Fred Uhlman

Fred Uhlman (19 January 1901 – 11 April 1985) was a German-English writer, painter and lawyer of Jewish origin. Fred Uhlman was born in Stuttgart, Germany, into a prosperous middle-class Jewish family. He studied at the Universities of Freiburg, Munich and Tübingen from where, in 1923, he graduated with a degree in Law followed by a Doctorate in Canon and Civil Law. In March 1933, two months after Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor, Uhlman moved to Paris to start a new life; but, as long as he had been living in France, he encountered many difficulties; foreigners were not permitted to take paid employment, and were immediately expelled from France if caught doing so. Uhlman supported himself by drawing and painting, and selling his work privately when he could. At one stage he supplemented his income by selling tropical fish. Uhlman's star as a painter was in the ascendant, but buyers were hard to come by. In April 1936 he moved to Tossa de Mar, a small fishing village on the Costa Brava in Spain, but shortly thereafter the Spanish Civil War broke out, and in August he decided to return to Paris, via Marseille. Here, while making a telephone call from a café to Diana Croft, a friend in London whom he had met in Tossa de Mar, his wallet, containing most of his money and his passport, was stolen from his jacket left unattended at his table. A foreigner in France without a passport effectively became a stateless person and subject to official harassment, internment and possib…