THE KINDERTRANSPORT: HISTORY AND MEMORY
Jennifer A. Norton
B.A., Australian National University, 1976
THESIS
Submitted in partial satisfaction of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
HISTORY
at
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, SACRAMENTO
FALL
2010
© 2010
Jennifer A. Norton
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ii
THE KINDERTRANSPORT: HISTORY AND MEMORY
A Thesis
by
Jennifer A. Norton
Approved by:
__________________________________, Committee Chair
Dr. Katerina Lagos
__________________________________, Second Reader
Dr. Mona Siegel
____________________________
Date
iii
Student: Jennifer A. Norton
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format
manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for
the thesis.
__________________________, Department Chair ___________________
Dr. Aaron Cohen
Date
Department of History
iv
Abstract
of
THE KINDERTRANSPORT: HISTORY AND MEMORY
by
Jennifer A. Norton
The Kindertransport, a British scheme to bring unaccompanied mostly Jewish refugee children
threatened by Nazism to Great Britain, occupies a unique place in modern British history. In the
months leading up to the Second World War, it brought over 10,000 children under the age of
seventeen into the United Kingdom without their parents, to be fostered by British families and
re-emigrated when they turned eighteen. Mostly forgotten in the post-war period, the
Kindertransport was rediscovered in the late 1980s when a fiftieth anniversary reunion was
organized.
Celebrated as an unprecedented act of benevolent rescue by a generous British Parliament
and people, the Kindertransport has been subjected to little academic scrutiny. The salvation
construct assumes that the Kinder, who were mostly silent for fifty years, experienced little
hardship and that their survival more than compensated for any trauma they suffered. This study
challenges the prevailing triumphant narrative and its underlying assumptions by examining the
government policies that allowed the children to come to England and the effects of these policies
on the children’s lives.
The British government’s decision to bring only children and not their parents left a
majority of them orphans after their families were murdered in the Holocaust. Exacerbating the
trauma of separation was the government decree that the program be entirely privately organized
and funded and that the children’s welfare be overseen by non-governmental agencies, which
were ill-equipped for such a task. Relying upon Kinder testimony, the official documentation of
the rescuers and parliamentary debate proceedings, this study analyzes and contests the
redemptory narrative and examines how it has been shaped and reinforced by the government, the
rescuers and the Kinder themselves in the seventy years since the program’s inception.
__________________________, Committee Chair
Dr. Katerina Lagos
_______________________
Date
v
To the Kinder and the families they lost.
Home is where some people know who you are
the rescue was impersonal
it was no one’s concern what use
we made of the years given us
one should not ask of children who
find their survival natural
gratitude for being where
ten thousand others have come too
Karen Gershon The Children’s Exodus
vi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This study would not have been possible without the testimony of the Kinder; to them,
my profound gratitude for sharing their often-painful life stories. Special thanks to those
with whom I personally interacted and who shared their memories with me: Ralph
Samuel, Ellen Fletcher, Leo Horowitz, Bea Steinberg, Marie Donner, Stephanie Smith
and Helga Newman.
Thank you to my wonderful thesis advisors, Dr. Katerina Lagos and Dr. Mona Siegel, for
their unwavering encouragement and guidance. They have challenged me to become a
better writer and historian and have helped me believe in my academic dreams. Dr.
Siegel, thank you for introducing me to History and Memory, and Dr. Lagos, for helping
me discover my area of expertise.
I would also like to thank Dr. Palermo Dr. Ettinger and Dr. Marashi for stimulating
seminars and discussions. I am indebted to Dr. Palermo for his willingness to work with
me while I was in Poland. His help and the Craft Scholarship grant enabled me to
complete my program on time.
The staff at the Weiner Library, London, deserve special acknowledgment especially
archivist Howard Falksohn, who helped me enormously.
To my family and friends, I appreciate your forbearance while I researched and talked
endlessly about the Kindertransport. Tom, miłością mojego życia, dziękuję za wszystko.
vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Dedication ................................................................................................................................ vi
Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................. vii
List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................................ ix
Chapter
1.
INTRODUCTION …………... .……………………………………………………….. 1
Challenging the Myth .................................................................................................. 5
2.
THE KINDER IN SCHOLARLY LITERATURE ............................................................ 9
3.
THE KINDER ................................................................................................................. 29
Parting and Separation .............................................................................................. 31
A New Life in Great Britain ....................................................................................... 38
The Consequences of Separation ................................................................................... 85
4.
GOVERNMENT POLICY AND THE KINDERTRANSPORT ....................................... 92
British Refugee Policy .............................................................................................. 93
Kristallnacht and the Kindertransport ......................................................................... 106
Parliament and Child Migration .................................................................................. 110
Parliament and the Kinder ....................................................................................... 117
Postwar Perspectives ............................................................................................... 123
5.
THE RESCUERS .......................................................................................................... 129
The Anglo-Jewish Community and the Refugees .................................................... 131
The Refugee Children’s Movement ............................................................................ 140
Rescuers Outside the Movement .................................................................................. 160
6.
CONCLUSION: THE TRIUMPHANT NARRATIVE ................................................ 170
The Emerging Myth: 1938-1945 .............................................................................. 171
The Kinder and Narrative Construction ...................................................................... 183
Summary ................................................................................................................. 192
Bibliography......................................................................................................................... 195
viii
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
AJR
Association of Jewish Refugees
BCRC
British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia
BOD
Board of Deputies of British Jews
CBF
Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief
[Formerly the Central British Fund for German Jewry]
FAR
Movement for the Care of Children from Germany
First Annual Report 1938-1939
HHC
Hansard, House of Commons
HHL
Hansard, House of Lords
JRC
Jewish Refugees Committee
KTA
Kindertransport Association
MCCG
Movement for the Care of Children from Germany
MP
Member of Parliament
RCM
Refugee Children’s Movement
ROK
Reunion of the Kindertransport
SAR
Refugee Children’s Movement Second Annual Report 1940
VHA
Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation Institute
ix
1
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
On September 4, 2009, a vintage British steam train carrying twenty-two elderly
men and women pulled into Liverpool Street Station in London, England. There the
passengers had an emotional reunion with Nicholas Winton, the frail 100-year-old man
whom they credited with saving their lives seventy years earlier. The passengers and their
relatives were completing a four-day journey that began in Prague, reenacting the passage
of the last of the eight children’s transports organized by Winton in 1939.1 Winton, then a
twenty-nine year old London stockbroker, devoted the better part of a year to arranging
the emigration of 669 Czech Jewish children whose parents, fearing their fate at the
hands of the Nazis, were anxious to send their children to England. “Winton’s children”
were among the more than 10,000 Jewish young people from Nazi controlled Europe
who were allowed into England as unaccompanied transmigrants in the months following
Kristallnacht, a movement that became known as the Kindertransport.
Knighted in 2002, Sir Nicholas Winton, now the most recognized symbol of the
child rescue program, was utterly unknown to the British public until about twenty years
ago. Failing to elicit any interest in his papers after the war, Winton stored the scrapbook
containing records of the children he had succeeded in bringing to Britain in an attic
“Jews Recreate Kindertransport Train Trip,” The Jerusalem Post, September 4, 2009. http://www
.jpost .com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1251804492347&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull (accessed
September 30, 2009).
1
2
trunk, where it languished for fifty years.2 Like Winton’s scrapbook, the story of the
Kindertransport lay dormant for over half a century. In the early 1980s, British social
historians began to take an interest in recording the testimonies of Holocaust survivors,
including a few of the Kinder. The crucial event in awakening memories of the
Kindertransport, however, was the Reunion of the Kindertransport (ROK), conceived
and organized by Bertha Leverton, a Kind who put notices in the Jewish Chronicle,
hoping to attract a hundred or so fellow refugees.3 When the reunion was held in 1989 on
the fiftieth anniversary of the rescue operation, over 1000 former child refugees and their
families attended, and it gave rise to a wave of memoirs and a collective autobiography of
the attendees. In the ensuing years, hundreds of Kinder from all over the world shared
their life stories on video and in personal memoirs and learned, along with the rest of the
world, the details of the migration scheme that saved them. That scheme now occupies a
unique place in British historical memory as an act of unprecedented mercy in which the
British people take unabashed pride.
The British and international press closely followed the reenactment of the
“Winton Train,” and their reports reflect the dominant national narrative about the
2
Muriel Emanuel, and Vera Gissing. Nicholas Winton and the Rescued Generation: Save One Life,
Save the World, (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2001); ,Matej Mináč, dir., Nicholas Winton: The Power of
Good, (Gelman Educational Foundation, Ann Arbor Michigan, 2006),film. Part of the Winton mythology
is that he kept silent or even forgot about the rescue until the ‘rediscovery’ of his scrapbook in 1988. In
fact, he attempted unsuccessfully to interest several institutions in his papers and finally stored them away
until the resurgence of Kindertransport interest in the late 1980s. Kim Masters, “Finding A Hero Amid
Fading Memories,” NPR, October 11, 2009, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=
95111848. (accessed October 30, 2009).
3
Mark Jonathon Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer, Into the Arms of Strangers; Stories of the
Kindertransport-The British Scheme that Saved 10,000 Children from the Nazi Regime, (London:
Bloomsbury, 2000), 252-3. Leverton’s inspiration was a photograph of one of her grandchildren, who was
exactly the same as Leverton age when she left Germany. Realizing that she knew little about the effort that
had saved her family, she decided to organize a small gathering of Kinder.
3
Kindertransport. Titles such as “Sir Nicholas Winton, the “British Schindler”, meets the
Holocaust survivors he helped save,” “Czech evacuees thank their saviour,” “WWII
rescue train trip recreated,” and ”Jews who escaped Nazis as kids recreate train trip,”
employ common Kindertransport imagery emphasizing heroism and salvation.4 This
celebratory narrative of rescued children who escaped Nazi tyranny and were evacuated
to safety in England through the generous efforts of the British people, has to a great
extent glossed over the painful aspects of the child migration scheme, most of which
emanate from the fateful decision to separate families and admit only unaccompanied
children to Great Britain.
Though the Kindertransport is undeniably one of the more positive threads in the
tragic story of the Holocaust, it was a deeply flawed program. The British government’s
crucial decision to allow children, but not their parents, to seek safety in Great Britain led
to life-long consequences for thousands. The government then compounded the trauma of
separation by throwing the full burden of the financial, physical and emotional welfare of
the children on privately funded aid agencies who were ill equipped to manage the task.
The result was that despite the best efforts of these agencies, many of these children were
deprived of love, parental guidance and protection, and the majority became orphans
Stephen Adams, “Sir-Nicholas Winton the British Schindler meets the Holocaust survivors he helped
save,” The Telegraph, September 4, 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/world-war2/6138441/ html (accessed September 29, 2009); Robert Hall “Czech evacuees thank their saviour,” BBC
News, September 4, 2009, htttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8237231.stm (accessed September 29,
2009); “WWII Rescue train trip recreated,” BBC News, September 4, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_
news /8238104.stm (accessed September 29, 2009); “Jews who escaped Nazis as kids recreate train trip,” 3
News New Zealand, September 5, 2009, http://www.3news.co.nz/Jews-who-escaped-Nazis-as-kidsrecreate-train-trip/tabid/423 /articleID/119856/Default.aspx (accessed September 29, 2009).
