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Oral history recording with Billi Holden 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 in Fischach, a little village in Bavaria, in 1933. I had an older sister, and we lived in my grandparents’ house. My mother came from Prussia, my father from Bavaria, and they were married in 1923. They started a factory in my paternal grandfather’s cowshed, making combs out of natural horn. My mother did all the office work and my father did all the selling. Things then got very difficult in Germany and my family wanted to go to Palestine, but they wouldn’t have us because we were not Zionists. My father heard that Great Britain would take people who could promise work. Nobody knew anything about Cardiff, but they measured it and it seemed to be a straight run to London so that’s why we came to Cardiff. We arrived in May 1939 and were allocated a factory in Treforest with a very low rent. We brought all the machinery from Germany, plus the works manager, who was not Jewish but had been a political prisoner, and we produced goggles for the air force, which is what kept us from being interned. The factory later moved to Porth and then finally to Pontygwaith. None of us spoke a word of English, only German, and my poor sister had to learn Welsh before she could speak English. My father’s English was pretty awful but somehow he always got understood. I always remember he’d tell people he was from Wales and they’d reply, “I didn’t think they spoke like that.” I was the first member of my family to become fluent in English. Another thing I think of so much is that I was with children whose fathers and uncles were killed in the war and nobody ever once said, “Oh, you bloody German” or something. My mother was not particularly religious but liked the music. My father used to go to the Orthodox synagogue in Cathedral Road but I didn’t have to go to Sunday school. My father gave the Reform synagogue a Torah scroll which came from the village where I was born. My husband, Ralph, came over from Germany in 1938, and after we were married he joined the firm in Pontygwaith. After the war we got our old factory and land back in Germany with restitution, and my father suggested that Ralph and I go and sort it out. I didn’t want to go. I thought I was being sent into banishment, but in those days I never questioned anything my father said. We lived in Germany for two and a half years, where we had our son. We moved back to Wales after we sold the factory. My grandmother wanted to go back but my father refused. We lost all our relatives in the Holocaust and he didn’t want her to be upset, but I don’t think she would have been. I don’t have any relations, and what I would love are some roots. I had two Chanukiahs, and I gave one of them to the village where I came from where they have a little Jewish museum. I go back to Germany quite often and there are a couple of people I still know. Something pulls me - I have no idea what, but I wouldn’t like to live in Germany as a non-German.