My Uncle Ernie and Aunt Bella are my favourite relatives of all time. Ernie, when I was 10 or 11 years old, went to the local music store in Guernsey at the time, Number 19, and bought me Neil Young’s ‘Live in Rust’ and Leonard Cohen’s ‘I’m Your Man’ albums. They both spent several NYEs partying with R.E.M. (Bella’s brother Alex childhood best friend was R.E.Ms accountant) and they lived in Atlanta at the time so would often go and see R.E.M. and the Indigo Girls in the 1980s and 90s. They moved to Detroit and Bella once worked with Michael Moore, the documentary film maker. They have got great taste in films, books, TV, music, popular culture, art, documentaries and we get on like a house on fire.
Brett first met E&B when we were over in the USA for my then brother’s (she is now my sister) wedding in 2007. We had flown from Vegas to LA and Ernie asked us what we had got up to. We told him we had seen David Lee Roth play the other night and he responded ‘God, that Asshole’ in his Swiss American drawl (think Rainier Wolfcastle in The Simpsons). Bella was born in Novogrudok (Belarus), then the Kritz family moved to Riga (Latvia) where her younger brother Alex was born. In 1961, when Bella was 15, the family sailed to the USA and settled in The Bronx, New York. Four years later, the family moved to Atlanta, Georgia and in 1967, Herman, Bertha, Balla and Alex were naturalized as American citizens and officially changed their surname from Kric to Kritz.
They were over in Guernsey for the first time since April 2023 for a week, leaving on Tuesday 7th October. I am fascinated by our collective family history, and I knew that Bella’s father was part of the resistance with the Bielski Brothers who evaded the Nazis and established a hidden base camp and then convinced other Jews to join them, effectively saving 1,200 Jews from certain death. I am determined to write for my granddaughter H a book detailing Brett and I’s family history. My mother is Swiss German, Ernie and she grew up as the children of hairdressers in the Jewish Quarter of Luzern. My mother moved to Guernsey in the 1960s and married my father, a proud Guernsey man. Ermie emigrated to the USA in his early 20s with his best friends Urs. He and Bella only got married when he and Urs were threatened with deportation, so they went to the Courthouse in Detroit, had a double-wedding with Urs and his partner Gail and then went to see the new Star Trek film.
Anyway, I digress. The purpose of this blog is to share the Kritz’s fascinating, heartbreaking and awful history of Herman and Bertha’s life. I was stunned when I was told the full story and I think you will be to. Story from the https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/9657801885?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title which I have purchased and recommend you do to.
Ms Red 
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