Big Red Book

Celebrating television's This Is Your Life

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THIS IS YOUR LIFE - Alice Goldberger, child therapist, was surprised by Eamonn Andrews in the audience at the New London Theatre, having been taken there by friends.

Alice, who was born in Berlin, Germany and trained as a youth work instructor, became the head of a state-run shelter for disadvantaged children before fleeing to England when Hitler came to power. After the war broke out, she was interned as an 'enemy alien' on the Isle of Man, but when news of how she had organised a nursery for the children of internees reached child psychologist Anna Freud, she was released and employed as the superintendent of one of the Hampstead War Nurseries for evacuated city children. At the end of the war, Alice, whose own family had perished in concentration camps, was tasked with setting up a team to receive and care for young Holocaust survivors.

Alice and 24 children moved into a large estate named Weir Courtney, in Lingfield, Surrey, where she became mother, caretaker, advocate, and teacher to the refugees, some as young as four years old. She worked diligently to get the children adopted into foster homes or reunited with living family members. In 1948, after some of the older children had left, Alice and the remaining children moved to London and settled in Lingfield House, where they remained until its closure in 1957, when Alice became a child therapist at the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic.

"What a surprise!"

programme details...

• Edition No: 495
• Subject No: 493
• Broadcast live: Wed 25 Oct 1978
• Broadcast time: 7.00-7.30pm
• Venue: New London Theatre
• Series: 19
• Edition: 1
• Code name: Lifeline

on the guest list...

• Hanka Darama
• Eva Cowan
• Denny Muench
• Sylvia Cohen
• Rachel Oppenheimer
• Eva Graham
• Asta Berlowitz
• Zdenka Husserl
• Fritz Friedman
• Vic Cohnheim
• Charles Kessler
• Tania Kessler
• Sophie Wurtch
• Elizabeth Moshage
• Anna Lisa Schnurmann
• Henny Spier
• Gertrude Dann
• Judith Sherman
• Rabbi Hugo Gryn
• Liliana Bucci
• Andra Bucci
• Mrs Bucci
Filmed tribute:
• Jane Wilton

production team...

• Researchers: Debbie Gaunt, Catherine Parnall
• Writers: Tom Brennand, Roy Bottomley
• Directors: Royston Mayoh, Terry Yarwood
• Producer: Jack Crawshaw

A Charitable Life

the unsung heroes

The Big Red Book

the programme's icon

The Audience

the applause, laughter and tears

Screenshots of Alice Goldberger This Is Your Life - and a photograph of Alice Goldberger's big red book

The Jewish Chronicle unknown date

Her Wonderful Life

Jewish Chronicle Reporter

Warm tributes were paid to Miss Alice Goldberger, an 81-year-old child therapist of West Hampstead, who to her surprise found herself the star of ITV's This Is Your Life programme last week. She was reunited with some of the children and others she helped in England after the Second World War.

Eamonn Andrews, the compere, called her life "one of the most remarkable and moving stories I have ever come across. She met her greatest challenge at the end of the war when she lovingly and patiently rebuilt the lives of innocent children rescued from Hitler's concentration camps."

Turning to Miss Goldberger, he said: "For 50 years your love and care led them out of that nightmare and gave them the will to live again."

The many who said "Thank you" included Rabbi Hugo Gryn, senior minister of the West London Synagogue, (of which Miss Goldberger is a member). As a young survivor of Auschwitz, he met Miss Goldberger in 1946. He spoke of the wonderful and profound Jewish legend that "our world could not exist unless there were the Lamed Vav Zaddikim, the 36 righteous people."

"Alice is one of those people, I am sure of that," he said.

Before the war, Berlin-born Miss Goldberger was in charge of a centre in the city for families made destitute by the economic depression of the 1930s.

holocaust.org.uk unknown date

This is the big red book from an episode of This is Your Life, hosted by Eamonn Andrews. The episode focused on Alice Goldberger, who, herself a refugee, became matron of the two children's homes known as Lingfield House, in which Zdenka lived.

Zdenka was born in 1939, in Prague, and at three years old was deported by the Nazi regime with her mother to Theresienstadt Concentration Camp and Ghetto. In her family, Zdenka was the only survivor of the Holocaust. After her liberation in 1945, Zdenka was brought to England as part of a scheme to aid surviving orphaned children liberated from the Nazi camp system. Once in England, the children lived in foster homes, including under the care of Alice.

Speaking of Alice, and the episode of This is Your Life in 2016, Zdenka says: 'Alice Goldberger was to all of us really like our mother, and she didn't want us to call her mother or aunt, but we all felt very close, and she was just a wonderful person. My strongest memory of Alice was the way she treated us all as individuals. Any problems we could go to her, and she would talk to us, and she was just a nice mother figure. For many years, Alice always watched This is Your Life with Eamonn Andrews, and she always said, 'One day I would really like to see all the children together'. So it was Sophie, Manna, and Getrude's idea to write to Thames Television regarding if she could be a candidate. We wanted to do it for her eightieth birthday, but we were one year too late, so it was for her eighty-first birthday, and it was the biggest surprise ever.'