Hilda Levi escaped Nazi Germany as a child (Image: SWNS)
Hilda Levi, who lived in a humble 1970s semi-detached house in Whitstable, Kent, donated £1.4 million after her death in 2022 at the age of 98.
Her recently disclosed will revealed that she donated £500,000 each to the Friends of Kent and Canterbury Hospital and Age UK, along with £200,000 each to the Friends of Whitstable Healthcare and Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. The charities were both delighted and puzzled, having had no prior contact or even awareness of Hilda – who it has now emerged likely inherited her wealth from a rich uncle.
Neighbours from Seymour Avenue claimed there were no indications of her wealth, as her house and garden were in a state of disrepair. It has now been revealed that Hilda was an orphaned Jewish refugee who fled to England from Germany in the late 1930s, with all her family killed in the Holocaust.
Hilda’s unassuming home in Kent (Image: SWNS)
She found a home in Sutton Valence, near Maidstone, where she was adopted, eventually gaining ‘naturalised’ status in 1958. Her adoptive mother, Ellen Jeffery, is buried in the same plot as Hilda in Whitstable cemetery, albeit 22 years earlier.
The investigation into Hilda’s life was carried out by amateur genealogist Julie Hunt from Whitstable, who expressed being “intrigued” by the generous pensioner’s story. She spent countless hours trawling through ancestry websites to piece together the life of a remarkable woman who overcame tragedy and adversity.
Mrs Hunt, who dedicated more than 20 years of her life to youth services in Canterbury, said: “I was just intrigued and thought there must be much more to this extraordinary woman.”
Records from May 1941 confirm that Hilda, then only 16, was a “genuine refugee from Nazi oppression”.
Julie Hunt (Image: SWNS)
Hilda’s education journey took her from the former Redhill School in East Sutton Hill to Maidstone Secretarial College and later Bromley Technical College. It was at this institution where she achieved a distinction in business studies in the finals of the Chartered Institute of Secretaries examinations, as reported by the Kent Messenger on August 16, 1963, when she was 38.
The report paints Hilda as “a refugee from Cologne who lost her entire family during the persecutions in the last war”, and identifies her as the daughter of Dr Friedrich Hermann Levi and Mrs Irma Levi. Hilda’s career saw her working as a confidential secretary in Maidstone and later at the Duke Of Edinburgh Awards Office in Westminster.
Article about Hilda (Image: SWNS)
However, the source of her wealth and why she spent her final years in a Jewish care home in Prescott, Manchester, remains a mystery. Mrs Hunt’s research did uncover that Hilda had a wealthy uncle, Herman Hecht, who relocated from Germany to San Francisco at the age of 16.
The relative amassed his wealth as a partner in a prominent coffee import-export firm, and was transferring money from the US to Hilda’s parents in Germany starting from 1939.
He passed away in 1951, leaving behind an estate worth the equivalent of £34.8m in today’s currency – with the majority going to his surviving siblings and their families, but also to distant relatives and charities.