Kurt Marx escaped the Holocaust as a schoolboy 86 years ago — and has just had his third Bar Mitzvah at 100 years old.
Kurt’s life is a testament to survival, escaping Nazi Germany on the ‘Kindertransport’ children’s evacuation aged just 14.
He was put up at a refugee shelter in Cricklewood where he had to be sponsored by Cricklewood Synagogue’s congregation in Warm Lane.
Jewish boys go through the Bar Mitzvah when they reach 13, reciting a reading from the Torah holy book in front of the congregation. A few go through the ceremony again when they reach the age of 73. But to be able to recite it a third time at 100 is rare.
The ceremony at Edgware Reform Synagogue brought together his family and guests including the Mayor of Barnet Rabbi Danny Rich.
“Seeing Kurt in the synagogue at 100 was inspiring,” Association of Jewish Refugees chief executive Michael Newman said. “It was a reminder of endurance in the face of history’s darkest trials, a moment to honour the strength of refugees to look with hope toward the future.”
Kurt was born in Cologne in 1925, his mother a dress designer and his father running a men’s outfitters store.
He remembers a happy childhood — then Kristallnacht, the ‘night of broken glass’ pogrom in 1938 when anti-Semitic rioting was orchestrated by the Nazi authorities across Germany.
His school teacher Erich Klibansky started organising to get pupils on the Kindertransport to Britain.
“I remember saying goodbye to my parents,” Kurt recalls. “I believed they would join me when they got the necessary documentation.”
But they never came — victims of the Holocaust trapped in Nazi Germany.
Kurt arrived in London in 1939 just months before the outbreak of the Second World War.
He stayed at the Cricklewood hostel, then left school to work in a factory - interrupted by an appearance before a tribunal that decided he was “not an enemy alien”.
He helped the war effort on a farm in Buckinghamshire, then worked as a diamond polisher in Hatton Garden after the war and spent a career in the diamond trade until his retirement.
He met his wife Ingrid, a refugee Auschwitz concentration camp survivor, and married in 1948 in Dollis Hill Synagogue.
Kurt tried to find out what had happened to his parents, whose last letter talking about their “impending departure” he received via the Red Cross in 1942.
He found out years later that they were deported to Minsk in Russia and were murdered in the forests of what is now Belarus.
The first time he returned to Cologne was in 1954, and he has since spoken there in schools about the Holocaust “to a different generation of Germans”.
Kurt worries about what happens when contemporary witnesses have all died and new generations might stop being interested in “these old stories”. He fears antisemitism is returning, the only way to fight it being education.
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