A BROMSGROVE man whose mum escaped on the Kindertransport and whose grandparents were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust has attended a special service to remember them in Germany.
Adrian Kriss was told he was adopted when he was 12 and, in 2001, he began extensive research on tracking down his real mum.
He managed to find her – Rita Levy – after she had fled Germany during the Second World War and came to the UK with her sister.
Their parents – Gerhard and Mary Levy – had died during the Holocaust and, unable to settle in England, Rita went to America aged 15 to find her grandmother, leaving her sister with her new family. Adrian, who represents the Beacon division on Worcestershire County Council, was reunited with Rita in 2015.
In last month’s service, the ‘Stolpersteine’, a memorial stone, was laid in Forst, eastern Germany, in memory of Gerhard and Mary, Rita and her sister Ingeborg who had both been displaced.
The bronze block, featuring their four names, was unveiled by the town’s mayor. Forst was near where his grandparents lived before they were taken by the Nazis.
The event came about when a Forst historian wanted to find out if any Jews from the town had lost their lives in the atrocity.
It reunited 26 members of Adrian’s family – his mum had two boys and her sister also had children and their children also attended. As well as England and Germany, others journeyed from America, Israel and Spain where Rita now lives.
Adrian and his mum gave speeches, thanking everyone who had made the emotional occasion possible.
He said: “Frank, the historian, had carried out his research and helped set up the event as a form of recompensing what had happened.”
In his speech, he said: “If the Second World War would not have happened, I would have been German and we would have been part of the German society and community – it has lost what we could have given.”
