Jenny's Feather Factory

My new record label

It started with an unexpected message from the German government...it ended with a record label.

I was at home one day when an email arrived from a civil servant from Berlin.

Was I, they wanted to know, the son of Rudy Goldberg, a Jewish boy forced to flee Nazi Germany for the UK in 1939 via the Kindertransport refugee scheme?

Indeed I was…

It transpired that my Dad had started a legal case years earlier, claiming compensation on behalf of his aunt Jenny, who like most of the rest of his family, perished in the horrors of the Holocaust.

Unfortunately, the lawyer taking the case had since died – as had Rudy himself.

Time was running out. This was a final attempt to reach out to me to see if I wanted to pursue the case before the legal deadline.

I remembered my Dad talking fondly about Aunt Jenny, who had lived in Berlin and owned a feather factory, presumably providing the stuffing for pillows.

Jenny was, by the sound of it, a ‘fun aunt’, who took Rudy wading in the river as a child and carried him on her shoulders - but it wasn’t necessarily a straightforward decision to continue the claim.

Some Holocaust survivors and their descendants have rejected German compensation as ‘blood money’.

I took a different view. I wanted to honour Aunt Jenny and keep her memory alive.

How best to do it?

As a small-time music promoter keen to make the step into releasing records I vowed that if a settlement came, I would use it to launch a record label in Jenny’s name.

Being a record company ‘boss’, even in a small a way, had long been a dream of mine, and I had already promised a brilliant Midlands-based band The Leaking Machine that if I ever had the wherewithal, I’d release their latest record.

When a small sum duly arrived, Jenny’s Feather Factory was born…

The label is live now, and we’ll be launching the album with a live show on May 29, 2025 at the Rock n Roll Brewhouse in Birmingham.

Over the next few months, I’ll be trying to find out more about Jenny’s story, as well as visiting the site of her factory in Berlin. You can follow my progress here.