My mom, Olga Grilli, a”h, gave us 90 years, but for me it was not enough. Facing debilitating renal failure, Mom didn’t want to continue treatment. But I insisted. You see, besides being a heroine to me and my sisters, Mom was part of a little-known episode in the history of the Holocaust. At age 11, she was given the gift of life, at a time when so many other Czech Jewish children never had a chance. Didn’t she owe it to them to continue to live at all costs? Or maybe I was deluding myself – I just didn’t want to let her go.
Mom fought until the end only to have her body fail her on July 4, 2018. Less than a year later, my wife Susan and I traveled to England, to the small town of Croston. We were there to dedicate a plaque honoring a couple from that town who had taken Mom in to save her from the Nazis.
Now that you know the end of the story, let me start from the beginning. Holocaust tales are never ending, and this is ours.
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Mom was born in 1928 in Chotebor, Czechoslovakia, a small town 40 kilometers southeast of Prague. Her mother, Marie Bergmann, had married Imre Gabanyi originally Grunhut, a Hungarian 15 years older than she, in an arranged marriage in 1927. Nine months later, Olga was born, and a few months after that, her father divorced her mother and went back to Hungary – never to be seen or heard from again.
Marie was now a single mom with a small child. She and Olga lived with Marie’s father, Wilhelm Bergmann, and Marie supported herself by tutoring German. Wilhelm was a successful businessman. He and his two brothers owned a hair factory that sold wigs and hairpieces to the opera and theater in Prague and to Orthodox women in Poland. Wilhelm’s brothers lived in Laupheim, Germany. The granddaughter of one of them, a second cousin to Olga, was very famous. She was Gretel Bergmann, the German high jump champion in 1935, who, in 1936, was used by Hitler to persuade the American team to participate in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
The Bergmanns were an assimilated Jewish family. Nonetheless, Olga was raised with a strong Jewish identity that had been handed down from generation to generation. She went to synagogue on the High Holidays and regularly visited the local Jewish cemetery, where many of her Bergmann relatives were buried.
Olga’s grandfather Wilhelm had a big influence and was a father figure to her until his death in 1935. Ironically, Wilhelm had immigrated to America in 1876; he lived in New York City for 20 years and became a U.S. citizen. After his wife died in childbirth, he returned to Czechoslovakia with two young children. He had found that the streets in New York were not paved with gold and experienced real hunger. Because of that, in Chotebor, he always invited Jewish peddlers for a meal; no one should go hungry. Had Wilhelm stayed in America, Olga’s history would have been very different.
My mother’s family did not have a lot of money, but Mom had a normal childhood. She played the piano, did well in school, ate what was on her plate – food was never to be wasted – and did what she was told. Her childhood was a happy one filled with fun and much love. In the summers, she went to a free camp sponsored by the Czech communist party. She learned Russian songs praising Comrade Stalin, and she would laughingly sing these songs throughout her life.
Everything changed after the infamous Munich Pact of September 30, 1938. In response to Germany’s threats to invade Czechoslovakia, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with Hitler. Anxious to avoid war at all costs, Chamberlain chose appeasement and allowed Hitler to annex the Czech territory of Sudetenland. The Czechoslovakian government was never consulted.
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Meanwhile, a 29-year-old English stock broker named Nicholas Winton was planning a ski vacation in Switzerland. A friend asked him to come to Czechoslovakia instead. The friend was working with refugees created by the German annexation of the country’s Sudeten region. Winton canceled his ski vacation and traveled to Czechoslovakia in December, 1938. He had been alarmed by the Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany and Austria, which had occurred just a month earlier, on November 9-10, 1938. Now he was worried that all of Czechoslovakia would soon be swallowed by Germany. After helping his friend in refugee camps filled with Jews, he decided to organize his own independent rescue effort for Jewish children, similar to the Kindertransport that brought children to England and safety from Germany and Austria. Without authorization at first, he began accepting applications at his Prague hotel; he then opened an office. Word spread, and crowds of desperate parents lined up on the streets to obtain a place for their children.
Winton obtained a promise from the British government to accept children on condition that 50 pounds, an enormous sum of money in those days, was deposited for each child and that homes were available for them. Leaving the Prague operation in the hands of friends, Winton returned to London to find the money and the foster homes. Working as a stockbroker by day, he devoted his afternoons and long nights to the rescue work, along with his “committee,” consisting of himself, his mother, his secretary, and a few volunteers. He advertised in British newspapers and in churches and synagogues. Frustrated that the Home Office was very slow issuing entry visas, he forged them.
