Walter’s story

The following testimony was directly contributed by Walter.

My parents were both born in Vienna into families that were part of the vibrant Jewish community. At that time, there  were almost 200,000 Jews living in Austria. The flourishing Jewish culture, and Jewish participation particularly in the arts and commerce, was extinguished forever in 1938 when Nazi Germany annexed Austria as part of the German Reich. This was followed by the November Pogrom, Kristallnacht, after which Viennese Jews were desperate to leave. Along with their baby daughter, Ruth, my parents escaped to Estonia, one of the few countries that did not require an exit visa. They arrived with no money or knowledge of the language. I was born in Tallinn in 1940. 

My father managed to find work, and they got by until 1941 when the Soviets arrested the family as enemy aliens and deported them to Siberia. Under very harsh conditions, through scorching summers and freezing winters, the family survived the war and three Soviet camps during more than six years in exile. My sister, Leah, was born while we were incarcerated in the Kok Uzek camp in Karaganda in 1945. 

As Europe was liberated, Austrians and Hungarians (most of whom were Jews) incarcerated in the Soviet camps were the last to attain their freedom, two years after most. In 1947, my family were released and started their gruelling three-month journey of more than 3,000 miles back to Austria. 

We arrived in Vienna station on a Russian cattle train on 29 March 1947 after being over nine weeks in transit from Kazakhstan. We were back in the city we had fled some eight and a half years before. 

When my father’s parents, who had managed to escape from Vienna, received our telegram from Romania on our way home, they went into action immediately to obtain entry permits for us to join them in Londonderry, where they had started a textile business. On the way, we spent time in London where my mother was reunited with her sister and mother (my grandmother), who had believed the family had perished. It took a while to process the information that our family had survived and had avoided the fate that befell millions of European Jews. Our family settled in Kilkeel, Northern Ireland, since that time. 

Walter Sekules moved to the United Kingdom in 2020 and continues to reside there.