Dame Rachel De Souza

speaker

518 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 12 May

Dame Rachel De Souza’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Rosebud with Gyles Brandreth · More Rosebud - Dame Rachel De Souza, the Children's Commissioner · 12 May 2026 podcast

So my mother was born in 1945.

She had an Austrian-Hungarian mother.

Renate Fekete, although she was... Renate?

Well, she was Renate Dornemann, Renate Fekete, but she was baptised Dagmar.

So she had a German father from Leipzig and my granny...

really did not want to live under communism.

She was a real Austro-Hungarian.

She was an interpreter.

She was from a Hungarian family in Breslauva.

So she wanted to go west and my mother's father didn't.

So she left my mother.

in a convent in passau um and she was there for seven years and made her way took a passage west came in through manchester here uh got passage so worked in the mills this is your grandmother my granny yeah and then brought my mother over when she was seven and my mother experienced some pretty terrible things

So there was lots of Southern Bavaria just after the war.

So there was lots of poverty.

She had hepatitis.

She's only 4 foot 11.

So that seven years been brought up by nuns with 50 other children.

I've got the photos of it.

And her father disappeared, did he?

We still I've never traced him, found him.

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