Old English: tréow [TRAY-oh]
1. noun tree, wood
2. noun truth, fidelity, faith, trust, belief; pledge, promise, agreement
The Buchwalds and Violet Bonham Carter​
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As a Researcher on the Channel 4 series My Grandparents' War, my attention to the little details helped bring stories to life.
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Helena Bonham Carter's grandmother, Violet, was staunchly in favour of aiding Jewish refugees as they fled Nazism. In her collected letters, a brief reference was made to a Czech family (the Buchwalds and their two sons) that she had assisted in coming to Britain in 1939. I traced the original letters to the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, where I discovered that they had been donated in the 1990s by someone called Noemi. Frustratingly, there were no contact details for her.
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Through examining birth and marriage records, I determined that Noemi was the daughter of the Buchwalds and that she had been born in the UK in the late 1940s.
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I made a Freedom of Information request via the National Archives for the family's immigration records, which gave me the names of the two Buchwald sons. From this I was able to locate their descendants in America and Australia, who gave me the contact details of Noemi in Wales.
The result was a moving scene in the film in which Helena learned about the Buchwald family's journey, and Noemi made the poignant observation that, without the tenacity of Violet and her own mother, she would not even have been born.
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To view a clip of the scene via Facebook, click here
