Recha Goldschmidt (in official documents she is also noted as “Ruth” and “Rosa”) was born in Würzburg on March 7, 1909. She was one of the eight children of the Würzburg tailor and merchant Josef Goldschmidt and his wife Johanna (Hannchen), née Fröhlich. The family moved to Hanau in 1927 where Recha worked as a teaching nurse. Since May 1928, the Goldschmidt family was registered in Frankfort/ Main. There Recha found an employment in the Jewish Nurses’ House and temporarily in Rothschildsches Hospital.

On April 30, 1936, she checked out for Bad Kissingen and worked there for two spa seasons as the director and nurse in the Israelite Spa Hospital on Altenberg, always from May to September and October, respectively. According to her daughter, Recha Goldschmidt loved her profession and often talked about Bad Kissingen. In October 1937, she returned to her family who lived in Mainz at that time.

Recha Goldschmidt managed to emigrate to England. In the list of “enemy aliens”, there is an entry of October 1939. In September 1944, she married Hamburg-born Arnold Thoms in the English exile. Arnold Thoms had been persecuted by the Nazis because of his membership in the Communist Party. He was imprisoned in Fuhlsbüttel Concentration Camp for a short time but- surprisingly - was released and fled to Prague and from there to England. He was deported to Australia by the English. Later he could return to England, where he got to know Recha Goldschmidt in Manchester. Their daughter Vera was born in England. After the war, the family had originally intended to go to San Francisco, where Recha’s siblings who had survived had settled. But immigration to the USA was denied to Recha’s husband Arnold when it was known that he had been a member of the Communist Party. With the beginning of the Cold War immediately after the war and the McCarthy Era to follow it, an extreme anti-Communism spread in the USA.

The Thoms family, therefore, returned from Salford in England to Germany in February 1947 and settled in Arnold’s hometown of Hamburg. Surely, it was not so easy for them to return to a country they had had to flee from few years before and in which Recha’s parents and some of her siblings had been murdered in the annihilation camps. That anti-Semitic attitudes were widespread even in the time after the war, was something their daughter Vera had to realize in the behavior of some teachers. Her parents realized it as well because of receiving anti-Semitic letters.

Arnold Thoms died in Hamburg in December 1988; Recha Thoms moved to Ahrensberg north of Hamburg in April 1996. She died there in October 2001 at the age of 92.