A woman who owned a modest home in Kent gifted more than £1million to local charities, now a curious researcher has discovered some sad details about her life
A secret millionaire who donated her fortune to local causes has been revealed to be a Jewish secretary who fled Nazi Germany as a child.
Hilda Levi, who owned a modest 1970s semi-detached home in Whitstable, Kent, gifted £1.4million after she died in 2022, aged 98.
Her recently published will revealed that she gave £500,000 each to the Friends of Kent and Canterbury Hospital and Age UK, as well as £200,000 each to the Friends of Whitstable Healthcare and Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. The charities were delighted but mystified having had no previous contact or even knowledge of Hilda – who it has now been revealed likely inherited her money from a wealthy uncle.
Neighbours of her home in Seymour Avenue said there were no clues that she was so well-off, with her house and garden left in a poor state. Now it has been discovered that Hilda was an orphaned Jewish refugee who fled to England from Germany in the late 1930s. All her family were killed in the Holocaust.
She was found a home in Sutton Valence, near Maidstone, where she became part of her adopted family, eventually gaining “naturalised” status in 1958. Her adopted mum, Ellen Jeffery, is buried in the same plot as Hilda in Whitstable cemetery, albeit 22 years earlier.
The research into Hilda’s life was conducted by amateur genealogist Julie Hunt from Whitstable who says she was “intrigued” by the generous pensioner’s story. She spent hours pouring over ancestry websites to piece together the life of a woman who overcame tragedy and adversity.
Mrs Hunt, who worked in youth services in Canterbury for more than 20 years, said: “I was just intrigued and thought there must be much more to this extraordinary woman.”
An internee record from May 1941 confirms Hilda, then aged 16, was a “genuine refugee from Nazi oppression”.
Hilda attended the former Redhill School in East Sutton Hill, before studying at Maidstone Secretarial College and later Bromley Technical College. It was there she received a distinction in business studies in the finals of the Chartered Institute of Secretaries examinations, which was reported in the Kent Messenger on August 16, 1963, when she was 38.
The report describes Hilda as “a refugee from Cologne who lost her entire family during the persecutions in the last war”. It says she was the daughter of Dr Friedrich Hermann Levi and Mrs Irma Levi.
Hilda worked as a confidential secretary in Maidstone and later at the Duke Of Edinburgh Awards Office in Westminster. But it is still unclear how she gained her wealth or why she spent her final years in a Jewish care home in Prescott, Manchester, where she died.
However, Mrs Hunt’s research did reveal that Hilda had a wealthy uncle, called Herman Hecht, who moved from Germany to San Francisco when he was just 16. The relative made his fortune as a partner in a large coffee import export firm, and was depositing money for Hilda’s parents from the US to them in Germany from 1939.
He died in 1951 and left the equivalent of £34.8m in today’s money – leaving most to his remaining siblings and their family, but also to distant relatives and charities.
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