4
4
when their families were destroyed in the Holocaust.5 Even those whose parents survived
the war found their former relationships irrevocably altered by the loss of six or more
formative years together. The failure to interrogate these aspects of the rescue scheme has
perpetuated a simplistic image of Great Britain as savior and rescuer. A reluctance to
tarnish that image has left the complex tangle of uprooted children, an intransigent
government and underfunded, inexpert philanthropic organizations largely unexplored in
impartial scholarship or the media.
The uncomplicated redemptive narrative of the Kindertransport rests on the fact
that Great Britain did something when the rest of the world did little, thus securing life
for 10,000 children and their descendants. While the British government legitimately
deserves credit for acting to save these children, the majority of whom would
undoubtedly have perished at the hands of the Nazis, the salvation construct rests on
several assumptions that have never been critically challenged either in a scholarly
monograph or by the Kinder themselves. The narrative of deliverance fails to
acknowledge that Britain’s generosity was heroic only in relation to the extremely
ungenerous response of other nations. It is also foundational to the Kindertransport
paradigm to assume that the only viable option was to bring the children alone to safety
in Great Britain. Gratitude, reflecting a retroactive knowledge of the children’s probable
5
It was long assumed that ninety percent of the children lost their parents. That assumption was
challenged by the results of a recent survey of 1043 Kinder, sixty percent of whom lost their parents. A
similar number is found in I Came Alone, and, while neither is a scientific survey, it seems safe to conclude
that a majority of the children were orphaned. Association of Jewish Refugees, “Kindertransport Survey,”
http://www.ajr.org.uk/kindersurvey (accessed September 30, 2009); Bertha Leverton and Shmuel
Lowensohn, eds., I Came Alone: The Stories of the Kindertransports, (Sussex: Book Guild, 1990;
paperback ed., 1996, 4th repr., 2007). Citations are to reprinted edition.
5
fate, is intrinsic to this conventional account. It has discouraged criticism of the policy
that saved children but not their parents and recognition that more humanitarian choices
were possible.
Gratitude has also deterred a thorough exploration of the consequences of
separation. The dominant narrative assumes that the children’s mere survival was
recompense for the many traumas they experienced. Further minimizing the Kinder’s
suffering is the tendency to appraise it only in comparison to the horrors of the camps,
unfairly diminishing it. Failure to confront these assumptions has deprived the Kinder of
the legitimacy of their own experiences and led to the construction of a mythical account
emphasizing only the triumphant aspects of the program. Ten thousand children’s lives
were saved, but at what cost?
Challenging the Narrative
Only within the past decade have British historians begun to question national myths and
to call for a more nuanced assessment of the Kindertransport. One of the first was Louise
London’s Whitehall and the Jews, a critical study of the British Home Office’s
immigration policy from 1933 to 1948, which examines Britain’s record of humanitarian
aid to Jewish refugees. London concludes that a “gulf exists between the memory and
history of that record.”6 London’s focus is on Britain’s overall response to the Jewish
refugee crisis of the 1930s and the war years, and she devotes only a handful of pages
6
Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews 1933-1948: British Immigration Policy and the Holocaust,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 13.
6
specifically to the child rescue scheme. Nevertheless, she was one of the first historians to
assert that, “The organizers of this exodus knew they were separating families in
circumstances where parents...had little chance of survival. This must qualify our view of
admission of unaccompanied children as humanitarian.”7
Academic journals have also begun to address the complexity of the
Kindertransport story. Many of these studies focus on sociological or psychological
consequences of the movement, avoiding entanglement with the larger historical and
cultural questions of how it has been remembered in Great Britain.8 A few historians,
however, noting the paucity of critical analysis of the Kindertransport, have called for a
reappraisal that takes into account the movement’s “more awkward issues,” including
child exploitation and abuse, as well as questions about why the humanitarian gesture
was extended only to children and not to their parents.9 A reader’s response to this
reevaluation, however, confirms the sanctity of the established narrative.
By any standards, the efforts of a dedicated band of people in Britain-- Jews and
non-Jews--resulting in 10,000 children being given safe haven in Britain on the
brink of war was a cause for celebration....attempts to find flaws in the response to
suffering which the Kindertransport represents--a response unparalleled
elsewhere—were unsupported by the evidence; its conclusion that we should
move from a celebratory view is unjustified.10
7
Ibid., 121.
8
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23, no.1 (2004) was dedicated entirely to
aspects of the Kindertransport.
Caroline Sharples,. “Reconstructing the Past: Refugee Writings on the Kindertransport.” Holocaust
Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 12, no.3 (2006):41; Caroline Sharples, “Kindertransport,”
History Today 54, no.3 (2004): 27.
9
Leonard Smith, “Thank God for the Kindertransport,” Letters to the editor, History Today 54, issue
5, (2004): 92.
10
7
This response contains all the trigger points of the self-congratulatory interpretation: the
“dedicated band” of rescuers, the “safe haven” of Great Britain, and unparalleled
response of the British people. Academic challenges to such emotionally invested
viewpoints are fraught with difficulty.
The seventieth anniversary of the rescue program in 2008 marked an increasing
willingness among writers of various disciplines to probe the scheme’s legacy in British
national identity. A journalist from the Jerusalem Post, in an article titled “The ‘noparent’ Kindertransport,” refused to applaud the rescue. Instead he sharply challenged
the premise of the entire scheme, observing that “the Kindertransport showed that the
Nazis were ready to let Jews out.. But why were the parents not allowed to enter Britain?
... The parents, like their children, could have been granted temporary shelter, thus
avoiding a cruel separation... even Britain’s unique act of humanity delivers a double
message.”11 In the recently published collection Anglo-Jewish Women Writing About the
Holocaust which focuses on Kindertransport memoirs, drama and fiction, Phyllis Lassner
observes, “Anglo-Jewish women writing about the Holocaust insist on the inclusion of
their stories in the evolving national narrative. Their writing argues that...Britain must
reconsider its complicated relationship to the Holocaust and Jewish culture.”12
A more realistic counter-narrative must balance the laudable achievement of
preserving the lives of 10,000 children against the alteration and damage to those lives
Amnon Rubenstein, “The ‘no-parent’ Kindertransport,” Jerusalem Post, December 3, 2008,
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1227702420030&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
(accessed April 2, 2009).
11
12
Phyllis Lasner, Anglo-Jewish Women Writing About the Holocaust: Displaced Witnesses,
(Houndsmills: Palgrave MacMillian, 2008), 6.
8
occasioned by the decision to spare the children but leave the parents to their respective
fates. For this decision and the failure to take a role in administering the enormous
undertaking, the British government must bear the brunt of responsibility. The cascade of
missteps and omissions that followed the children’s entry into Great Britain compounded
the fundamental tragedy of separation. The triumphant narrative that has attached itself to
the story has denied the Kinder the complexity of their experiences and impeded
dispassionate analysis of the event. Gratitude is necessary, but gratitude and careful
criticism should not be mutually exclusive. Only through an analysis that confronts the
omissions and failures of the institutions that created and administered the program, and a
critical study of the construction and perpetuation of the dominant narrative, can a more
realistic story of the Kindertransport’s triumph and tragedy emerge.
9
Chapter 2
THE KINDER IN SCHOLARLY LITERATURE
A critical study of the Kindertransport cannot overlook how separation from their
families affected the subjects of rescue—the children. Both the available official
documentation from the period as well as the Kinder’s own accounts can be utilized to
examine this aspect of the program. Fortunately, the latter are plentiful, for the
Kindertransport is now one of the most documented of all the refugee movements of the
twentieth century. The majority of those documents are collective autobiographies,
memoirs and oral testimonies from the Kinder themselves, most of which have been
recorded or published within the past twenty years. It is estimated that as many as ten
percent of all the Kinder have recorded their testimony in some form or another, an
unprecedented figure compared to the recorded testimony of other World War II victims
and participants.13
In the surfeit of remembering about the Kindertransport in recent years, the
former child refugees have been remarkably forthright about their lives, making it
possible to learn a great deal about their experiences, both positive and otherwise.
Nevertheless, it is also important to recognize the limitations of such sources. There is no
way of knowing, for example, whether the testimony of over 1000 Kinder accurately
reflects the entire group’s experiences. As in any survivor group, only a select few feel
motivated and capable enough to leave literary accounts their lives for the public record,
13
Tony Kushner, Remembering Refugees: Then and Now, (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2006), 141-2.
10
and a responsible scholar will be cautious when drawing broad conclusions from such
sources. While a much greater number are likely to leave oral or audio testimony, even
these resources will represent only a select group, since they rely on both specific
opportunities to make recordings as well as the participation of outside agents.
Both oral and written testimony, especially when recorded after the passage of
many years, is an intricate tapestry of memory and forgetting. All survivor testimony is
mediated by the urge to leave a lasting record and the desire to suppress painful
memories. Historians who use survivor testimony have recognized that these memories
occupy several realms. At the deepest level are repressed or traumatic memories, to
which an interviewer is almost never privy, and the survivor often permanently buries. It
is not uncommon, however, for “secret,” painful memories that have been suppressed for
years to emerge in the confessional atmosphere of an interview or memoir. Some
survivor groups share “communal” memories that, while freely discussed among
themselves, are often mediated in public by censoring those elements deemed potentially
damaging to the group. Those memories that survivors are likely to be most willing to
share are “public” memories. These are usually the safest and most easily discussed
episodes in the survivor’s life, and constitute the bulk of survivor testimony and memoir
work.14 Kinder testimonials reflect all four memory realms although public and secret
memories are by far the most commonly encountered.
14
Christopher Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp, (New York:.
Norton, 2010), 9-11. See also Lawrence Langer,. Holocaust Testimonies: the Ruins of Memory, (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
11
It is also important to take into account the purpose and intended audience of the
testimony or memoir. Some particularly distressing memories, even if retained, may be
self-censored in testimonies intended for the public or as a family legacy. This is clearly
demonstrated by those whose stories are recorded in several different sources. Ellen
Kerry Davis, for example, gave a two-hour videotaped interview for the Shoah Visual
History archive in 1996 in which she provided detailed testimony about her abusive and
exploitative foster mother, information that she entirely omitted from her submission to
the 1988 collective autobiography I Came Alone.15 Similarly, Milena Roth recorded an
audio interview for the British Library in 1988 in which she described her emotionally
abusive foster mother in starkly unflattering terms but chose to have her name listed as
“Anonymous.”16 Five years later, she gave similar information to Doris Whiteman for her
study The Uprooted, under the pseudonym Maritza Jasper.17 It was not until 2004 that
Roth used her own name in the memoir Lifesaving Letters, a work in which she
considerably softened the descriptions of her foster mother.18 In general, the Kinder were
much more circumspect in their own publications and in collective works that included
authorial attribution, saving their harsher criticisms and more painful reminiscences for
anonymous collections and video or audio interviews. This self-censorship suggests the
15
Ellen Kerry Davis, Interview 32914, Visual History Archive, (USC Shoah Foundation Institute,
1996). (Hereafter VHA); Leverton and Lowensohn, 63.
