38 The Times Magazine

n the summer of 2011 I met a gentleman

called Henry Wuga. I was a journalist at

a Scottish newspaper, come to interview

him and his wife, Ingrid, at their home

in Glasgow. He was a retired kosher

caterer with a strong German accent

and a penchant for bow ties, opera and

skiing. I was in my early thirties. He

was in his mid-eighties. I was born in

London in the late Seventies. He was

born in Nuremberg in the mid-Twenties.

I was the daughter of Indian immigrants. He

was the son of a Jewish mother and Austrian

father who had served in the First World War.

We could not have been more different. And

yet, it was as though I walked over the Wugas’

threshold into a new chapter of my own life

that day. A chapter in which Henry Wuga

and I became brilliant friends.

In their elegant mid-century flat in

Giffnock – a Glasgow suburb home to a

significant number of Scotland’s dwindling

Jewish community – the Wugas told me

their extraordinary life stories. I learnt how

abruptly their lives changed when Hitler

was appointed chancellor of Germany on

January 30, 1933. How their parents managed

to secure them a place on the Kindertransport,

the British rescue effort that saved the lives of

almost 10,000 predominantly Jewish children

in the months leading up to the Second

World War.

“It was a lottery,” said Henry, who was

15 when he was sent from Nuremberg on a

Kindertransport in the spring of 1939. “You

would have 100 children in a town wanting

to go and there was only room for 30. There

must have been tremendous trauma for

parents. ‘Why can’t you take my child?’

You can only imagine.”

“I will never forget saying goodbye at

the station,” said Ingrid, who left her mother

and father two months later on a platform in

Hamburg. “You wave goodbye until you can’t

• until the train is so far away you can’t see
  your parents any more.”
  Heinz Martin Wuga, as Henry was known,
  was born in Nuremberg on February 23, 1924


• his father Karl, a stationer, and mother
  Lore’s only child. By the time Henry started
  school, the Wugas were living in the heart of
  Nuremberg’s old town. The same street
  where the Nuremberg trials would be held
  in a few short years. Henry’s childhood was
  happy, uneventful, loving. “Then, of course,”
  said Henry, “the Nazis came.”
  Henry saw the nightmarish spectacle
  of the Nuremberg rallies, the torchlit parades
  marching “15 abreast” down his street. At the
  age of 13, he witnessed the Reichspogromnacht,
  the pogrom the Nazis branded Kristallnacht.
  From his bedroom window, he watched
  Sturmabteilung paramilitaries drag his Jewish
  neighbour out of the house and beat him.

Then, in May 1939, Henry got off a

Kindertransport in Liverpool Street, London,

and boarded a Royal Scot from Euston to

Glasgow. “In the dining car there were waiters

with white gloves serving hot chocolate

in silver teapots,” he sighed. “I will never

forget it.”

In Glasgow, he met his guarantor, one

of many Britons who agreed to take in

an unaccompanied child refugee for the

duration of the war, which required paying

an upfront £50 bond to “assure their ultimate

resettlement”. Mrs Hurwich, herself a Jewish

immigrant from Latvia, was a widow in her

sixties. A complete stranger who gave Henry

his own bedroom, took him to a tailor to get

new clothes and put him into a local school.

“A tremendous lady,” said Henry. “I was one

of the lucky ones.”

In Britain, Henry, like many other Jewish

refugees, was interned during the war. In the

midst of the panic and paranoia that seized

the country, he was summoned to a tribunal

I

at the High Court in Edinburgh in June 1940.

There, a judge made an immediate verdict

based on letters sent between Henry and

his parents via an uncle in Brussels, which at

the time was neutral, and Henry was wrongly

charged with corresponding with the enemy.

Just like that, he was detained in six camps

across Britain. One of them was Peveril, the

high security camp on the Isle of Man. Henry

was just 16 years old.

As the afternoon darkened into evening,

the Wugas told me how they met at a refugee

centre on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow during

the wartime summer of 1941. How abruptly

they had to stop speaking their mother tongue

and start to learn English – “Refrain from

speaking German in the streets and in public

conveyances and in public places such as

restaurants,” advised a booklet issued to German

refugees in Britain. A new identity had to

be wrought. Quickly. And this is how a little

German boy called Heinz, who had been tossed

from here to there in the hurricane of history,

emerged as both someone else and himself.

Henry.

After the war the newly married Jewish

couple set up a kosher catering company,

bringing a certain European flair to Glasgow’s

Jewish weddings and bar mitzvahs. We talked

about all of this as we ate Japanese crackers

from bowls centred on handmade lace doilies

and drank water poured from a bottle encased

in a basket, wheeled into the room on a Sixties

tea trolley. We spoke about some of the greatest

I fell in love with the

Wugas that day. With

their love of life in

spite of the most

unconscionable hatred

Henry and his late wife Ingrid, who died

in 2020, and, below, the couple in their

youth, on a ramble with fellow refugees

COURTESY OF HENRY WUGA