Trudy Körösi, married name: Platt

Trudy Körösi was born in Linz in 1933. She was raised a Catholic, but her older relatives remained members of the Jewish community. Her father, Viktor Körösi, worked as a salesclerk at the Kraus & Schober department store.

Trudy attended the Ursuline kindergarten and spent a great deal of time with her grandparents in Kleinmünchen. There, she could play in a garden with the neighbours’ children. Music and German songs were played in the evenings.

On 12th March 1938, the family’s nanny Mizzi walked to the Landstrasse, leading Trudy Körösi by the hand and pushing Trudy’s one-year-old brother Schorli in the pram. There, they waited in the crowd until Hitler had driven past. After that, the Körösi family desperately sought a way to escape. The Quakers in England finally came to their aid.

The Körösi family ended up settling in the Lake District.  Trudy experienced hostility from her peers there, because of her foreign language and clothing. The other children called her a “dirty German spy”. Trudy dreamed of a better world than what reality was offering her, even years later, when she was living in Leeds with her family.