I was surprised, and delighted, to receive an email in response to the article about the National Holocaust Centre and museum featured in the last issue of Barrow Voice, saying that one of the faces featured was Lisa Vincent and that she had spent the last few years of her life living in Barrow with her daughter, Heather Hoskin. I met up with Heather to find out more.  

Lisa’s grandfather owned a big toy company in Nuremburg and she grew up in the nearby village of Cadolzburg. 

Her mother was Jewish but her father wasn’t. As life became more difficult for German Jews, her father took Lisa’s two older brothers to South America, leaving Lisa and her mother alone in Germany. In 1939, at the age of just 15 years, Lisa was put on a Kindertransport train. She knew nobody and she had no idea where she was going or what would happen to her mother. Imagine the courage of her mother to do that!

Lisa arrived in Liverpool and from there was sent to live at Burcot Grange, a school near Sutton Coldfield. When she left school she went to the close-knit Jewish community in Nottingham, where she was happily joined by her mother who had escaped Nazi Germany via Switzerland.

Lisa went on to become a German teacher in a comprehensive school in Clifton, Nottingham and started exchanges between her school and one in Germany – her heart was always in Germany as she yearned to belong somewhere. She married and had her daughter, Heather. When she retired, she maintained her fitness by enjoying long-distance walking and it was when she was walking round the Laxton area one day, she came across Beth Shalom, the National Holocaust Centre, and soon became one of their regular volunteers, giving talks about her life. It became like a second home to her as she met and became firm friends with other survivors, who came from all over England to volunteer – they met up for meals, birthday celebrations 
and religious festivals. You may have heard Lisa speak as she sometimes gave talks to groups in Barrow.

When Heather moved to Barrow, to be close to her own daughter, Lisa moved with her. She was initially quite isolated but while visiting Barrow’s Christmas market shortly after moving here, Heather and Lisa got talking to people from Barrow Baptist Church who welcomed them to their Christmas lunch and thus began another group of friendships. Even after Lisa was housebound following a stroke, her new friends from the Church visited and kept in touch.

Lisa’s Jewish roots and faith were not forgotten. Heather planted a rose, in memory of her mother, in the gardens of the Holocaust Centre and took some of her ashes to bury in the Jewish cemetery at Nuremburg. Heather has taken over her mother’s volunteering approach to life as she now volunteers with a range of charities, notably, Barrow’s Baldwin Trust. 

Desperate to feel that she belonged somewhere, Lisa finally felt she belonged in Barrow and the last few years of her life were happy ones.

Karisa Krcmar