Kingston is a kind of anglicisation of Kornicker, my grandfather's surname before he changed it when applying to become a naturalised British citizen in 1947. We're not sure why Kingston, but perhaps the choice was prompted by some association with place (more likely Kingston upon Thames than Hull). In retrospect, the choice seems carefully judged: unambiguously English, with deep Anglo-Saxon root…

My very earliest attempts to understand something of the fate of my great-grandparents led me to JewishGen.org and the misconception that they were murdered at Theriesenstadt concentration camp, in modern-day Czechia, having passed through a transit camp at "Riebnig". Documents in the Arolsen Archive relating to my grandfather's search for his parents further muddied the water, with references to…

My grandfather's half-brother, and my great-uncle, was Peter Kornicker, born in 1917 in Breslau to my great-grandfather Georg and his first wife, Herta (née Cohen). His mother died in 1919 when he was just a year old. Peter was lined up to work in the family law firm, but with the situation in Germany growing increasingly difficult he left Breslau in 1937, travelling to the Netherlands to attend a…

A recent attempt to learn more about the fate of my great-grandparents, Georg and Else, led to the Arolsen Archives and the discovery of a Red Cross Enquiry made by my grandfather in 1946, when he was 20 years old. This is a single-page tracing request with scant information, and yet is a deeply human, personal document that carries within its bureaucratic form a suggestion of my grandfather's gri…

I recently re-read Robert Roberts' classic, The Classic Slum. There's a passage in the text that I've included below that I think stands as one of the most quietly devastating pieces of moral realism in twentieth-century British writing—an example of working-class self-critique that reveals how deprivation, fear and ignorance can deform empathy, yet also how individual acts of kindness can quietly…