16
Anonymous, Living Memory of the Jewish Community British Library National Sound Archive
National Life Story Collection, Ref. No.: C410/007, 1988.
17
Dorit Bader Whiteman, The Uprooted: A Hitler Legacy, (New York: Plenum Press, 1993), 108, 130,
135, 147-9, 157, 182, 216-17, 223.
Milena Roth, Lifesaving Letters: A Child’s Flight from the Holocaust, (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2004),
18
12
possibility that a number of factors, including public memories of the movement, mediate
Kindertransport accounts.
The fact that the Kinder were child refugees possessing limited knowledge of the
wider political and social forces that upended their childhoods compounds the dissonance
of their remembering and forgetting. They realized only years later that they were part of
a larger rescue scheme, and the vast majority, for a complex web of reasons, remained
silent about their experiences. Milena Roth noted in her memoir,
Absurd as it sounds, I had come off one of those trains, one among 10,000, but
had been too young to take in, or to remember later that there were others who
had literally been in the same boat, I had no idea until about 1988 that there were
10,000 of us. I had seen only one train and then forgot there were other children
on it, too, who had experienced the same things. I find this ignorance and
forgetting unbelievable now.19
Nevertheless, the Kinder’s personal reminiscences are the primary resource for assessing
the program’s human cost. In this instance, survivor memories are necessary not for a
factual record of events, but for recognizing the rescue’s impact on the children’s lives.
The reunion of the Kindertransport coincided with the beginnings of public
recognition of and interest in the program. After a fifty-year hiatus, a spate of news and
radio programs in Britain began to explore the phenomenon of the child refugees.20
Nicholas Winton’s scrapbook was unearthed from the attic and his story aired on the
British television program That’s Life.21 The “rediscovery” of the Kindertransport
19
Roth, 123.
Marianne Kröger, “Child Exiles: A New Research Area?” trans. Andrea Hammel, Shofar: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23, no.1 (2004): 8; Kushner, Remembering, 162-5.
20
21
Emanuel and Gissing, xxi-xxii.
13
unleashed a torrent of Kinder related memoirs and autobiographies, video-taped
testimonies and interviews, documentaries, plays, poems and novels. These accounts
have added layers of complication to the story, but the unsullied narrative has proven
difficult to budge, even though the Kinder themselves support a more nuanced reading of
their own history. The American Kindertransport Association (KTA) notes:
We were spared the horrors of the death camps, but we were uprooted, separated
from our parents, and transported to a different culture where we faced not the
unmitigated horror of the death camps, but a very human mixture of kindness,
indifference, occasional exploitation, and the selflessness of ordinary people faced
with needy children.22
This statement strongly suggests that the Kinder would welcome a study appraising the
Kindertransport on its own merits and recognizing the unique character of their
hardships.
The records of the agencies who oversaw the children’s welfare once they arrived
in England hold the greatest promise of representing the entire spectrum of Kinder
experience suggested by the KTA statement. Reports, minutes and memos of the Refugee
Children’s Movement (RCM), the agency responsible for the majority of the
Kindertransportees are valuable sources of information, and many are available in the
public domain.23 The RCM also kept dossiers on each of the children covering the years
1938 to 1950. Since the dissolution of the RCM in 1948, the Jewish Refugee Committee
(JRC) has overseen these files. Unfortunately, they are closed to the public, including
22
The Kindertransport Association, http://www.kindertransport.org/history09_FAQ.htm (accessed
September 20, 2009).
23
Originally named The Movement for the Care of Children from Germany (MCCG) in 1940 it was
renamed the Refugee Children’s Movement (RCM) the designation used throughout this study.
14
legitimate academic researchers.24 Only those working directly for the JRC on officially
sanctioned histories of its parent organization, the Central British Fund for World Jewish
Relief (CBF), have been allowed access to those documents.25
In the postwar period, three publications devoted in whole or part to the
Kindertransport have emanated from the CBF, all amplifying the triumphant narrative. In
1956, Norman Bentwich’s They Found Refuge, defending the work of Anglo-Jewry on
behalf of Jewish refugees, included a chapter on children’s rescue, conflating the
Kindertransport with the postwar rescue of orphans from concentration camps. Written
by the RCM co-founder’s husband, it is hardly a disinterested account of the work of the
Movement, but it remained the only historical account of the Kindertransport to appear
between 1944 and 1989.26 Bentwich’s version provides a factual record of the origins of
the RCM and its logistical and financial challenges, emphasizing the extent to which the
physical, educational and religious needs of traumatized children were met by the tireless
efforts of the RCM staff.27 Bentwich describes the Home Office as “very helpful,” and
24
Paula Hill, “Anglo-Jewry and the Refugee Children 1938-1945,” (PhD. diss., Royal Holloway
University of London, 2001), 215. I encountered the same problems as Hill in my own communications
with the JRC. The London Metropolitan Archives list select files of the Board of Deputies of British Jews,
(BOD) and the CBF as accessible only with the written permission of the depositor. “Kindertransporte”
files are closed until 2051.
Hill, 159; Sharples, “Reconstructing the Past.” 41.
25
Norman Bentwich, They Found Refuge: An account of British Jewry’s work for victims of Nazi
oppression, (London: Cresset Press, 1956).
26
27
Ibid., 65-74.
15
mentions the lost parents only in passing.28 His summation favorably compares the
British effort to that of other nations, thereby buttressing the accepted narrative:
The Children’s Movement achieved one of the most remarkable and effective
records of child rescue…If we compare it…with…Youth Aliyah [an American
based effort]…in nine months the British effort saved as many young persons
from the hell of Nazi oppression as that…effort saved in…ten years. And if we
compare it with the efforts made by the English Save the Children Fund for…the
Basques, the Spanish Socialists, the Greeks, the number…and the speed…[of] the
rescue…stand out.29
Bentwich invited Lord Gorell, RCM Chairman and the Kinder’s legal guardian
by Parliamentary decree, to corroborate his assessment in a separate essay at the end of
the chapter. Titling his remarks “Adventure and Opportunity,” Gorell reflects on the
responsibilities and challenges of guardianship over thousands of foreign children. He
reminds readers “it had unquestionably been the means by which over 9,000 children, for
whom death or degradation had been a certainty, had been given a chance to exist as
human being and to make good.”30 In this equation, the children’s pre-Kindertransport
hardships and their presumed fate, if not rescued, excused any lapses in their treatment on
English shores. It is unsurprising therefore, that Lord Gorell ended his remarks with
words that deliberately echo Churchill’s “finest hour” speech.
It had been ‘a great adventure’: yes, but it had been much more…in spite of the
suffering they had endured…hardly one of the children thus brought over failed to
make good. It is…a tribute to the organization of the Refugee Children’s
Movement, and to the loving, understanding care shown to them by many, many
28
Ibid., 66, 73.
29
Ibid., 74.
30
Ibid.
16
people in this country…It was a magnificent achievement: it remains the finest of
memories.31
One of the few writers given access to the full CBF archive is the journalist Barry
Turner, whose 1990 work ...And the Policeman Smiled quotes freely from the children’s
personal files.32 Turner’s popular history, the only published account devoted entirely to
the Kindertransport from its inception to the dissolution of the RCM, is problematic for a
number of reasons. Containing numerous direct quotes and excerpts, the book is
nonetheless devoid of footnotes or other citations, and the bibliography contains no
mention of archival or documentary sources. Commissioned by the Central British Fund
for World Jewish Relief (CBF), which controls the archives of the RCM, Turner’s work,
while comprehensive, cannot be viewed as entirely objective.33 Whatever its limitations,
it remains the only source of the children’s records, scant and elusive as they are, and for
this reason researchers must rely rather more heavily on this book than they might
otherwise be inclined.
Turner’s extensive use of Kinder testimony ensures that the Kindertransport is
not perceived as unabashedly redemptive. However, Turner’s own commentary fails to
challenge any of the basic assumptions about separation or deviate from the standard
language of salvation and rescue. Turner sets the tone in the first few pages with the
31
Lord Gorell, “Adventure and Opportunity,” in Norman Bentwich, They Found Refuge: An account
of British Jewry’s work for victims of Nazi oppression, (London: Cresset Press, 1956), 85.
, Barry Turner, …And the Policeman Smiled: 10,000 Children Escape Nazi Germany, ( London:
Bloomsbury, 1990).
32
Hill, 2,3,5, 159 and Sharples, ‘Reconstructing,” 41.
33
17
familiar imagery of rescue, escape, exodus and new beginnings.34 The terrors and
hardships of life in Nazi Europe take up nearly two chapters, and Turner’s only comment
on the Parliamentary decision to separate families is to reaffirm “the impracticability of
an open door policy.”35 The Home Office appears as a cooperative agency and the
rescuer workers are “gifted indefatigable unsung heroines.”36 The very title of the book
suggests British hospitality and reinforces the notion of Britain’s benevolence.
Selective editing and minimal commentary allow Turner to maintain the dominant
narrative of the Kindertransport. Turner includes no introductory or concluding remarks,
and comments sparingly on the Kinder testimony he chooses to include. This authorial
decision seems to have come from a desire to avoid interpretations that were inimical to
the efforts of his sponsor, the CBF, even when the material lent itself to these very
readings. Turner uses RCM documentation, not Kinder testimony, to reveal the most
painful Kinder experiences, including sexual abuse and mental illness, stripping them of
much of their potency. There are affecting testimonies of loneliness and exploitation, but
rarely is the reader left with the impression that the situations were long-lived or
unresolved. Many are like the girl whose widowed foster mother “just wanted a little
skivvy,” but who managed after a period of discomfort “to tell the woman I didn’t leave
Germany to come into another concentration camp.”37 In the main, Turner’s children are
a plucky lot who faced some challenges but who in the end, to use Lord Gorell’s words,
34
Ibid., 2-3.
35
Ibid., 32.
36
Ibid., 21, 48-9.
37
Ibid., 124.
18
“made good.”38 Turner’s entanglement with the CBF seriously compromises his
objectivity and ensures that his book reinforces the prevailing narrative of the
Kindertransport. Despite that, it remains to this day the only full-length history dedicated
entirely to the Kindertransport.