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Marie was able to get Olga on Nicholas Winton’s list in mid-1939. Olga departed the Woodrow Wilson train station in Prague on July 30, 1939. She begged her mother to let her wait and join her cousin Hana on the next kindertransport train scheduled for September 1, but Marie insisted that Olga keep her spot. Unfortunately, World War II broke out on September 1, and that train never left Prague. It was supposed carry an additional 240 children. All but one of those children died in the Holocaust, a fact that pained Nicholas Winton for the rest of his life. The one that survived was Olga’s cousin. A Czech policeman took her into his apartment for a year, at great risk to himself, and forged her birth records in the town hall by changing her religion.
Thus it was that Olga was on the last of the kindertransport trains from Czechoslovakia, becoming one of 669 Jewish Czech children saved by Nicholas Winton. Many years later, her children and grandchildren would read a journal entry about that emotional terrifying day, when she was forced to say goodbye to her mother, her country, and everything she had known.
On August 2, Olga, age 11, found herself in England at the Liverpool Street Station, sporting a cardboard label with the number 58 hung around her neck. Due to train delays, her foster father, Norman Cardwell, arrived a few hours late. Mom was the last child on the platform and was convinced that the Cardwells had changed their minds and that no one wanted her. But Norman Cardwell did show up, and brought Mom to Croston to live in their home.
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The Cardwells had decided to sponsor a girl but could only support one. They picked my mom at random from two pictures that were sent to them: of Olga and another girl. The Cardwells could barely afford to feed themselves, never mind another mouth at the kitchen table. The Quakers of England put up the 50-pound bond.
The Cardwells were deeply religious Methodists, very modest in their nature. Olga always said that they practiced what they preached. Mom’s job was to cut the newspaper which was used as toilet paper in the outhouse since the house at 48 Moor Road had no indoor plumbing. Olga attended church and Sunday school every week, where she played the piano for the children as they sung their hymns. The Cardwells would have liked Olga to convert and become a Methodist, but she did not succumb to pressure and told them she wanted to remain Jewish.
When Olga arrived in England, she wrote the number 100 on a piece of paper, thinking that that would be when she could return home. Each day she decreased the number by one, and when she got to zero she started all over again. Every night she cried herself to sleep. Fortunately. the Cardwell’s dog Laddie helped mitigate the homesickness. She also became friendly with Gladys Stephenson and her mother Clarissa who lived across the street.
Olga found herself all alone and dependent on total strangers for the basic essentials of life – clothing, food, and shelter. It was very difficult for her emotionally. Her psyche had been damaged by her father abandoning her, and then her mother sent her away to England even though she did not want to go and did not comprehend the reason. (Years later, especially when she discovered what happened to her family, she of course understood why her mother had sent her. Yet, she could never reconcile herself to it emotionally, even in old age. She became insecure and was insecure her whole life. The insecurity would manifest itself when anyone close to her left her. She hid this issue well from others but once our father was gone, we had to make sure Mom was never alone. She was fragile.)
After spending two years at the local school, Olga left Croston in 1941 to attend high school, returning to the Cardwells for school breaks and holidays. The Czech government-in-exile had set up a high school in South Wales for all the Czech children, Jewish or not, to attend so that they could continue to learn the language and customs and return to their homeland when the war ended. Mom was in contact with her Czech classmates until the end of her life.
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After the war ended, my Mom received letters from the Red Cross informing her that her mother Marie, Marie’s two sisters, and her father Imre had perished at Auschwitz in 1944. There was no one at home in Czechoslovakia to go back to. Olga’s mom made a decision that no mother should have to make: to let go of her only daughter so that she might live.
I found an old piece of paper that contained my mother’s thoughts upon learning of her mother Marie’s death: “It was late in the afternoon, and my mother was giving me some last few pieces of advice – what to do and what not to do when I am away. I’m afraid it went in one ear and out of the other as I was half crying. My mother and aunts went with me to the train station which was crowded with children of all ages, all going on the same journey. I went into the train and leaned out the window to speak to my mother. She was telling me to be good, to write often, etc. I was holding my mother’s hand; she had a hard time to keep back tears. I felt a hard lump in my throat, yet I managed to keep my tears back. I tried to sound jolly, yet in vain. The doors of the train were being shut. Last grasp of my mother’s hand, a last goodbye, last look on the face which I loved beyond anything else, which meant so much to me, which I will never see again.”
After finishing high school in 1945, Olga went to St. Godrics College in London, paid by the Czech government, where she learned shorthand and typing. Then she found a job as a secretary. She had a boyfriend, and they planned to go to Palestine together. In 1947, my Mom was told by her mother’s sister, who spent the war years in New York City, that she needed to move to the U.S. This aunt had promised her sister Marie to look after Olga if Marie should not survive. So, at age 19, Olga once again had to pack her bags and immigrated to America.
Olga arrived in New York in July 1947 with just the clothes on her back. A distant Bergmann cousin, Lore, in England, bought her passage on a ship and her first suit. Olga quickly found a job in New York. One Saturday night, she went with a friend to a dance at Temple Rodeph Shalom and found her husband – our father, Leon Grilli, a refugee from Austria. He had been in the U.S. army for over four years and was going to Columbia on the GI Bill, studying civil engineering. They married in 1950 and settled in Eastchester, New York.
