Irene Black

Irene’s new work, If only I could have News from You, is a biography of her parents, who married in Berlin weeks before the Nazis passed a law banning marriages between Jews and” Aryans”.

The family was persecuted throughout the 1930s, including the loss of her father’s factory and his imprisonment. Her parents fled Germany on the last train from Berlin before war was declared, taking with them over 100 Jewish schoolboys.

The family’s subsequent experiences as refugees in England, and their desperate correspondence with those marooned in Germany, form the basis of this truly historical work.

Irene has translated original family documents, diaries and letters and placed them into historical context in order to tell this remarkable story.