My uncle, Bob Kutner, who has died aged 91, lived through some of the darkest years in European history. He arrived in Britain as a teenager, became a British citizen and joined the army, where his linguistic abilities resulted in work with the Intelligence Corps. He spent a year in England interrogating prisoners of war, followed by a year in Germany interrogating war criminals. Later he built up a business as an agent for manufacturers of women’s clothes and was much in demand around his adopted home of Glasgow as a speaker about the Holocaust.
Bob, whose given name was Norbert, was the youngest child of Leo Kutner and his wife Mitzi (nee Rotenstein). Born in the east German city of Chemnitz, he spent his early childhood there and in Leipzig, both of which had thriving Jewish populations, mainly involved in the textile business. The arrival of Hitler stopped that and Bob’s father and uncles decided to leave Germany at the end of 1933.
One branch of the family settled in Nottingham, while Leo and Mitzi and their three children moved to France, then to Switzerland, and finally to Fascist Italy, encountering hostility, prejudice and suspicion everywhere. Most of the family members who stayed behind in Germany and Poland died in the Holocaust. Leo’s death from cancer in 1937 in Milan was critical for the family. Bob’s sister, Celia (my mother), came to Nottingham in 1938. Bob, aged 15, travelled alone through Europe in 1939, arriving in London and then moving to Nottingham; their mother followed soon after.
These adventures are wonderfully evoked in Bob’s book, Over My Shoulder (2000), which gives a moving picture of what life was like for poor Jews in Europe in the 1930s. I was Celia’s child, born in 1940 and adopted at birth in Nottingham; only after discovering my real identity in my 60s, and after reading Bob’s book, was I able to meet him and discover a new and loving family, for which I shall always be grateful.
After the war, Mitzi remarried and moved to Scotland, and Bob soon followed, finally settling in Glasgow with his wife, Barbara (nee Stone), whom he married in 1953. He spent the final half-century of his life there, and his business took him all over Scotland. He was much in demand as a speaker in schools, clubs and colleges, also on the radio, giving talks on the war and his experiences. He was also a member of the Senior Studies Institute of the University of Strathclyde, later the Centre for Lifelong Learning. He was also a Samaritan, chair of the Avron Greenbaum Players amateur theatre group, a supporter of the Variety Club of Great Britain, and he called in on elderly people in need of a visitor, some of whom were younger than him. He remained full of vitality and optimism to the end.
He is survived by Barbara, their two children, Lesley and Tony, two grandchildren and assorted nephews and nieces.
