A really heart-warming story here. "The letter to Gladys Jones arrived without fanfare - and probably without much hope of a reply. It had been sent by a family she’d met just once on a Danube riverboat in Vienna five years earlier. A little boy’s shoe had threatened to muddy her skirt as he’d knelt up to get a better view, but she’d laughed it off and accepted his father’s invitation for coffee and a slice of Sachertorte (a rich Austrian chocolate cake) by way of apology. On Gladys’s return to England, she’d sent a note thanking him for his hospitality. Then, one imagines, this middle aged wife of a Chester dentist considered the encounter no more than a souvenir of her 1934 holiday. Now, Frank Kessler and his wife Annie had tracked her down to say they and their son Harry, eight, were in mortal danger. It was 1939 and they were Jews in a country which belonged to Hitler. They could flee - but only with an affidavit from someone beyond the Nazi empire willing to take legal and financial responsibility for them. With Britain on the eve of war, Gladys and her husband William could have been forgiven for ignoring such a plea from people they barely knew and to whom they owed nothing. Yet their reply was breathtaking in its generosity. ‘Come to England,’ it said. ‘We will do whatever you need.’ The Kesslers took what they could carry by hand and bought one way tickets on the trains still clattering out of Czechoslovakia and into a free Europe. It would have been a nerve-shredding journey with every station stop, every examination of the papers identifying them as Jews, putting them at risk of imprisonment or perhaps even summary execution. In the leafy village of Churton, seven miles from Chester, the Joneses were making good on their promise. William organised a car to meet the ferry in Harwich while Gladys prepared the spare rooms in her big brick villa. She shopped for food for three extra mouths and found a place at the local primary school for Harry. In Vienna, she had chatted to the Kesslers in her fractured German. Then, it had been endearing. Now, it would be a lifeline until she could teach them English." www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9178361/How-British-couple-took-family-Jews-Austria-Second-World-War.html
