The siblings Inge and Heinz Bernhard grew up in sheltered middleclass conditions in Dinslaken. Their parents, Siegfried and Anna Bernhard, ran a long-established and well-known department store in the city centre of Dinslaken.
The siblings experienced the pogrom of 10 November 1938 in Dinslaken. By that time Inge was ten and Heinz seventeen years old. Their father, chairman of the Dinslaken synagogue community, was arrested early in the morning and taken to the local district court’s prison. According to later reports, Inge would afterwards hide fearfully for hours in the cellar of her parents’ shop premises. On 16 November, Siegfried Bernhard and other Jewish men from Dinslaken were taken to the Dachau concentration camp. On 29 November he was released because his presence was required to support “Aryanization negotiations” regarding not only his own but also other Jewish-owned businesses, residential and commercial buildings.
Inge and Heinz Bernhard were registered by the Comité d’Assistance aux Enfants Juifs Refugiés (Assistance Committee for Jewish Refugee Children, CAEJR) as Kindertransport children Nos. 306 and 307 and reached the Belgian capital on 31 January 1939. Although 17-year-old Heinz had exceeded the age limit for the Kindertransport, an exception was made for him.
Inge spent several months living with René Beyersdorf’s family before moving to the Général Bernheim home in Zuen near Brussels in September 1939. Heinz initially stayed with Erich Korytowski, who ran a home for refugee boys in Schaerbeek supported by the CAEJR. After ten months, at the end of November 1939, he moved to the Ixelles district of Brussels. There he lived with a few other Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria in 6 Rue Vautier. Around this time, he was offered a workplace with a diamond dealer in Antwerp. However, the authority concerned refused to allow him to move to Antwerp in February 1940.
... We hereby confirm that we have inspected a group of Israelite children arriving by train from Germany today. They are in transit on train no. 146 from Cologne to Brussels and arrived in Herbesthal at 5.50 p.m. The attached list was handed over to us by the nurse who accompanied the convoy. According to the check we carried out, sixty-nine children were present.
Herbesthal railway station, 31 January 1939, confirmation from the border police of the arrival of the Kindertransport.
© Belgian State Archives
After the German invasion on 10 May 1940, Heinz Bernhard was interned as an “undesirable alien” in the St. Cyprien camp in southern France. In October 1940 he was transferred to the Gurs camp from where he managed to escape to Switzerland in September 1942. However, there he was also interned, until the end of August 1945.
Inge Bernhard was one of the children from the Général Bernheim and Herbert Speyer homes who escaped from the Germans to France in May 1940. After a stay of more than one year in the village of Seyre in southern France, the children reached the Chateau de la Hille in the summer of 1941.
On the night of December 10-11, 1943, Inge Bernhard, who was fifteen by that time, along with Toni Rosenblatt, and led by the kindergarten teacher Gret Tobler, dared to escape to Switzerland. First of all, the three of them went to Carcassonne. From there they reached the St. Cergues children’s home on the Swiss border. A first escape attempt over the border failed, but the second one ended with a successful arrival in Switzerland. Here the Bernhard siblings met again after almost four years of separation. After 1945 they both emigrated to Palestine.
Siegfried and Anna Bernhard moved from Dinslaken to Cologne in May 1939. From there they were deported to the “Altersghetto” (“Retirement Ghetto”) Theresienstadt in June 1943. In 1944 they were sent from there to Auschwitz and murdered. AP
Portrait of Inge and Heinz Bernhard: © Anne Prior