Bertha Bracey
| Bertha Bracey | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 1893 Bournville |
| Died | 1989 (aged 95) |
| Occupation | teacher, youth worker, aid worker |
Bertha Lilian Bracey (1893–1989) was a Quaker teacher and aid worker who organised relief and sanctuary for Europeans affected by the turmoil before, during and after the Second World War. These included many Jewish children threatened by the Holocaust and rescued in the operation known as the Kindertransport. In 2010, she was recognised as a British Hero of the Holocaust.
Her father worked for the Quaker chocolate maker, Cadbury, in their model village of Bournville. Her mother was Annie née Miles. She went to Birmingham University and, after graduating, she worked in personnel and as a teacher for five years.
She joined the Society of Friends – the Quakers – when she was about eighteen. In 1921, she left teaching to work at the Quaker Centre in Vienna where she founded and operated youth clubs. She enjoyed singing with young people and her work in these centres gave her good fluency in the German language and a network of many contacts. The Quaker International Centres had been conceived by Carl Heath in 1916 and eight of them were established across Europe after the First World War. After Vienna, Bracey moved to Germany where the hyperinflation and instability of the Weimar Republic caused great hardship. At the centres in Nuremberg and then Berlin, she organised aid for the population, especially children. The provision of food to the impoverished and starving was known as the – the Quaker feeding – and it so endeared the Quakers to the German people that it enabled them to aid refugees during the Nazi era.
In 1929, she became an Administrative Secretary of the Germany and Holland Committee in the Quaker headquarters in London, responsible for the relief operations in Germany and Holland. In 1933, she took charge of the newly-formed German Emergency Committee and this was later renamed as the Friends Committee for Refugees and Aliens. As the work expanded, her staff in Friends House grew from a single assistant to 59 case-workers in 1938 and, with crowds of refugees to process, they overflowed into Drayton House nearby.
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