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Decades after she died in the Holocaust, Brummie lad's 'Aunt Jenny' is remembered in amazing wayBBC radio presenter and Brummie star Adrian Goldberg is honouring his 'Aunt Jenny' through

musicCommentsNewsJane Haynes Politics & People Editor05:19, 29 May 2025Adrian Goldberg and (inset) his father Rudolph, who escaped the Holocaust. Goldberg is now honouring his lost aunt

Jenny through music Brummie music fan and broadcaster Adrian Goldberg's long gone 'Aunt Jenny', killed in the Holocaust, has become the unlikely inspiration for a new record label in

Birmingham after an extraordinary development.

Goldberg's fun-loving great aunt, a feather factory owner, was among the millions of Jews who cruelly perished under the Nazis during the Second World War. Now, more than 80 years on, her

memory has been revived in the most unlikely way.

‌ For Goldberg is using a small compensation payment belatedly paid to his family by the German government to set up a record label promoting Brummie bands, with her name in its title.

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Jenny's Feather Factory is launched this week (Thursday May 29). "From how my dad described her, as always fun to be around and up for adventure, I think she would be thrilled," said

Goldberg.

The unusual story goes back over two years, when Goldberg received an email out of the blue from a civil servant in Berlin informing him that his dad had been part of a legal case seeking

compensation on behalf of his aunt, who had lived in the city and ran a feather factory.

Article continues below "My dad had talked about his Aunt Jenny and always described her as great fun, she was the aunt who would go wading in the river with him, would carry him about on

her shoulders.

"And there was always something very unique about her in that she had a feather factory.

"If you pardon the pun, that always tickled me as a kid, thinking it was this place that was making feathers, but of course what actually happened was that duck and goose feathers would be

brought in and used to stuff pillows and eiderdowns, and were put in hats for ladies' fashions of the time.

‌ "But I had no idea that my dad had taken part in this legal case with his cousin, who lived in London. Unfortunately, by the time the email reached me my dad had passed away, his cousin

had passed away and the lawyer involved had also passed away."

Adrian Goldberg and (inset) his father Rudolph as a boy and later in life "As my dad's heir, the case was now with me." Goldberg considered not pursuing it for the sake of what he knew would

be a small sum, but was intrigued to conclude the case, resulting last year in a small payout of a couple of thousand pounds.

‌ "I'd never met Aunt Jenny, didn't even have a photograph of her, but it felt like a real connection," said Goldberg. He used some of the cash paid out to fund a pilgrimage to Berlin with

his sister to locate the site of the feather factory, discovering it was now an indistinct industrial estate.

Goldberg and his family have now set about getting a 'stolpersteine' placed at the site of the former feather factory. The brass plaque will be set into the paving nearby, to commemorate

Jenny as a victim of the Holocaust.

But there was something else he wanted to do with the money. Shortly before he got wind of Aunt Jenny's case, Goldberg said he had become bewitched by a song about Birmingham called

Chocolate and Cars by newly formed band The Leaking Machine.

‌ "It's an absolutely beautiful, very tuneful pop song, and I said to them that I'd love to one day start a record label and if I did they'd be my first signing. At the time I didn't have

spare money lying around - then literally a week or so later I got this email about Aunt Jenny."

The Leaking Machine, first signing on Jenny's Feather Factory records The Leaking Machine will peform songs from their new album Sound On Sound at the Rock n Roll Brewhouse in the Jewellery

Quarter, Thursday May 29, to officially launch Jenny's Feather Factory. Tickets are still available here. Starring two members of established Brummie band Mighty Mighty, the group are

described by Goldberg as 'west coast pop meets the West Midlands'.

‌Content cannot be displayed without consent Said Goldberg of his belated encounter with Aunt Jenny's legacy: "The saddest thing from the experience was receiving from the civil servants in

Germany an inventory of all her belongings stolen in the Holocaust, including a radiogram that she'd have listened to music on. I don't know exactly what happened to Jenny or where she died

but all the evidence is that, like the rest of my father's family, she perished in the Holocaust.

"The only two who survived from the whole direct family were my dad and his brother, who escaped to England just before the outbreak of war in 1939 on the Kindertransport. His cousin, who

was in London, also got out but that was it.

‌Adrian Goldberg at the site now of what was once Jenny's Feather Factory in Berlin "Aunt Jenny's now alive again in a way, Jenny's Feather Factory is a way of giving her life and looking to

the future, and I think she would have liked that."

Adrian’s father Rudolph Goldberg died in 1912, aged 87. He had arrived in Britain as a 13-year-old boy on the Kindertransport rescue mission after fleeing Nazi Germany as a Jewish child

refugee. He and his brother Werner, 11, were among 10,000 Jewish children brought to Britain under the scheme in the months before the Second World War began.

Article continues below They were the only known survivors of their direct family, with at least 10 of his nearest all perishing in the Nazi death camps.