Wahle family papers

Francis and Anna Wahle came to Great Britain on a Kindertransport organised by the Quakers from their home city, Vienna, in 1939. Whilst both children were raised as Catholics, they qualified for inclusion as their parents, Karl and Hedwig, had converted from Judaism. Anna grew up to become an ordained nun and a member of the order ‘Our Lady of Sion’ (specifically dedicated to Christian-Jewish understanding) and Francis became a parish priest.

The parents continued to live in Vienna throughout the Nazi era, hiding ‘in plain sight’. They managed to exist unnoticed using false names and working at a succession of low-level jobs. In fact Karl was a judge and went on to become president of the Austrian Supreme Court for a period after the war and Hedwig was a mathematician and professional actuary. Miraculously they both survived the war and eventually met up with their children again, who had become quite Anglicised. The parents continued to live in Vienna. Hedwig died relatively young in 1957 and Karl in 1970, aged 83.

The Wahle family had Jewish merchant roots in Prague, for which relatively minimal information survives within this collection- mostly fragments of family trees. Hedwig’s Brunner family can trace their roots to Hohenems in Austria and later Trieste, where they established textile and merchant banking businesses. In addition to various family histories and family trees, the collection contains material relating to a relatively recent gathering of descendants of the Brunner family in Trieste, where branches of the family continued to reside.