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My father had his own story. His family, originally from Romania, lived in Paris from 1936 to 1940 and prior to that Vienna. They retreated with the French government to Bordeaux in June 1940 and found a passenger ship to take them to America since they had previously obtained American visas. However, the ship was delayed in the Bordeaux port and no port authority could provide any further information about the delay. My father, age 16, left the passenger ship and found a French freighter that was leaving for England that day. After bribing the French captain, my father and his brother and parents boarded the freighter and left France the same day France surrendered to the Nazis: June 22, 1940. They were the only passengers on the freighter. They arrived in England and were immediately arrested by the British authorities since they had no UK visas. Two months later, they left England and arrived in New York on a ship that on a subsequent voyage was sunk by a Nazi U-boat. The original passenger ship in the Bordeaux harbor that was to take them to America never left France.
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In 1968, my father took a job in Poughkeepsie. There, the Grillis made a good life, raising their three children, making many friends, and being active members of the small Poughkeepsie Jewish community. In 1969, Mom started a business, Orbit Books, that supplied scientific books to government libraries. She had previously worked for a similar company in White Plains but that company failed financially. As a woman business owner, Mom was way ahead of her time. She was a born salesperson and finally landed her crown jewel, IBM.
Mom loved America and was a staunch supporter of Israel. At the same time, she had a strong attachment to Czechoslovakia, where she never experienced any anti-Semitism. She was a lifelong member of American Friends of the Czech Republic and donated to their causes. Mom was especially proud that, in 1947, Czechoslovakia was the only country in the world that sold arms and planes to the struggling Jews of Palestine, some of whom were her classmates and friends from the Czech school in Wales, who settled in Palestine after World War II.
Mom never forgot what relatives as well as total strangers had done so much for her as a child and young adult and both she and my dad took their turn to help others. Over the years, they helped my dad’s cousin Leisel’s children Wanda and Stephan to leave communist Romania and come to America. It was very important for both my parents because they had travelled that road as refugees many years ago. They helped her cousin Hana, who still lived in Communist Czechoslovakia, buy a refrigerator and gave them financial aid numerous times. Mom visited her childhood friend Gladys in Croston and bought her a television to alleviate her loneliness.
At the very end of her life – two days before she died – Mom told me that she wanted something done for the Cardwells and the town of Croston. She told me that she always loved the British people, who had been so kind to her in her darkest days. She did not want what they had done to be forgotten. She asked me if I would make sure that it happened.
And so, we found ourselves in Croston. We dedicated a plaque at a ceremony where the dignitaries and some clergymen of the town were present. Also present were Consul General of the Czech consulate; Barbara Winton, granddaughter of Sir Nicholas Winton; the townspeople of Croston; and members of the Jewish community. The plaque reads, “In memory of Norman and Merci Cardwell who in 1939 opened their house to our mother, Olga Bergmann Gabanyi, and saved her life. She was 11 years old and a Winton kindertransport refugee from Czechoslovakia. By her Children, 2019
In a moving ceremony, we honored the Cardwells for what they did 80 years ago. They have not been forgotten. Anyone who steps into that church will see the plaque and hear about the Cardwells and what they did for our mother. The world turned its back on the Jewish people, but the Cardwells opened their arms to a Jewish child.
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And what became of Nicholas Winton? He married and lived the rest of his life quietly in England. He did not mention his rescue activities to anyone, not even his wife Grete. However, she found a scrapbook in their attic in 1988, 50 years later. It contained photos of all the children, a list of their names, and other documents. These papers are now at Yad Vashem in Israel.
Winton’s story was soon published in a newspaper, and he appeared on a nationwide BBC television program, “That’s Life.” The station brought some of “Winton’s children” to the studio, and they expressed their gratitude to him on the air. After this, many of the rescued children, grandparents now, contacted him from all over the world. Winton also received recognition for his humanitarian deeds from many sources. His story is the subject of two films. And, on December 31, 2002, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his services to humanity.
A relatively unknown fact about Sir Winton is that he was actually born Jewish. His parents were Wertheims, who had come to England from Germany years before, changed their name, converted, and had Nicholas baptized. It is because his Jewish ancestry that Sir Winton did not receive the Righteous Among the Nations designation, the honor bestowed by Yad Vashem on gentiles who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust. However, the record of his rescue activities is preserved in both Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
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The Cardwells passed on long ago, and Sir Nicholas Winton died in 2015, at age 106. Now Olga, too, is gone. But their stories must live on in hopes that the telling of their deeds will in some small way inspire more kindness and righteousness to proliferate in the world.
Richard Grilli lives in Baltimore.
