Alice Frank Stock, who is 101, grew up in Munich, Germany, on the same apartment block as a local celebrity of sorts: Nazi party leader and all around popular fellow Adolf Hitler, who lived next door to her until he became Chancellor, on January 30, 1933, the UK’s Bristol Post reported on Sunday (The Jewish 101-year-old woman who used to live on the same apartment block as Hitler).
“We lived in a small apartment block next to the Prince Regent theater,” Alice recalled. “It was a lovely apartment, with four or five bedrooms, a big salon (living room) and a dining room. The salon was very large and we had two grand pianos.”
She also recalled seeing Hitler going in and out of his apartment on her block a few times, once even escorted out of a car by two SS guards, who rushed the Führer inside. And she also saw him once at the opera.
In November, 1923, when little Alice was 4, her neighbor led the notorious Beer Hall Putsch, a failed coup d’état. Hitler was found guilty of treason and sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison, where he dictated his life’s work, Mein Kampf to his fellow prisoner Rudolf Hess. Then, after serving only nine months, Alice’s neighbor was released and came home to her apartment block.
Eventually, things came to their inevitable ending. “We were Jewish and once the Nazis came to power my father was asked to retire,” Alice told the Bristol Post. In 1937, at age 17, she moved to London.
“My parents stayed in Munich and I got a job in London but then the situation in Germany got much worse,” she said. “The day after the Crystal Night (sic) a friend of my parents rang them up saying her husband had been taken to a concentration camp.”
According to the Bristol Post, Alice’s father was also going to be sent to a concentration camp, but was let go because he was old and all the concentration camps were full.
This last detail kind of makes one wonder if the entire interview in the Bristol Post was adequately fact-checked. But then the reporter revealed that “Mrs Frank Stock worked for the BBC,” and everything became clear.
Alice also recalled that when her parents tried to flee Nazi Germany into England, in 1939, “the UK government said at the time that you had to have £1,000” to be allowed to enter, “but we didn’t.” according to her story as told to the Bristol Post, “My father had a valuable violin which he bought as a young lawyer which they accepted instead.”