Newbury Branch meeting Wed 8 January 2025
Zoom talk by Phyllida Scrivens
Escaping Hitler: a Jewish boy’s quest for freedom
The speaker described her long-standing friendship with Joe Stirling, who was born Günter Stern in a Rhineland village in 1924, and whom she met in old age and chose for her biographical study. With photographs old and new she outlined his life-story, from Kristallnacht in 1938, in which his father was arrested, and the family forced to flee. In 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Günter came to Britain under the Kindertransport arrangement, under which the Nazis allowed 10,000 Jewish children to leave Germany. He was placed with host families, first in Birmingham, then in north Wales, and lastly in Gloucestershire. All the time he believed that his parents would eventually be able to follow him.
Now calling himself Joe Stirling, he went on to join the British army, and after the war became a Labour party activist. Later, he achieved business success running his own travel business in Norwich, a city for which he became Sheriff in 1975.
Joe co-operated enthusiastically with the speaker in her biographical research, attending book-related events and being delighted to meet surviving relatives and former neighbours. He learned that his parents had died in Nazi death camps, but that his uncle and aunt, thought to have died en route to the USA in 1940, had in fact survived and lived well in New York.
Joe himself died aged 94 in 2020, a prominent and much-loved figure in Norwich, survived by his four children.