The authors who have written, compiled or edited books devoted in part to the
Kindertransport nearly all have direct ties to the program. Like the Kinder who publish
their own memoirs, these authors are deeply vested in the subject and tend not to
challenge the positive national myth. For example, Men of Vision (1998) by Amy
Gottlieb, another CBF designee, is an update of the material first covered by Norman
Bentwich. Gottlieb’s unembellished Kindertransport chapters include no testimony and
focus on the rescuers, not the children. Beyond suggesting that, “the years of the war
were anxious and difficult for them and their families,” Gottlieb does not delve into
Kinder trauma, question the government’s policies or critically assess the work of the
RCM.39 In contrast, The Uprooted, (1993) a psychological study of “those who escaped
before the Final Solution,” and written by a former child refugee, sympathetically
examines Kinder trauma. Author Dorit Whiteman, however, shies away from the
fundamental question of separation and concludes a chapter filled with damning
See for example, Turner, Chapter 7, “Home from Home.”
38
39
Gottlieb, 127. Gottlieb addresses the religious controversy at length, including Solomon
Schonfeld’s attack, discussed in Chapter 5 below, and is clearly an apologist for the RCM in this regard.
See pages 128-132.
19
testimony about unsuitable placements with a defense of the Movement and a “feeling of
awe and respect for the committee’s achievements.”40
Although it has been the subject of many Masters’ theses and several doctoral
dissertations, no monograph devoted entirely to the history or memory of the
Kindertransport has yet appeared in English.41 A few chapters in larger refugee studies
exist, the most probing of which is in British historian Tony Kushner’s book
Remembering Refugees: Then and Now. 42 In this study, Kushner devotes a chapter to
“The Kinder: a case of selective memory?” Within the context of exploring “heritage
construction,” that is, the way that the British view themselves vis à vis refugees and
asylum seekers, Kushner sums up the current Kindertransport storyline as one in which
“innocent children are rescued by a righteous nation and specific righteous individuals.
They become a saved remnant of a lost people whose parents sacrificed their own
happiness for the well-being of their children who subsequently made good.”43 Kushner’s
is the first serious effort to scrutinize myriad aspects of the dominant narrative by
analyzing Kinder’s writings, secondary sources, literary and film references, and
curricular materials. Kushner also examines two rescuers, Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld
and Trevor Chadwick, who have been relegated to the fringes of the Kindertransport saga
40
Whiteman, 220. Another highly specialized psychological study of Kinder trauma is in Iris Guske,
Trauma and Attachment in the Kindertransport Context: German-Jewish Child Refugees Accounts of
Displacement and Acculturation in Britain, (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Publishing, 2009).
41
Iris Guske’s study, published in 2009, is the first academic work to appear on the Kindertransport. It
is not a history, but a close psycho-social study of trauma and attachment based on testimony from five
Kinder.
42
Kushner, Remembering, 141-180.
43
Ibid., 167.
20
or ignored altogether because their work challenges the leading interpretations. Kushner
raises a number of important issues that merit further investigation, several of which are
integral to this study.
In 2000, the Oscar-winning Kindertransport documentary Into the Arms of
Strangers aired widely and earned the child refugee movement its most extensive
renown. The account told in the film and book of the same name has become the
definitive story of the Kindertransport, and despite the inclusion of much poignant and
painful testimony, it too tends to perpetuate the celebratory narrative. Deborah
Oppenheimer, co-author and producer, and child of a Kind constructs a tale that reflects
her own close emotional involvement with the subject. In an attempt to represent many
aspects of the Kindertransport, the book and film utilize a wide variety of voices,
including Kinder, rescuers, a foster parent and two parents who made it to England before
the war broke out.
In the choice of participants and the testimony they include, Oppenheimer and her
co-author Mark Harris maintain the imperative that the Kinder’s trauma must always be
weighed against the experiences of children who were not transported to England. One of
the stories in the book and film is that of a woman whose father pulled her off the train at
the last moment, not being able to bear the idea of parting from her. She was later
deported to Theresienstadt with her parents and eventually to Auschwitz, surviving six
concentration camps and a death march. Her story is harrowing and undoubtedly relevant,
but including it feels a little manipulative. The constant reminder of what the Kinder
escaped has the effect of diminishing the suffering they did experience. As is commonly
21
the case, those experiences are not permitted to stand alone and be appraised on their own
terms without reference to the very different experiences of non-Kinder. In addition, only
five of the eleven Kinder in Oppenheimer and Harris’s collection lost their parents, while
the parents of the other six survived the war. This is almost an exact inversion of the
presumed percentages of parental loss for all Kinder and leaves the filmgoer or reader
with an overly optimistic assessment of the outcome of the Kindertransport.44 Whether or
not this was a conscious choice on the part of the authors/filmmakers, the result is a
reinforcement of the narrative of salvation and rescue and an overall impression that the
Kindertransport is a poignant but ultimately feel-good story.
Holocaust historian David Ceserani’s introduction to the book version of
Into the Arms of Strangers moderates the film’s optimism to some degree. Constrained by
the context in which he was asked to contribute, Ceserani goes only so far as to
characterize the Kindertransport as “a great, if flawed, humanitarian gesture.”45 Cesarani
only mildly challenges the prevailing interpretations by pointing out the lack of
sensitivity to the children’s cultural and religious needs and the fact that while few
succumbed to psychological illness, “none was wholly unscathed.” Cesarani could not
have avoided making some comment on the children’s suffering, for the testimony in the
pages that follow is often heartbreaking. Ceserani’s only comment on the government
policies that led to that damage was the observation that the initiative to allow
44
There are actually twelve Kinder stories in the book, but one was an orphan before the
Kindertransport began. The estimate of sixty percent of Kinder losing one or both parents comes from the
results of the JRC Kindertransport survey.
45
David Ceserani, introduction to Into the Arms of Strangers; Stories of the Kindertransport-The
British Scheme that Saved 10,000 Children from the Nazi Regime, (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 19.
22
unaccompanied children into Great Britain “was undoubtedly a great humanitarian
gesture, although it was difficult to object to helping children and they could hardly be
accused of taking the jobs of Englishmen.”46
Recent studies on refugees from the Third Reich are similarly uncritical. In a
chapter on the Kindertransport in the book Interrupted Journeys: Young Refugees from
the Reich, Australian journalist Alan Gill asserts:
[M]ost Kinder have basically positive memories of their time “in care,” though
many were—and a few still are—severely traumatized. On the whole, the Kinder
were treated in a civilized way and with affection—a far cry from that received in
their countries of birth. A photograph of an English “bobby” gently assisting two
refugee children says it all.47
Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt’s chapters on the Kindertransport in Flight from
the Reich: Refugee Jews 1933-1946, break no new ground although they focus more on
the parents left behind than do most previous works.48 The authors claim that Home
Office agreement to the child rescue plan resulted from the embarrassment of
Kristallnacht so soon after Chamberlain’s Munich blunder and characterize it as
“politically advantageous…from every point of view.”49 Beyond this, the authors make
no effort to take the government or Anglo-Jewry to task for the policy that separated and
destroyed families although there is ample evidence of the harm it did the children in the
subsequent pages.
46
Ibid., 11.
47
Alan Gill, Interrupted Journeys: Young Refugees from Hitler’s Reich, (Sydney: Simon and Schuster,
2004), 156.
48
Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews 1933-1946 (New
York: Norton, 2009), 164-84.
49
Ibid., 168.
23
With the exception of two articles by Caroline Sharples, most journal articles
explore discrete aspects of the Kindertransport shaded towards psychological studies of
Kinder trauma and avoid direct confrontation with the prevailing myths about the
program. Sharples is one of the few historians to directly challenge the dominant
representation of the Kindertransport, examining Kinder trauma and suggesting that a
more nuanced appraisal of the scheme be considered.50 More common are the eleven
articles in the 2004 issue of the journal Shofar devoted to the Kindertransport, nine of
which deal with the Kinder’s acculturation, identity struggles and coping strategies. Two
articles focus on the refugee organizations; one exploring the under-studied role of
women’s leadership in the rescue and care of children, the other on the selection of
children who could appropriately integrate into British society.51
These are all very worthy topics of research, but none critiques the enduring
assumptions about the program, and many reinforce them. One article examining the
children’s social adaptation refers to the Kindertransport as “one of the greatest
humanitarian events of the twentieth century,” though the evidence marshaled throughout
the text strongly countervails that notion.52 Another ends by exhorting:
If we criticize the former restrictive admissions practices of other countries,
accusing them of not having rescued enough children from National Socialist
persecution, we must also remember that for one and a half million Jewish
children there was no rescue. It makes it all the more important for us today to
50
Caroline Sharples, “Kindertransport,” History Today and “Reconstructing the Past,” Holocaust
Studies.
51
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23, no.1 (2004): 28-40.
Susan Kleinman and Chana Moshenska, “Class as a Factor in the Social Adaptation of the
Kindertransport Kinder,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23 no.1 (2004): 28-40.
52
24
recognize encouraging examples of people who did their utmost to rescue Jewish
children and alleviate their existential needs following separation.53
Not only does the author perpetuate the assumption that Kinder trauma must always be
measured against the suffering of non-rescued children, he also fails to question the
validity, wisdom or humanity of separating children from their parents in order to “save”
them.
Academic journals generally reach only a small audience of specialists, whereas
the forces that shape the story of the Kindertransport for the general public are more
likely to be films like Into the Arms of Strangers and curricula disseminated to schools.
Pedagogical materials, most developed by Jewish organizations, often use the
Kindertransport as a vehicle for students to contemplate the plight of contemporary child
refugees, an auspicious basis upon which to question and critique the program. Tony
Kushner was the first to analyze the narrative structure of these materials, concluding that
the two most prominent examples reinforce the celebration of “Britain as savior country,”
enacting an internationally unique rescue.”54 Another example, authored by the son of a
Kind for the Jewish Council for Racial Equality is promisingly titled “Unaccompanied
Refugee Children: Have the Lessons Been Learnt?” After a very brief outline of the
events leading up to the formation of the Kindertransport, the author assesses Britain’s
effort in familiar comparative terms. “Although Britain could have done more, it is
important to note that no other country at the time chose to open their doors in the same
Ute Benz. “Trauma through Separation: Loss of Family and Home as Childhood Catastrophes,”
trans. Toby Axelrod. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23, no.1 (2004): 98-9.
53
54
Kushner, Remembering, 168-170.
25
way.”55 Of the children’s experiences, the guide has only this to say: “Mostly, the
children were well treated and grew to develop close ties with their British hosts. A few
were mistreated or abused…Many rebuilt their lives and became parents themselves.”56
The author suggests that children using the lessons consider the following questions:
“Why do you think children were rescued and not adults?” and “Do you think Britain did
all it could for the Kinder?” but, as Kushner submits, such questions are unlikely to elicit
anything but the most obvious responses.57
The Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), the successor to the JRC, undertook
the task of surveying the surviving Kinder and the resulting document provides a
different tool for constructing an accurate picture of the Kindertransport experience.
