Edith Poulsen
Edith Poulsen was born in Austria in 1918; she is Jewish and came to London in 1939 to escape the Nazi regime. She talks about being an educated middle-class woman who came to Britain on a domestic servants’ visa.
Listen Edith (mp3, 823kb)
Transcript
'No, you could only get a visa if you had a domestic permit, which meant you had to work as a domestic servant, because there was a great shortage of those. And that was one way that you could get a visa. Otherwise you had to find someone to guarantee that you weren’t going to be a burden on the community, which was almost impossible to obtain. Unless you either had means of supporting yourself or somebody else supporting you, it was almost impossible to get here.
'So I was going to be a housemaid. And I thought, well, compared to instant death it was a glorious opportunity. Because I had no doubt whatsoever about what the Nazis were going to do, because I had always taken an interest in politics, which was unusual for women of my background. My parents were completely taken aback by it, they had no idea what was going on, but I knew and that was how I managed to get them out. And so I went to Croydon and carried on…
'I think the worst thing, the worst of my experience, was having to wrestle with the boiler every morning. Because I’d never seen one before [laughs]. And that was where the hot water came from, and you had to do all kinds of things and when it went out you had to light it. And I had never lit a fire before. And the lady of the house was very good about it. Because she could do it in 20 seconds. Very humiliating.
'Luckily she was interested in modern art and I’d been to Paris in ’37, at the world exhibition, there were some great exhibitions of modern art. So I could tell her about it, and she lent me some of her books. She was quite pleased to have somebody she could talk to about the things she was interested in, so it was alright. It’s just I was a very inexperienced housemaid.'
Copyright Museum of London oral history collection