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Oral history recording with Gerald Goodwin collected as part of The Hineni Project, an insight into the life and stories of a Jewish community in all its diversity. Hineni was a collaborative project between Cardiff Reform Synagogue and Butetown History & Arts Centre.

I was born as Gerhard Guttmann in 1929, in Beuthen in Upper Silesia, Germany. My mother came from well-known Breslau Jewish and rabbinical families on both sides. In August 1937 my parents decided that we had to emigrate. Things were coming to a head, although in Upper Silesia, it was still relatively calm. But my mother kept pressing my father: “We’ve got to go, we’ve got to go”, and as my father later said many years afterwards, “Your mother gave you life twice. I can remember leaving Germany, travelling with my parents, my brother and a Polish maid. We were supposed to immigrate to Hong Kong, but just as we got to London, the Sino-Japanese War took off, so it was decided that we would stay in England. In early 1938, we came to Bristol where my father set up a flourishing dental practice. I went to the Bristol Grammar School where my form master used to refer to me as “Schnitzel”. In 1940 Bristol was declared a protected area, and so our family, as so called “enemy aliens”, had to move away at very short notice. Through friends locally, we found a farm near Malmesbury in Wiltshire. We hadn’t been there very long before two policemen took my father away for internment. It was horrific because we had no means of support and no money was coming in. I think the Quakers helped. We had bi-monthly letters from my father to say that he was in good health and had made some very good friends in the camp. He was released from internment in October 1940. Of course, we were unable to return to Bristol because it was still a protected area and in the meantime, my despairing mother and us boys were told we could not stay on the farm indefinitely, so we decided to come to South Wales, where we had friends from Germany. When my father returned from internment he was again able to practise dentistry in the Rhondda, where we were very well accepted and my father was looked upon as a sort of pillar in the community. But my parents still had to report once a week to the police station as enemy aliens, and could not travel even to Cardiff or go to the coast because it was a protected area. My brother and I could, being under sixteen. I won a scholarship and went to Rhondda County School for Boys in Porth, and after studies in Cambridge and Cardiff, later qualified as a doctor in 1954. In 1947 my family became naturalised British citizens and we changed our name to Goodwin. I became Gerald. It was rather strange at first being in school under one name and then suddenly having another name. I was called up for National Service (Royal Army Medical Corps) in 1956 and posted to Hamburg where I met and married my wife, Ruth. In 1958 I resumed studies in dentistry at St Andrews University and then joined my father’s practice in Porth in 1962. We had a really good relationship with the synagogue and went fairly regularly. My father and Rabbi Graf spent hours arguing. I mean, they were the best of pals, but my father would never let him get away with anything theological which he didn’t accept as being valid. My wife, Ruth, was very active for a long time with the Ladies Guild while our children were growing up. Once our children left home the synagogue didn’t really play such a big part with us. I’m basically agnostic so, unfortunately, in one way the synagogue doesn’t mean so much to me, though it means something to be part of the community.