Released in late 2009 as a detailed database, the survey garnered over 1000 responses and
provides a wealth of statistical information about foster care, education, religion, work,
parents and the role of the RCM in the children’s lives. As with all the other available
sources, it is not possible to know how closely the respondents’ recollections reflect those
of the majority of the Kinder but the survey can be used to suggest statistical
confirmation or refutation of conclusions drawn from other sources. Taken together, the
available documentation provides useful anecdotal and statistical bases for an analysis of
the Kindertransport experience and the consequences of separation.
55
Jack Gilbert, ed., Unaccompanied Child Refugees: Have the Lessons Been Learnt? (London: Jewish
Council for Racial Equality, 2001), 4.
56
Ibid., 5.
57
Glibert,14; Kushner, Remembering, 170.
26
While the lives of the 10,000 children in Great Britain varied widely, the children
of the Kindertransport shared a number of common experiences. The “collective
autobiographies” of the Kindertransport, sources unique to this refugee movement,
highlight these commonalities. Karen Gershon, a Kind from Germany initiated and
compiled the first and most evocative of these collections, We Came as Children, on the
twenty-fifth anniversary of the movement.58 Gershon believed, erroneously, that “most of
the documents of those days have been destroyed and that many of the people who were
concerned with our rescue no longer remember the events clearly or...are dead” and
“decided then to collect what material I could before it was too late.”59 One of the very
first memory works of the Kindertransport, the volume comprises the remembrances of
234 child refugees who had answered Gershon’s newspaper appeal in 1965.
The Kinder, then in their thirties and forties, who responded to specific prompts
from Gershon, left accounts suffused with repressed anger, bitterness, sorrow, heartbreak
and guilt. Gershon allowed the respondents the freedom of anonymity and the result is
what Kushner characterizes as a “deeply moving and desperately unsentimental
collection created by the desire of the former Kinder to explain to themselves who they
were.”60 The reminiscences, arranged thematically, recount leave-takings, lost
opportunities, difficult adjustments, the loss of parents, and triumphing over adversity,
many related with emotional depth.
58
Karen Gershon, ed., We Came as Children: A Collective Autobiography of Refugees, (London:
Victor Gollancz, 1966).
59
Ibid, preface, n.p
60
Kushner, Remembering, 161.
27
Self- examination is a less apparent impetus in the later compilations, all of which
appeared after 1989. I Came Alone, Into the Arms of Strangers, and a Scottish collective
autobiography, Recollections of Child Refugees from 1938 to the Present all came about
after the first Kindertransport reunion during a period of collective identity formation and
widespread public interest in the movement, distinguishing these works from Gershon’s
pioneering effort. 61 Nonetheless, all three sources reveal the common threads that unite
the children’s lives as refugees. Bertha Leverton explains in I Came Alone, “If some of
the stories seem repetitive, please realize that our experiences were often identical; for
instance the journey, described so many times by so many of us, was a trauma, as was the
realization of having become orphans when the rest of the world celebrated victory.”62
The outpouring of memory following a long period of amnesia about the
Kindertransport has led, Kushner suggests, to both the beginnings of heritage
construction and to a lack of historical and critical reflection.63 He notes that “[i]t is
important to focus on the question that few now seem willing to ask: why just the
children?”64 In his pioneering work, Kushner examines the creation and perpetuation of
the dominant narrative and suggests the need for a critical reappraisal of the official
61
Harris and Oppenheimer, Into the Arms of Strangers; Rosa M. Sacharin ed., Recollections of Child
Refugees from 1938 to the Present, (Glasgow: Scottish Annual Reunion of the Kinder, 1999). Dorit Bader
Whiteman interviewed over sixty Kinder. Her work is a good source of Kinder testimony but it does not
fall into the category of collective autobiography Dorit Bader Whiteman, The Uprooted: A Hitler Legacy,
(New York: Plenum Press, 1993).
62
Leverton and Lowensohn, 80. For discussions of the common themes in Kindertransport writings,
see Sharples, “Reconstructing,” 40-62 and Phyllis Lassner, Anglo-Jewish Women Writing About the
Holocaust: Displaced Witnesses, (Houndsmills: Palgrave MacMillian, 2008).
63
Ibid. 145.
64
Ibid., 148.
28
policies that separated children from their families. Kushner believes it is necessary to
redress the imbalance of a simplistic history that declares the Kinder experienced Britain
“...as a place where The Policeman Smiled before falling comfortably Into the Arms of
Strangers” and that until such a work is produced, “we will not have done justice either
to the experience or to the legacy of the Kinder.”65
Such a reevaluation must begin with a detailed study of the collective
autobiographies, individual memoirs and testimonies, which yields a nuanced picture of
the Kinder experience and debunks the notion that after a period of cultural adjustment
the majority of the children “lived happily ever after.” The price the parents and their
children paid for rescue was much higher than is adduced in most of the scholarly
literature or in the prevailing interpretations of the Kindertransport. Only a close reading
of the Kinder’s own accounts yields this richly textured though more somber story .
65
Ibid. 172. The titles Kushner references are the two most well-known, though problematical texts
devoted entirely to the Kindertransport. Barry Turner, …And the Policeman Smiled; Mark Jonathon Harris
and Deborah Oppenheimer, Into the Arms of Strangers.
29
Chapter 3
THE KINDER
Sometimes I think it would have been
easier for me to die
together with my parents than
to have been surrendered by
them to survive alone
Sometimes I feel I am a ghost
adrift without identity
what as a child I valued most
forever has escaped from me
I have been cast out and am lost
from “Cast Out” by Karen Gershon66
Karen Gershon was the pen name of the poet and writer Kathleen Tripp [née Kaethe
Loewenthal] (1923-1993) who came to England with her sister Lise in 1938 from
Bielefeld, Germany in the second children’s transport. Traumatized by the separation
from her parents, Gershon’s experiences as a Jewish refugee child in Great Britain were
difficult. Lise immigrated to Palestine alone in 1939 and although Kaethe intended to join
her when she turned seventeen, the outbreak of war made it impossible for her to leave
England. Their elder sister, Anne, who was too old for the children’s transports, came to
England with a Zionist group in 1939, but died in tragic circumstances in 1943, leaving
Gershon alone in the new land. The necessity to support herself thwarted Gershon’s early
academic ambitions, and she was forced into domestic service and a series of menial jobs.
In desperation, Gershon married during the war who to a man she did not love, and the
marriage quickly failed. She never felt at home in England, and suffered alienation from
Gershon, We Came, 174. Although the poem’s author is not identified, other sources credit Gershon
as the author. See Jean E. Brown, Elaine C. Stephens, Janet Rubin, Images from the Holocaust: a
Literature Anthology, (Lincolnwood, Illinois: National Textbook Co. 1996), 75.
66
30
her Jewish identity. Gershon might have overcome even these tribulations, but the
crushing blow from which she never recovered was learning in 1946 that her parents had
been deported to Riga, Latvia in 1941 where the Nazis murdered them.67
Karen Gershon’s experiences as a child of the Kindertransport were far from
unusual. Many of the children suffered similar or even more crippling dislocations,
disappointments and losses. These began at the moment of leave-taking, and for the
majority culminated at the end of the war with the news that one or both parents had died.
Even those whose families survived missed out on six formative years together and
reunited as strangers. Parting from parents and learning of their fate were the bookend
moments between which the children endured other shocks: the loss of language,
separation from siblings, blighted educational opportunities, alienation from religion, and
most significantly, a lack of parental guidance and love. The source of these misfortunes
was a program in which rescue was predicated on the separation of parents and children.
67
Karen Gershon, A Lesser Child (London: Peter Owen, 1994); Karen Gershon, A Tempered Wind,
edited by Phyllis Lassner and Peter Lawson, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010); Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography , s,v,“Kathleen Tripp,” http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/ 52073
(accessed April 10, 2010) ; Jewish Women’s Encyclopedia, s.v. “Karen Gershon,”
http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/gershon-karen (accessed April 10, 2010).
31
Parting and Separation:
It was an ordinary train
travelling across Germany
which gathered and took us away
those who saw us may have thought
that it was for a holiday
not being exiled being taught
to hate what we had loved in vain
brought us lasting injury
Our parents let us go
knowing that who stayed must die
but kept the truth from us although
they gave us to reality
did they consider what it meant
to become orphaned and not know
to be emotionally freed
when our childhood seeds were spent
from “The Children’s Exodus,” Karen Gershon, Collected Poems68
One of the most oft recalled events in Kindertransport memoirs is the moment of parting.
A range of emotions, from excitement to guilt characterizes these accounts. Some of the
Kinder recall feeling only relief at leaving what had become a toxic and dangerous
environment in Nazi Germany and Austria. “For me the situation [after Kristallnacht]
was getting more and more intolerable. I was longing to escape...the persecution. When
word came that I was to leave for England I was ecstatic.”69 Others remember only
excitement. “The prospect of going to England appealed to me above all as an
adventure...In any case the separation would be only temporary...until we could all be
reunited.”70 “Somehow I appear to have missed any feeling of wrench, or more probably
68
Karen Gershon, Collected Poems, (London: Paperrmac, 1990), 22-3.
69
Ibid., 166, 39.
70
Gershon, We Came, 19; Leverton and Lowensohn, 43, 59, 112, 206, 350; Whiteman, 145-6.
32
my parents—who were very sensible—managed not to show any sign of sorrow at the
parting. It was all matter of fact, and see you shortly either in London or Palestine.”71
Shielded by their parents’ reassurances, these children were able to part from them less
painfully than many of their fellow child refugees.
Many Kinder describe the parting as an emotionally charged scene. Some admit
that they were bewildered by their parents’ reactions. “Despite the quietly shed tears, the
desperate hopelessness of the people left behind was not really grasped by us...It wasn’t
quite clear to us why our parents, standing in small groups on the platform, were quietly
sobbing.”72 Others reflect on their parents’ feelings from an adult’s perspective. “Until I
had children of my own, I never knew how my poor mother must have felt. At fifteen my
main preoccupation was not to burst into tears.”73 “I... have looked at my own children
and grandchildren as they reached the age of eleven and asked myself, ‘Could I send this
child into the unknown, even to save its life?’”74 Some feel guilty about their own
childish selfishness at the moment of parting. “My mother insisted on kissing me over
and over again, and I got impatient with her demonstrativeness, not realizing of course
that this was to be the final parting. I have often wondered since what she must have felt
as a result of my impatience. I was eleven years old.”75 The Kinder’s memories of parting
71
Gershon, We Came, 19; Leverton and Lowensohn, 57, 95, 99, 149; Whiteman, 146-7, 153-4.
72
Leverton and Lowensohn, 15-16.
73
Ibid., 134.
74
Ibid., 157, 62, 95, 112.
75
Gershon, We Came, 19; Harris and Oppenheimer, 111.
33
are suffused with retrospective empathy for their parents’ plight, insights they gained in
adulthood after becoming parents themselves.
