Helene Eisner

Helene Hildegard Eisner was born on December 31st 1927 in Berlin. She lived in Genthiner Straße in the Berlin district of Tiergarten with her parents Rudolf and Hildegard Eisner and her big brother Peter. Her father was a successful industrialist owning a steel-mill who enabled the family to live a prosperous life. But the Nazis coming into power in January 1933 changed everything, as the Eisner family was subjected to the full force of the anti-Semitic policies of the new state. With his business aryanised, stolen and absorbed by Mannesman Steel, Rudolf Eisner and his family fled Germany in February 1938. They first went to Prague, then Warsaw and finally to the UK, arriving on July 7th 1939, just before war broke out. Helene as her other family members, too, had to adapt to a new life in the UK. Her father Rudolf was interned as an enemy alien by the UK Government during the first half of the war on the Isle of Man and died of pneumonia in 1946 in London, aged 58. Helene spent the decades after the war in London and then Hampshire, looking after her mother and working as a teacher. She married late in her life, too late to have children of her own and is buried in Hampshire after having converted to Christianity.