My father, Otto Newman, who has died aged 93, escaped from the Nazis in Austria on Kristallnacht in 1938. Aged 16, he had been picked up and bundled into a truck but managed to jump off and run away. The others in the truck were never seen again, and a little later Otto was able to reach London on the Kindertransport from Vienna. Apart from his two sisters, Lucy and Erika, and his uncle Heinrich, the rest of the family perished in Auschwitz and Birkenau, among them his father, Jonah, an insurance company director, and his mother, Rosa (nee Schwartzstein).
After a brief period of internment on the Isle of Man, Otto was sponsored by Lord Nuffield, who offered him a scholarship to Oxford University to study engineering. But he could not afford to take up the offer, so came to London, where, having been refused for active service, he spent the rest of the war fire-watching on the rooftops of tall buildings.
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