It is touching for me and my four children, how every year Nuremberg Football Club fondly remembers my father through the school project “The Jenö Konrad Cup – Football meets History”. To know that, today, in front of both the Nuremberg stadium and our former residence in Bingstrasse, a stumbling stone is being laid in remembrance of my father’s fate, affects us deeply.

I, my sons and their families are sorry that we cannot be present at the ceremony. At the moment, I am selling my country home in Southampton and moving to New York. There are many things to do that require my presence in New York. However, I can assure you that we are all with you in our hearts. And I know for sure that I will come to Nuremberg next year. 

What would have pleased my father most of all was the fact that it was school pupils who came up with the idea for the stumbling stones and then realised the project. That is, in a way, the most appropriate thing that could have happened, because my father had always been interested in and supportive of young people.

My father was a very decent human being. He was especially fond of children and young people and was very patient with them. He was also patient with me: he gave me the confidence to believe that I should not be afraid of defeat. Defeats belong to success. From defeats one can learn a lot, he always said.  

I am now 93 years old and say, only seven and a half more years and I will be 100. Ninety years ago, I was too young to remember things at that time. From the stories I have heard, I know my parents felt comfortable in Nuremberg. They spoke often and lovingly of the two years we were there. I remember little from that time, but I do recall the farewell. At the railway station, the club’s board members were there with roses for my mother. They did not want us to go. They were very decent and always behaved politely. 

My father always stressed that he did not run away after the inflammatory article. I did not run away, I departed, he always said. In August 1932 he had clearly seen and sensed how things were to develop in Germany only a couple of months later.  This ability to discern the growing and developing anti-Semitism saved his life and ultimately, mine and my mother’s life as well.

I would like to give to those present today his life motto: always look joyfully to the future and live without anxiety and fear. My father was always positive. He always made plans for the future and carried them through. That is what I have inherited from him. I do not possess talent but I do have this approach to life. 

I am enormously grateful for what Nuremberg Football Club has done here for human rights and what it will do in the future. Continue in this work, so that the sort of thing that happened to my father does not happen again.