K U R T   M A R X
B i o g r a p h y

   Kurt Marx was born in Cologne on 31st August 1925, the only child of Siegmund and Irma Marx. To begin with he attended a Protestant ‘Volksschule’ . In 1933, after the National Socialists seized power he moved to the Lützowstraße Jewish Municipal ‘Volksschule’. Later on he went to the Yavneh Jewish Reform Grammar School.

   Although his parents were trying to arrange for the family to flee together to the USA, they supported their son’s immediate departure to England after the November (Kristallnacht) pogrom. A few weeks after his bar mitzvah, Kurt Marx was able to leave Cologne with a Kindertransport organised by Dr Erich Klibansky. Together with about 20 girls and 20 boys from lower Yavneh classes, he arrived in London at the beginning of 1939 where the boys were accommodated in a hostel in Minster Road while the girls were in a hostel in Willesden Lane.

   Die Eltern von Kurt Marx konnten sich nicht retten. Sie wurden im Juli 1942 nach Minsk/Trostenez deportiert und ermordet.

   Kurt Marx’s parents were not able to save themselves. In July 1942 they were deported to Minsk and were murdered in Maly Trostenez.

   Kurt Marx initially went to an English school in London but when war broke out, he had to end his school career. The British authorities declared him an ‘enemy alien’. Through contacts with Jewish immigrants, he was offered an apprenticeship as a diamond cutter and from then on earned his living from the diamond trade. In 1947 he married his wife Ingrid, a survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp. They had a son and then later two grandsons. His wife died in 2002. Today (2016) Kurt Marx lives in London.
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