Jonny Gould's Jewish State

Dov Forman and her great-grandmother Lily Ebert have co-written a book, “Lily’s Promise” about her Holocaust story. But 35 years before, I recorded the same idea with my own grandma. Grandma Olga’s recorded voice and when and where we recounted her life story will always be my most treasured episode. This is her eyewitness testimony of leaving Nazi-occupied Vienna for a new and as yet, uncharted home in the UK. She rebuilt her life in Birmingham where I grew up and where back in 1984, we recorded a chat on cassette in her front room. At the time, she was 77 and I was just 17. The motivation to record this way back then was to explain, to my as yet unborn children, who we are and how we got here. Grandma began life in England as a 32-year-old housemaid in a faraway London suburb before meeting my fellow refugee grandpa at a friendship club in Birmingham. They got married and lodged in an upstairs room next to Sutton Town's football ground. Eventually, they managed to buy their own home and set up a typewriter