East End To Essex
Jewish Migration Routes
Gus Bialick
"And Hitler decreed that all people who came from Poland living in Germany must leave the country immediately, he expelled them all. So my mother-in-law collected my two children. That’s my future wife who was nine years old and her brother who was ten. And she had to go to the town square at five o’clock the following morning, lock up her business with all the goods in it and everything, which was looted anyway. She had to leave the country!"
Gus, Jewish soldier with tow friends/soldiers in full military uniform
Gus in his later years with his war medals and poppy cicra 2000
Gus' family celebrating a Bar Mitzvah
Gus, Jewish soldier with tow friends/soldiers in full military uniform
"What actually happened was, there was a boat then used to leave Rotterdam harbour twice a week for London Bridge with barrels of heron to deliver. That may sound curious but that was true at that time. And all the immigrants used to take that boat because the captain of that boat used to take bribes, and for very little money he would allow you go onto his boat and he’d take you to London Bridge, but also at that time, you didn’t need a passport or a visa. Providing you behaved yourself in the country, in England, they let you stop here."
"I mean, nobody wants to live in the East End unless you have to. You’d rather live erm, in Bayswater say, where you’re near to Hyde Park, if you could! And then everybody moves further and further out, they started moving to Stoke Newington from the East End, then to Clapton [pause] then to Finsbury Park, they had the park near there, beautiful park, it’s nicer to live near a park then it is in the East End where you had to walk two miles to get into a green patch, in those days."
"But it was good, and you drank four glasses of wine. That’s according to the good book, tells you on that night you should drink four glasses of wine, and of course young children took it for granted that they were also going to get four glasses of wine, which they normally did but they were drunk [laughter], they were fast asleep by the end of the evening, they couldn’t stay awake."
