As I understand it, statelessness implies that you have lost your
citizenship without being acknowledged as a citizen of another state,
wherever in Europe you were born, and citizenship is confirmed by a
passport. In my family's case, my parents destroyed the German
passports that had taken us to England after England declared war on
Germany in 1939. We were told that we were therefore not German, but
stateless. Looking at my father's internment record, I see that in any
case the family's German passports expired in 1940. Some months later,
in order to be able to emigrate further to USA, my mother was issued
with a travel document which acted only as a one-way passport and did
not confer British citizenship on her (a passport she never used). Only
after WW2 was over were we able to obtain British citizenship by
naturalisation.
Eva Lawrence
St Albans, UK.
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Eva Lawrence
St Albans, UK.