Shlomo Galandauer was born in 1932 in Wiener Neustadt. His father Bela Mano Galandauer was an orthodox Jewish doctor in Eisenstadt. His mother Gisela, nee Jakobovits, came from a devout Jewish family who had lived for generations in Lackenbach where Shlomo spent his early childhood. During the night on which the Nazis took power in March 1938, the windows of their house were smashed and the family's belongings stolen. Not long after this his father was taken away by the police and ordered to leave Lackenbach. Despite the dangerous situation, they managed to obtain visas for Czechoslovakia. Initially they fled to an uncle in Wiener Neustadt, and from there continued to Czechoslovakia where they stayed with another brother of Shlomo's mother. In Prague they were able to obtain entry visas for England. On the 10th November 1938, the day after the infamous pogroms against Jews in Germany and Austria, known as Krystal Nacht, the family left Prague. In order to be acknowledged as a doctor in England, his father had to spend a considerable time studying and taking exams. After a short stay in London and Liverpool the family came to Birmingham. In 1940 his father, being a citizen of the "German Reich", was taken as an "enemy alien" to an internment camp in Devon and then Shropshire, where he and his brother-in-law were detained for 10 weeks. In 1943 the family moved to Leicester where his father opened a doctor's surgery. At the age of 16, Shlomo went to the Gateshead Yeshivah, the Academy for traditional Talmud studies. Following this he studied chemistry in London and graduated in 1954. He soon began working as a research scientist at a chemical factory near London. In 1959 he married Lily Ruth Pineas, with whom he has 3 children. He retired in 1997 and now works in a voluntary capacity in a centre for holocaust survivors.