In 1938, with the rise of fascism, her parents put my mother, Lisel Vulliamy, on a train travelling out of Austria and through Nazi Germany to France. After some months in Paris with her half-brother, she travelled on to Britain. She found a home with the family of Walter Ward, a solicitor, in Felixstowe, and continued to live in Suffolk until her death, at the age of 92. She qualified as a state registered nurse and worked in several Suffolk hospitals during and after the second world war.
Some of her friends who reached the UK by the Kindertransport had rather harsher experiences. A slightly older boyfriend was interned on the Isle of Man along with Nazis he had been trying to escape from. Lisel, still a teenager, experienced only the minor discomfort of signing on weekly at the local police station. The Wards in effect adopted her, not expecting she would see her parents again.
Lisel’s father, Siegmund Kürschner, was a Hungarian Jew who, while fighting for the Austro-Hungarian army in the first world war, had been captured by the white Russians. Released by the communists without transport, he took almost two years to work his way back to Budapest, where he found that his first wife had remarried.
He too remarried, to Hermine (nee Streubel), and after their daughter, Liselotte, was born, the family moved from Budapest to the wine district of Grinzing in Vienna, sharing a house with their landlord’s family. Siegmund became a corn chandler on the Vienna Bourse. Lisel said that these were the happiest days of her life. That happiness was broken by the Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation of Austria.
Lisel’s parents survived the war and visited her for a year in 1955-56, her father actively assisting refugees from the 1956 Hungarian uprising, but they did not settle and returned to Austria.
These formative experiences contributed towards Lisel’s sometimes eccentric and unconventional disposition. She was a keen musician, playing the piano and the clarinet, and enjoyed rambling throughout Suffolk.
Through Barbara Ward, Walter’s eldest daughter – a journalist and broadcaster who in 1976 was raised to the peerage as Lady Jackson of Lodsworth – Lisel met David Vulliamy, last of three generations of Suffolk solicitors and coroners, whose own ancestors had come to the UK as Huguenot refugees two centuries before. They married in 1947 and lived in Ipswich until 1985, when they moved to Eye.
David died in 1997. Lisel is survived by four children, 10 grandchildren and 19 great-grandchildren.