While the memories of parting overwhelmingly focus on the child’s emotions,
much can be deduced about the parents’ feelings from the Kinder’s accounts. A number
of Kinder recall mothers who circumvented the rules in desperation to save their
children. “I saw a very young child being passed...through the open window of a carriage
by its mother. The thoughts and feelings of that poor mother handing over that tiny tot to
a complete stranger still haunt me today.”76 Another, who was handed an infant as the
train pulled out, saw that “ [t]he mother of my little charge had fainted and I’ll never
forget the sight of her lying on the ground of the platform as we left the station behind
forever.”77 On a different train, a girl of fourteen saw a laundry basket containing
undocumented infant twins pushed into her carriage just as the train was departing.78 One
man who left Germany in December, followed by a brother in April, recalled that “In
June my mother took my small brother and sister twins, aged three and a half, to the
railway station just as another transport was leaving. She pushed them into the melee
among the other children and walked away. They too came to England.”79 The
desperation that motivated parents to take such risks is corroborated by the accounts of
rescue workers in Nazi-controlled countries. They unanimously speak of the
overwhelming avalanche of parents clamoring to get their children on trains and the
76
Leverton and Lowensohn, 154.
77
Ibid., 40.
78
Ibid., 217, 291. Emma Mogilensky, Interview 36513, VHA (1997).
79
Ibid., 224.
34
impotence of knowing they would only be able to get a fraction of these to safety.80
Although few records from the parents’ perspective exist, such testimony makes clear
that the parents suffered acutely even as they scrambled to save their children’s lives.
While some parents were stoic, others expressed the agony of relinquishing their
children. Some parents were so upset about the idea of saying goodbye that they could
not even bring themselves to go to the station. One child remembers that the nanny took
her and her brother to the train.81 Fathers climbed the sides of the train carriages and
weeping parents ran the full length of platforms to get one final look, wave or kiss from
their children.82 Parents lost their resolve at the last moment and pulled their children off
the trains, one mother vacillating three times before finally allowing her daughter to
leave.83 Another crossed her daughter off two transport lists before finally letting her
go.84 Many Kinder recall their parents’ desperate bids to prolong the goodbyes. “My
parents followed us through Berlin from station to station just to get a few last glimpses
of our faces.”85 Not all poignant partings took place in train stations.
80
See the testimonies of Trevor Chadwick in Gershon, We Came, 22-25 and Norbert Wollhiem and
Nicholas Winton in Harris and Oppenheimer, 77-81 and 148-150.
81
Whiteman, 149-150.
82
Ibid., 278, Harris and Oppenheimer, 111.
83
Ibid., 212. For an account in which the parent did not allow the child to make the journey, see Harris
and Oppenheimer, 108. The child, Lory Cohn, and her parents were deported to Theresienstadt and she was
later sent to Auschwitz. Her father survived in Theresienstadt, but her mother did not.
84
Leverton and Lowensohn., 24.
85
Gershon, We Came, 26. See also Leverton and Lowensohn, 157, 262. Also, Whiteman, 155, and
Helga Relation, Interview 48310, VHA (1998) . One father even stowed away on the train carrying his
children to assure himself that they had reached the Dutch border safely. Leverton and Lowensohn, 151.
35
My mother took me to Berlin; when I left home my father was lying in bed ill...
He ...bade me look after my mother when she got to England in case he did not
make it. I was then just ten years old. We got to Berlin to learn that I was too late
for the first transport, but would be able to go on the second....My mother had to
leave me there, and the last I ever saw of her was in the Berlin street... walking
backwards along the pavement to get a last look at me, until she rounded the
corner and we were parted.86
Most of the parents did not live to give their own testimony about the moment of parting.
The children’s memories of that moment are the only testament to the pain the parents
endured in letting their children go.87
Some of the Kinder admit that they did not have any foreboding about the finality
of their parting with loved ones. “My parents took me to the station...Little did I know
that this would be the very last time that I ever saw them. But what fourteen year old
child would think she would never see her parents again?”88 For the majority, however,
the parting is remembered as a deeply painful moment. “At the station we were ushered
into an enormous waiting room which was packed with children and parents weeping,
crying and shouting…We were ordered to take leave of our relatives quickly and go
straight to the train… From behind the sealed windows I saw my parents again, rigid and
unsmiling like two statues, for the last time ever. I was sixteen years old.”89 “I clung to
86
Gershon, We Came, 26. The father’s health had been destroyed by a stint in Dachau after
Kristallnacht.
87
One of the contributors to Into the Arms of Strangers was a parent who survived. She remembered
being in such shock after relinquishing her child that she felt nothing. Harris, and Oppenheimer 102.
Likewise, one contributor to I Came Alone was a parent who had sent her fifteen month-old baby on a
transport. She makes no mention of parting with the child, but was able to rejoin her son in England just
before the outbreak of the war. Leverton and Lowensohn, 215.
88
Ibid., 49. Also 76,79, 115, 243,248, 268. See also Harris, 105-6.
89
Ibid., 26. See also Whiteman, 149-153.
36
my mother for the last time. Moments later, grief-stricken and shattered, I was on a train
headed for the English Channel. I kept thinking about my mother and sister, wondering if
I would ever see them again. I didn’t!”90 “Shouting and screaming broke loose...It was a
pitiful sight. On the platform mothers and fathers were holding each other, weeping, as
the train swept their beloved children away...We did not know it, but for most of those
left behind on the platform, it was the beginning of years of doom and untold
suffering.”91 The unnatural prescience and sentimental emotion with which these Kinder
often recall the moment testifies to their inability to reflect on this event without
reference to their parents’ ultimate fate and their ex post facto knowledge that this was
the last time they ever saw their mothers and fathers. This awareness invests the moment
of separation with even greater tragedy and import.
Children who could not cope with the trauma blocked the entire leave-taking
moment out of their memories. One, who was seven at the time admits, “I cannot
remember actually leaving my mother, although I have spent considerable effort, some of
it on a psychiatrist’s couch trying to recapture what must have been a painful
experience.”92 Interestingly, this child’s parents both survived, though they were not
reunited until 1946. The testimony accruing from the Kindertransport demonstrates
90
Leverton and Lowensohn, 138.
91
Ibid., 162.
92
Ibid., 148.
37
clearly that most of the children, regardless of the fate of the parents, were deeply shaken
by the ordeal of separation.93
The moment of parting was also the moment when the fates of parents and
children diverged. Parents went back to familiar surroundings, now sadly bereft of their
beloved children, to resume their frantic searches for countries of refuge for themselves.
In this endeavor their children, now on trains taking them to England, often assumed a
vital role once they reached safe harbor. Those who, through their own efforts or those of
their children, managed to secure visas might survive. The rest endured increasingly
draconian anti-Jewish measures culminating in deportation and in most cases death. The
children, in contrast, were headed to lives in which their physical safety was almost
certainly secured, but whose religious beliefs, psychological well-being, educational
opportunities and cultural heritage were to be severely tested in the years to come.
93
Ibid., 114. Also, 146-7, 154; Harris and Oppenheimer, 99-103.
38
A New Life in Great Britain
People at Dovercourt were gay
as if they thought we could forget
our homes in alien play
as if we were not German Jews
but mealtimes were a marketplace
when sudden visitors could choose
although we were not orphaned yet
a son or daughter by their face
My childhood smoulders in the name
of the town which was my home
all we were became no more
than answers on a questionnaire
at Dovercourt we were taught that
our share of the Jewish fate
had not been left behind but was
the refugee life facing us
from “The Children’s Exodus,” Karen Gershon, Collected Poems94
The children arrived in a strange country dazed and exhausted. The journey to England
took about two days by train and ferry. The train journey was marked first by fear, as the
Nazi soldiers who accompanied them through Germany often rifled through and
confiscated their meager possessions, and then by elation as they reached the
Netherlands, where friendly Dutch relief workers fed and fussed over them.95 The
crossing itself is rife with memories of seasickness, though for many it was a moment of
camaraderie with fellow refugees, all literally in the same boat. The disorientation and
bewilderment multiplied when the children landed in a strange country where few spoke
the language and none was familiar with the food, customs or expectations. The sense of
94
Gershon, Collected, 24.
95
Whiteman, 157-162; Harris and Oppenheimer, 113-115.
39
adventure vanished as homesickness and feelings of abandonment and rejection
overwhelmed many children.
Once they arrived in England the children’s experiences varied widely depending
on when they came, their age and sex, where they came from, whether or not they were
sponsored and a host of other variables. Sponsored children generally went directly to
their foster families, but the majority who arrived between December 1938 and February
1939 were non-guaranteed children.96 These children were housed in disused summer
camps at Dovercourt and Lowestoft while the relief agencies scrambled to find
permanent places for them. As the refugee committees ran low on funds in early 1939,
Parliament stipulated that all children must be guaranteed with a £50 or £100 bond before
arrival. This slowed the influx of children and resulted in a larger number who were
placed directly in foster homes from February through August 1939.
For those who arrived in the first few months of the scheme, life in the temporary
camps was anything but joyful. The unheated summer cabins at Dovercourt and
Lowestoft were wholly unsuitable and most of the children were miserable there.97
Despite donning every piece of clothing they brought with them, going to bed fully
dressed with scarves and gloves, a number of children fell ill with pneumonia or scarlet
fever.98 One recalled realizing that “we as refugees, fleeing in the real sense of the word,
96
Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, First Annual Report: November 1938-December
1939, (London: Bloomsbury House, 1940), 4. (Hereafter, FAR ) Non-guaranteed children had no sponsor
prior to emigration.
97
Gershon, We Came, 31-39. There were several other temporary group homes, including Barham
House, and Margate, but Lowestoft and Dovercourt are the ones most often mentioned.
98
Ibid., 37.
40
had to live here, in the cold chalets, by the windy sea because there was nowhere else for
us to go. It got so cold that …kind ladies organized parties for us to run up and down the
steep sloping beach in order to get warm…I remember staying in my chalet under
unfamiliar blankets most miserable and cold.”99 Also unfamiliar to Continental children
were the breakfasts of kippers, porridge and tea with milk, which scores of Kinder found
unpalatable.100 Most children came alone and few found it easy to make friends in these
temporary camps. “I did not really mix well with the other children so did not make any
friends, nor do I remember the names of any of the children who came with me,” one
recalled.101 Another observed, “I did not make any friends, with all the moving,
reshuffling, and strangeness, it would have been difficult, I suppose, and one felt always
alone”102 Though most of the children moved on to better lodgings within a few weeks,
many remembered those winter days at Dovercourt and Lowestoft as a wretched
beginning to life in England.
The deplorable conditions only exacerbated the children’s emotional turmoil.
When tensions arose among the older boys at Dovercourt, an adult supervisor threatened
to send them back to Germany, though as one Kind observed, “I do not suppose she
realized at the time that this did not seem such a terrible thing to children parted from
99
Ibid., 35. Many of these Continental children, used to sleeping under feather quilts, found English
blankets strange, confining and uncomfortable.
