 His mother was a German baroness and his father a Polish horse breeder who both fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and arrived in London as penniless refugees.Lenkiewicz frequently stated in interview that the hotel's elderly residents included Holocaust survivors but this is contradicted by the artist's brother John, who recollects that the residents tended to be the parents or grandparents of 2nd or 3rd generation English Jews (for instance, the mother of popular entertainer Dickie Valentine), though the hotel's Czechoslovakian cook, Mrs Bobek, was a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen camp.Nevertheless, the loneliness and suffering the young painter witnessed at the hotel was "salutary and thought-provoking" according to Lenkiewicz.