latvia today. All were welcome in my parent’s home, but the ORT school boys and their wives always played a special role in our hearts and social calendar. They stayed in touch and regularly met up as a group until the bitter end.
My father was not a religious Jew but he was spiritual and he did see himself as a Jewish man and very social minded. He saw a connection between all life forms and though not a musician like many of his mother’s family, he saw a harmony in numbers, a beauty in maths and in the rhythm of life. He had an instinctive touch with children and animals and they in turn were sweet with him, many a friend of mine turned to my father when they went through troubles of their own.
If there is one word that I would use to sum up my father it would be kindness. He knew that kindness multiplies itself a thousand times and that all things can be survived with it. His first teacher in that respect was ORT.”