100
Gershon, We Came 31-36.
101
Sacharin, 51.
102
Gershon, We Came, 36.
41
their parents.”103 One volunteer, who contracted pneumonia working at Dovercourt,
moved with some children “into the old workhouse at Branham near Ipswich, a spooky
place complete with cells, mortuary and graveyard.”104 He described the camp’s
atmosphere as “highly emotional...charged with anxiety and fear.”105 One of the
housemistresses recognized the source of the children’s anxiety. “The boys were thankful
to be safe…and very grateful for the kindness they received, but it did not provide the
answer to all their problems. They were naturally fearfully worried about their parents’
safety.”106 This anxiety was especially evident in older children. An optimistic volunteer,
excited about working with two dozen ten to fourteen year olds in a temporary hostel,
became overwhelmed with their grief, which manifested itself nightly by a “mighty choir
of crying.”107 During the day the children were “fairly happy...At night it was bedlam,
monstrous...I realized that I was unable to offer them solace and I, myself, was unable to
bear it...I left. I ran away...Seeing the children in such a state moved me enormously...
how could I offer them comfort? I saw the catastrophe of the Jewish people. I had to
leave.”108 He had lasted only two weeks.
Faced with the substandard conditions at the temporary camps and a constant
inflow of refugee children, the RCM and other agencies felt it imperative to place
103
Ibid., 36.
104
Diane Samuels,. Kindertransport. (New York: Plume, 1995), xiv.
105
Ibid., xii-xiii.
106
Ibid. 33.
107
Jacob Newman, Kinderertransporte: A Study of Stresses and Traumas of Refugee Children,
(London, 1992), 69-70.
108
Ibid., 69-70.
42
children as quickly as possible into private homes. Broadcast appeals brought scores of
prospective foster parents to the reception centers on the weekends, in what is often
referred to in memoirs and testimony as the weekend “cattle market.”109 Most of the
Kinder recalled these moments with distaste and humiliation. One remembered it as
feeling “like monkeys in the zoo,” and “a bit like second-class citizens, which we, of
course, were.”110 Rosa Sacharin, who arrived as a frightened thirteen year old recalled:
People used to come to the camp and look for children they wanted to foster or
even adopt. The youngest children were taken very quickly, but my age group
was more difficult. The people who came were not necessarily Jewish. One man
came and said, “Stand up little girl,” and when I stood up, he said, “Are you
Jewish?” and when I said “Yes,” he said “What a pity.” That was that. I felt
terrible.111
In some cases, the event shaped children’s entire lives in an instant. One girl who
was asked if she was orthodox, did not know how to answer. “I didn’t really know how
orthodox I was. I looked at my friend... She nodded her head. I said “yes” and the next
day was sent off to Liverpool to a family who wanted... company for their daughter. I
realize now that that nod of the head from my friend probably determined the whole
course of my future life.”112 Another girl, who better understood the gravity of the
situation, nonetheless felt pressured to accept a foster placement. “Everybody wanted us
to leave so that more children could be brought over from Germany. I can see now that
the next step determined the whole of my life but I was made to feel guilty for taking it
109
Gershon, We Came, 39-40. See also Harris and Oppenheimer, 145-6.
110
Harris and Oppenheimer, 146.
111
Sacharin, 51.
112
Gershon, We Came, 39.
43
with so much care.”113 It is clear that many of the Kinder keenly felt both their own lack
of agency and the absence of parental advocacy in these decisive moments.
Many children who spent their first weeks at the reception centers and almost all
the children who arrived after February 1939 were placed in private foster homes where
their experiences ran the gamut from near idyllic to unbearable cruelty. While a
significant number went to live with relatives or family friends, most were placed in the
homes of strangers, and placement was often alarmingly arbitrary. Ralph Samuel, a seven
year old German boy, was chosen from a list solely on the basis of his name. Ralph’s
sponsor had a son whose middle name was also Ralph, and the sponsor’s first name was
Samuel. In this case, the placement was fortuitous; Ralph was treated as one of the family
and he enjoyed a close relationship with his foster brother.114
Due to the intense pressure to place children quickly, however, a disturbing
number were sent to completely unsuitable homes. Nora Danzig, who was eight when she
arrived in England, went with her older sister to the home of three spinster sisters. Her
primary guardian was mentally unstable and had been in and out of mental institutions for
many years prior to the sisters’ placement in her home. Although Nora generously stated
that “she looked after us as well as she possibly could,” she also admitted that their
guardian punished them severely for any infraction.115 In Glasgow, ten-year-old Herbert
Kay was met by his guardian, an elderly lady doctor:
113
Ibid., 40.
114
Ralph Samuel, personal interview with author, August 2010.
115
Nora Danzig, Interview 18654, VHA (1996).
44
I was rather apprehensive but in no position to express my feelings to anyone.
She took me to her gaunt large Victorian house…where in fluent German she
detailed the two rooms I was allowed to enter, in contrast to the army of cats
which were given the freedom of the house. The house was damp and unclean
with a strong cat smell which was most unpleasant. She had no idea how to
manage children and, apart from an occasional outing to see my sister, I was a
virtual prisoner.116
Of the numerous instances of children being placed in such patently unsuitable foster
care, one Kind opined, “because of the pressure of the moment they weren’t asking were
these qualified people or were they not qualified people. Their goal had to be to put
children into homes to save lives.”117
Some Kinder reported having secured happy placements where they were
welcomed as one of the family. These fortunate ones found themselves with foster
families who provided security and comfort to children grieving for their parents and
former lives. One woman recollected, “As a girl of ten I was taken into a wonderful foster
home. I was terribly happy there and still remember this period with joy. I could hardly
remember my parents being as young and carefree…as this lovely young couple.”118
Another considered her foster family “simply marvelous—if standards of human decency
and ordinary down-to-earth kindness are the measurements by which we judge them.”119
In Steffi Schwarcz’s first foster family, she and her sister were “taken care of, loved
and…educated in a decent well-cared for home…having received from them lovingkindness, the simplicity of a good family relationship…and motherly guidance…to this
116
Leverton and Lowensohn, 167.
117
Henry Kreisel, Interview 16930 VHA (1996).
118
Gershon, We Came 59.
119
Ibid., 60
45
date we are part of their family and this relationship has been passed down to the second
generation.”120 Even in these happy placements, the Kinder often acknowledged that their
good fortune was merely the result of luck or Providence. Alice Boddy admitted, “I was
very lucky and my English family were both good to me and good for me…Most of the
kids, as I found out, did not fare as well.”121 Another noted that her “beloved foster
parents…made life worthwhile again. I shall thank God to my dying day that He dealt so
kindly with me by bringing me to a loving home…”122 Sadly, most accounts bespeak a
far less rosy picture, and the evidence shows that successful matches between bewildered
Jewish refugee children and understanding English benefactors were not the norm.
Many Kinder remember feelings of intense loneliness in English homes, where
affection was rarely expressed. Children desperate for parental love and security felt the
lack of human warmth keenly. Inge summed up the feelings of many Kinder: “Europeans
and Jews all together are very warm. They hug and kiss…But in England, everybody
seemed very reserved. There were no hugs and kisses. Everything was cold.”123A Kind
who at eight had been sent to Ireland remembered, “I was tremendously unhappy...and
would have run away, had I any idea where to run.”124 Having written a children’s story
about his experiences, he confessed, “it is not the truth. It does not deal with emotions
…when I think about those days…I am amazed at the lack of emotion shown to us, by
120
Leverton and Lowensohn, 298.
121
Ibid., 40.
122
Ibid., 96.
123
Harris and Oppenheimer, 207.
124
Leverton and Lowensohn, 330.
46
those who saved us, and our own lack of emotion. I was eight then, am fifty-eight now
and I think I am finally getting very upset.125 This man was one of the fortunate few
whose parents actually survived the war; yet, he admitted that he was “so desolated by
my separation from my parents that in order to survive I literally reinvented myself as a
tough...kid who had no emotions.”126
Most Kind keenly missed the warmth and affection of their mothers. In a videotaped testimony, Lorraine Allard unconsciously lapses into the present tense when
remembering her arrival in England. “The first night in the house is quite painful...I say
goodnight, can’t speak English, so I try to put my arms around her and she gave me one
push away from her and said, ‘That’s sissy.’ I didn’t even know what it meant. That’s
how she was. There was no affection in the house.”127 Nora, who was harshly disciplined
by her mentally unstable foster mother, felt the loss of motherly kisses and hugs more
sharply than her foster mother’s blows and recalled with understatement, “I must have
missed my parents terribly.”128 Twelve-year-old Inge Joseph, wrote in her diary, “How
frantically I envy other children who are able to be together with their parents. To be in a
foreign country is punishment to me! When I am dead they will have to put on my grave
that here lies a child who died of homesickness.”129
125
Ibid., 331.
126
Leverton and Lowensohn, 331
127
Lorraine Allard, Interview 39689, VHA (1998).
128
Nora Danzig, Interview 18654, VHA (1996).
129
Gershon We Came, 57-8. Slightly different versions in Turner, 115 and Whiteman ,241.
47
A common remembrance is that of foster families who provided material security
but little else. “I was taken in by a young family, a Rabbi and his wife…I was housed and
fed but never loved. I was terribly homesick, and despaired of ever seeing my folks again.
I spent thirteen months in England; the unhappiest time of my life; my loneliness was at
times unbearable and I worried constantly about my parents in Germany.”130 This Kind
was reunited with her parents in 1941, but her testimony nevertheless underscores the
difficulties of separation and foster placement. Fifteen-year-old Harry Bebring, who
arrived with his thirteen-year-old sister, spent the war years with a successful London
tailor and his extended family. Soon put to work as an errand boy in the tailoring
business, Harry admitted to “very mixed feelings about the Landsman family…I don’t
want for posterity to be ungrateful in any way. The Landsmans saved our lives, there’s no
question about that…Mr. Landsman’s sisters were very kind-- they looked after me and
fed me and so on….[but they] were being paid my wages, so it was more or less a
straightforward commercial transaction.”131
Even those who developed fond appreciation for their foster families remarked on
their English reserve. “It was not their fault that I found their life…a little lonely and
lacking in any expression of affection…They were kind, unselfish, anxious to make me
feel one of them, though I never got over the feeling of being a guest.”132 Lore Segal’s
summation undoubtedly applies to the experiences of thousands of Kindertransportees.
130
Leverton and Lowensohn, 293.
131
Harry Bebring, Interview 32914, VHA (1997).
