Source: Yad Vashem Archive 0.2/1005 Reproduced with the kind permission of the Wiener Library, London. [the testimony was originally written in English]
…My father, Ferdinand Josef Adolf Rahmer, was born in Prague in 1887 and was distantly related to the famous Rabbi Moritz Rahmer of Magdeburg. He had fought and had been wounded in the first World War, and was a greatly respected official of the Deutsche Bank, specialising in French correspondence… My parents were non-practising Jews and called themselves "Freidenker" (free thinkers), but with the establishment of the Nazi regime I was sent to a Jewish school…At the Theodor Herzl school I came under a strong Zionist influence… I was also introduced to Orthodox Judaism…. My father had been dismissed by the Deutsche Bank in 1937 and was receiving a very small pension…. The day after "Crystal Night" my father was fetched by the Gestapo and sent to the Oranienburg concentration camp, from which he returned seven weeks later in a state of extremely bad health…During my father's absence we were turned out of our little house…and moved into a small flat in Marburger Street, where we lived in very cramped conditions until I left Germany. After my father's return from Oranienburg, we redoubled our efforts to emigrate, and one of my mother's brothers, who had emigrated previously to Uruguay, cabled us to the effect that he had secured our admission to that country. Consequently my father had his pension converted into a lump sum with which we were on the point of purchasing our fares to Uruguay, when there was a change in Uruguay's immigration policy and the whole thing fell through. My parents then tried to get at least my sister and me out of the country and we both enlisted for Hachsharah… when I was offered the opportunity of going to an English public school… I left Germany on 10 August 1939 with a Kindertransport (children's transport) and arrived at Newcastle-on-Tyne the following day…My sister followed a fortnight later, on August 25…. As I know from Red Cross messages, my parents continued to live in the small flat in Marburger Street…until 14 December 1942, when they were deported with Ost transport 25 to Auschwitz, where they are presumed to have died. There were no survivors of this particular transport involving about 800 people of all ages…
