L I E S L   M U N D E N
B i o g r a p h y

   Liesl Heilbronner was born on 9th March 1924 in Düsseldorf. Her older sister had died at the age of 11 in 1923. The family lived at 5 Hermannstraße in the Flingern district of the city until 1939. Liesl’s father, the cheese manufacturer and distributor, Ludwig Heilbronner, and her mother, Emma, née Scharff, were deported from Düsseldorf in 1941 and murdered in Minsk.

http://www.pipelinetheatre.com/transports.html

   After primary school, Liesl attended the Auguste-Victoria-Lyceum (today the Goethe Grammar School) in Düsseldorf. After the pogroms of 9th and 10th November 1938, her parents decided to send her to the Yavneh Jewish Grammar School in Cologne, so then Liesl was travelling every day by train from Düsseldorf to Cologne. From Easter 1939 onwards, she attended one of the newly-introduced English classes at the Yavneh, which were preparing pupils for emigration. On 24th August 1939, Liesl Heilbronner was on a Kindertransport from Düsseldorf to England. First, she went to the boarding school ‚Ladies‘College‘ in St Leonards-on-Sea. As a result of the British authorities’ ban on any ‘enemy aliens’ of any age living in the coastal regions of east and south England, she had to move to London in May 1940 where she attended a secretarial school. After the war, Liesl Heilbronner married Alfred Munden, a non-Jewish Englishman, with whom she had a son and a daughter. Liesl Munden lives in Cornwall, in southern England, today (2010). Inspired by Liesl’s biography, the play ‘Transports’ by the Pipeline Theatre (Job Welch/Alex Munden) tells the story of the intertwined fates of two refugees.

http://www.pipelinetheatre.com/transports.html

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