“I had a very happy childhood until the troubled years came.”
“I couldn’t talk about the past. In fact I didn’t tell my children anything until they heard about it on the radio when I lived in Dublin in the early 70’s.”
Rosel Siev was born in Aurich, North west Germany in June 1921. She grew up in a very religious Jewish family and had a happy childhood. She was one of five children and the family were very close.
Rosel had to return to her Jewish elementary school when she was high school age before Hitler decreed that Jewish children were not allowed to attend non-Jewish schools. However, when she was 15, she went to a finishing school for young Jewish girls on the Swiss border for a year.
Rosel later lived in Fulda and Frankfurt where she experienced Kristallnacht. She remembers walking in the street and seeing Jewish places of interest burning and being destroyed. Close non-Jewish friends turned against her and her family which impacted her badly and her parents thought it would be good for her to come to the UK.
She arrived in Cardiff in 1938 when she was 17 but relocated to Manchester soon after, where she was a student nurse at Crumpsall Hospital for seven years, and became a staff nurse.
Rosel married Arthur in 1947 and had two daughters. Sadly, Arthur died suddenly in April 1969. Rosel was introduced to her second husband, Asher who had also been widowed, and married him in 1971. She went to live with him in Dublin and became stepmother to his four children and have become one happy family. Rosel has many grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Sadly Rosel’s parents and two younger brothers were killed in concentration camps, along with many of her extended family. However, her sisters Hannelore and Hildegard survived the camps.
