Rudi was born in on 26 August 1920 in Nuremberg.  His parents identified with German life and culture, particularly with German music, and his father had been honoured for bravery in the First World War. 

Rudi’s early years were overshadowed by the hatred and propaganda against the Jews and the overwhelming power of the Nazi rallies in the city where he was born.  This culminated in his humiliating public expulsion from the German school he was attending.

On the night of Kristallnacht the family home was ransacked and his father was savagely beaten and died in front of his family.  The women, including his paralysed grandmother, were dragged through the house by their hair.  Rudi was beaten, and put against a wall to be shot, but was spared by a diversion from a neighbour’s house. 

Rudi’s mother realised the gravity of their situation.  Rudi’s sister came to England with the Kindertransport and was fostered with a family.  Rudi arrived later with an agricultural scheme under which he was put to work on a farm.  At the outbreak of the Second World War he was interned in Australia as an 'Enemy Alien'.

Rudi was able to communicate with his mother until March 1942 when his letters were sent back stamped ‘gone away’.  He later learned that she had been deported to the Majdanek extermination camp in Lublin where she perished.

Rudi says: 'as my parents have no grave.... and there's nobody to mourn them, I feel that talking about these events, and the way they perished, is my only way to perpetuate their memory'.