C H A R L E S   H A N N A M
Biography

   Charles Hannam was born in Essen on 26th July 1925 as Karl Hirschland. Together with his older sister Margot, he grew up in a well-to-do banking family in Essen. His father Max Hirschland ran the bank ‘Levi Hirschland and Sons’. After 1933, Charles Hannam experienced massive anti-semitic hostility. In 1937 his mother died from a serious illness. On 10th November 1938, Karl’s family home was ransacked while he was in it. His father was able to avoid being arrested by hiding in the attic of the house. After these events, Max Hirschland intensified efforts to help his children to emigrate. After Margot found a job as a maid in an English household, Karl too was able to leave Germany, helped by Dr Erich Klibansky, the principal of the Yavneh School in Cologne.

   Karl reached England in May 1939 with a Kindertransport and was housed in a hostel in Ramsgate. After the outbreak of war, the hostel could not be funded any more so the German and Austrian boys were sent to a camp for maladjusted young people where they had to do agricultural work. Karl’s sister Margot eventually arranged for her brother to go to Gilbert Hannam Grammar School in Midhurst where he completed his secondary education. He then applied to the British army as a soldier and, on the advice of the recruitment office, got rid of his birth name, Karl Hirschland. Charles Hannam was, however, not sent to Germany, but to India for the remainder of the war. His father Max Hirschland, who delayed his own emigration in order to help his father-in-law, was deported from Essen to the ghetto in Theresienstadt in 1942, where he died in 1944.  

   Charles Hannam worked as a teacher and later as a lecturer at various universities. He has written his story in three autobiographical novels (‘A Boy in Your Situation’, London 1977; ‘Almost an Englishman’, Brighton / Portland 2008; ‘Outsider Inside’, London 2008). Charles Hannam, who had three sons and a daughter, died in Devon on 28th May 2015.
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