Tuesday 18 December 2018

Renate’s Passport




We’re very excited to have found Renate’s passport. It has various stamps on it that show her movements. 

It was originally granted on 17 July 1936. There is an Italian stamp for 31 of July 1936.  This is the famous journey to Italy which created the need for the passport. Remember her father had a massive row with the officials over that passport and this was all because she was christened wrongly. Her name should have been Renata Clara and she became Klara Renate. In the end he was told to go and get her an adult passport and this may have really helped her to get out of Germany when she needed to.  

The passport was valid until 17 July 1941. By that time she was living in England.   

There are several stamps up to 1938- showing that she was well off enough to travel and that travel was reasonably easy even though everything was getting difficult in Europe, especially for Jews. Quite chilling are the swastikas on the German border stamps. 



There are transit visas for Switzerland and France. Her French visa allows her a stay of up to fifteen days. Presumably this is to cover any hold-up on the journey.  

Her English visa shows that she was permitted to land in Dover on 31 January 1939. This is a little puzzling. Her own account has her leaving Germany 28 January. Was this memory not working properly or would it have taken that long in those days? Or perhaps she was fictionalising her account. The visa was for twelve months. She stayed in the UK for the rest of her life, and became English in 1947. This passport could have confirmed dates for her.  



In the passport we can also see some money transactions. In December 1938 she bought 400 Swiss francs. We can only assume that this was an easy currency to use when obtaining sterling may have been difficult. This was worth about £32.00 then, getting on for the £50.00 needed for the Kindertransport. That £50.00 is the equivalent of £3,000 today. There is also an exchange of ten Reichmarks for approximately ten French francs which presumably were used to buy the French transit visa.