132
Gershon We Came, 59
48
“The families who took me in were not particularly warm. They did not love me. I did
not love them. Nevertheless, they did what most of us don’t do, which is to burden their
households…with this little foreigner.”133
Many foster families were well meaning despite the shortcomings in love and
affection that the Kinder felt. Much of the anguish the children experienced in such
environments can be ascribed to cultural differences and the fact that most foster parents
were ill-suited to the task, however altruistic their motives in accepting refugee children
into their homes. Childless couples took in a considerable number of children, as did
older unmarried women and elderly couples with grown children, often those who had
the most room in their homes. While not all such homes proved inhospitable, many
Kinder noted their foster parents’ inexperience with children and incapacity to deal with
their emotional needs. Ellen Fletcher, who was ten when she arrived in England, recalls a
difficult adjustment in her foster home
[I]in Germany ‘good’ children didn’t hide their hands on their laps when sitting at
a table; the hands were to rest at the edge of the table. When I took pains to be on
my best behavior and put my hands on the table, I got slapped because that was
considered unacceptable. They had no children of their own and had no idea how
to deal with me.134
Inge Sadan’s “Uncle Billy and Aunty Vera” didn’t have children, “[and] didn’t have
much idea how to treat us…I should have been happier there. But facts are facts and it
wasn’t a good place to be.”135 A thirteen-year-old girl whose first foster family found her
133
Harris and Oppenheimer, 212.
Ellen Fletcher, response to author’s questionnaire.
134
135
Ibid., 207-8.
49
“too old to be adopted…not old enough to be an au pair,” was placed with “what seemed
to me two very old ladies. My room was at the very top of the house, freezing cold. They
lived mainly on the first floor, their deaf and dumb sister on the ground floor. I spent
hours in my room writing to my parents…knitted, did jigsaws and learned sign language
with their sister and got warm running up and down stairs.”136
Children who lived with people so ill-equipped to deal with their myriad needs
often developed short-term emotional disturbances. Brothers Herbert and Gerald Subak
were sent to a childless couple who did not really understand adolescent boys.
[They] found it hard to believe what we told them about conditions in Vienna and
thought we were exaggerating and rebellious youngsters…both my brother and I
were sent to…a class which was well below the level we had reached…in
Vienna….I felt bored, disillusioned and disappointed, and rebellious against the
depressingly useless sort of existence I was forced to lead at that time.137
Eve Soumerai was thirteen when taken in by a childless older couple who lived very
spartan lives. When they took her to the park and she asked for an ice cream, they said
“Oh, no, you can’t have ice cream—that’s luxury.” Living in an unheated house, Eve
asked for a hot water bottle for Christmas but was denied her request because it was “a
luxury.” She was sent to bed at 6:30 every evening, where her only consolation was
looking at the stars and thinking about her family, but “Auntie” pulled the shade, telling
Eve she should sleep, not look out the window. Eve felt that she was in a coffin. Clearly
depressed, she could barely make herself get out of bed. Finally, the exasperated couple
136
Leverton and Lowensohn, 120-121.
137
Sacharin, 66-67.
50
found her another placement. “They told me to mind my two shillings a week, put me on
a train and said they were finished with me.”138
Often, separation from parental love and guidance led to permanent emotional
scarring. Ignorance of a child’s needs led a spinster guardian to isolate her seven year old
charge from other children. When neighbors pointed out to her that children needed
playtime, she arranged for some, but the boy was by then unable to relate to his peers.
Social isolation left life-long scars on the young child who desperately missed his parents
and felt unloved in his new home.139 A woman recalled that her early experiences in
England “were very unfortunate. I had no one to confide in, no one who tried or even
wanted to understand. There was that awful feeling of helplessness about my parents and
all my fears about them. Since that experience I have never been able to feel really deeply
about anything.”140
The literature indicates many instances of guardians’ behavior that crossed the
line from reserve and indifference into meanness and cruelty. Food deprivation was a
common theme in these instances. One Kind wrote, “What I have never been able to
forget or forgive is the discrimination. I was given margarine when the rest of the family
ate butter, on only one slice of bread was I allowed to put jam---the very jam for which I
had collected the brambles.”141 Hedy Epstein stayed with a middle-class family who put
the fifteen-year-old on a diet of tea and one to two pieces of toast three times a day, with
138
Eve Soumerai, Interview 25315, VHA (1996).
139
Whiteman, 214.
140
Gershon We Came, 151.
141
Ibid., 63.
51
a cookie on Sundays, even though the rest of the family ate normal meals in her presence.
Practically starving after ten weeks of this deficient diet, she was rescued by a friend of
the family who found her a new home where she was finally fed generously. 142 Milena
Roth was always hungry despite living with the family of a well-to-do physician who
owned a weekend country house. Though food was plentiful, Milena’s foster mother did
not believe in feeding children after four o’clock tea and she counted Milena’s food,
always letting her know how much it cost, adding, “You don’t think I’m going to do
without luxuries to feed you, do you?” Despite food shortages and rationing in England,
none of the children reported starving for that reason. In each case, the cause was either
deliberate abuse or misappropriation of the maintenance money foster families received
to ensure that the Kinder had adequate clothing and nutrition.
Sometimes the cruelty devolved into outright physical and emotional abuse. Ruth
Michaelis was just four when she arrived in England with her seven-year-old brother
Martin to be fostered by a kindly rector and his grudging wife. Ruth’s sudden separation
from her parents had resulted in a common reaction for the younger Kinder, a regression
to bedwetting. The childless couple had no experience with children, and Ruth was
beaten with a leather strap every time she wet the bed. For other infractions, food was
withheld, and Ruth’s brother was reduced to stealing from the larder at night to make sure
his younger sister did not go hungry. What little playtime the children had was
monitored, and if they did not play “correctly,” their toys were taken away. Ruth, whose
need to be hugged and loved went unfulfilled, took out her anger and confusion on her
142
Hedy Epstein, Interview 9701, VHA, (1995).
52
dolls, repeatedly throwing them in the rubbish bin, until they too were withdrawn.
Eventually the children were put to work in the garden but forbidden to speak to one
another. Martin invented an elaborate system of communicating with Ruth using crude
sundials scattered throughout the garden by which they could arrange to meet in a
secluded area to play and keep one another company.143
It was not uncommon for one foster parent to have been moved by altruism to
sponsor a refugee child against the wishes of the other. Such incongruity caused great
confusion and distress to the Kinder trapped in these situations. Ruth recalls that “it was
most unfortunate that we started at the Strangs when we were so young and least able to
deal with their cruelty. Reverend Strang certainly was not cruel and I don’t think he had
any idea of what was going on. But he insisted that his wife take on children when he
must have known she did not want to.”144 Gerda Feldsberg faced a similar situation when
at six she was taken into a home with a kindly father and a foster mother who ignored
her and made no secret of the fact that she had not wanted a refugee child. Gerda was
locked in her room at seven each evening. To avoid wetting the bed, she resorted to using
a celluloid pencil box as a makeshift potty, which she emptied out the window each
evening, eventually nearly killing her foster mother’s favorite rosebush. Gerda was
rescued two years later when her foster father died and the foster mother asked the RCM
to remove Gerda, asserting that she could no longer afford the child, although she
143
Whiteman, 259-261. See also Turner, 120 and Leverton and Lowensohn, 214.
144
Whiteman, 268.
53
employed maids, a gardener and a chauffeur.145 Elfriede Colman faced a similarly
schizophrenic family dynamic when at age five she was placed with two single women,
one of whom was kind and loving, the other “a religious maniac and a bully…There
followed thirteen years of tension/fear/repression/rows between the two women, and
religious brainwashing. Certainly no room for personal development; fun and spontaneity
were dirty words.”146 Four years later, the women adopted a young orphan girl. “Of
course I was bullied as before, but the new child was beaten as well. We were both too
cowed to complain to anyone.”147 While such mismatched altruism undoubtedly caused
the Kinder torment, often the kindness and care of one guardian helped the children cope
with the arbitrary cruelties inflicted by the other.
It is clear from the literature that many sponsors had ulterior motives in
volunteering to be foster parents, a situation that was for the Kinder almost always
unfulfilling. For six-year-old Milena, the hidden motive involved her parents, whom her
foster mother Doris had hoped but failed to bring to England as domestic servants.
Milena had the misfortune to be raised by a woman who disliked child rearing so much,
“she had left the upbringing of her own children to nannies and boarding schools. And
then she landed herself with me, instead of gaining two servants.”148 Crippled with
homesickness, Milena was not comforted, but made to understand that her non-stop
crying was an inconvenience that kept Doris from going out. Never allowed to forget that
145
Ibid., 218-219.
146
Leverton and Lowensohn, 59.
147
Ibid., 59-60.
148
Roth, 113.
54
she should be deferential because her parents would have been Doris’s servants, Milena
was constantly belittled.149
I remember walking about in a sort of vaporous cloud of misery. …I wanted to be
a good daughter to her, but she was unable to let me. Not being allowed to love is
as bad as not being loved, and I was deprived of both…Doris actually wished me
to fail and forecast my downfall daily…To this day I don’t know what my crime
was, except I existed… I would think of my mother and grieve at what she would
have made of my misery after all her efforts to save me.150
For a beloved only child like Milena, separation from her “loving, accepting
parents” was the worst of all. “I doubt if a day has passed in my life when I don’t think of
them. This can’t be usual among people who have led a normal life, surely? Of course
nobody ever asked me if I was missing them. It was as if they ceased to exist.”151 The
Nazis murdered Milena’s parents, and Doris delivered the news to the thirteen-year-old
by telling her, “I’m afraid your parents did not survive. The Germans put them into a
room all together and gassed them.”152 After this terse announcement, the subject was
never mentioned again. No one attempted to comfort Milena or inquire about her
feelings, for “no one seemed to think for a moment that anything had happened to me at
all. I was alive wasn’t I? I had a substitute family, didn’t I?”153 Milena’s experiences help
illuminate the general silence about the true nature of the Kinder’s trauma, the
149
Ibid., 81, 87.
150
Roth, 119-121.
151
Ibid., 112.
152
Ibid., 122-3.
153
Ibid., 123.
55
disremembering of the parents’ fates and the subsequent nurturing of the celebratory
myths surrounding the Kindertransport.
Many childless couples sought a potential adoptee who could satisfy their
unfulfilled longing for parenthood. In some cases, the Kinder responded to the nurturing
love of the foster family. Renate Buchtal was ten when a childless couple took in both
she and her five-year-old sister. Although she remained fiercely loyal to her parents, “My
little sister more than made up for it and was soon as devoted to Auntie and Uncle as they
were to her. They had no children of their own and Vera became theirs...”154 Henry
Bebring, too, resisted his overbearing foster parents, but his eight-year-old sister was sent
to an older childless couple who “felt that they owned her. They wanted a kid to fill a
void in their own lives.” They were sweet to her but treated her like an infant, cooing and
fussing over her in a way that was inappropriate for her age. “They wanted a baby which
they never had. They weren’t interested in her growth and development as much as the
satisfaction of getting a baby in the house when she was eight going on nine. I don’t think
it was a very happy experience for my sister, but what could she do other than make the
best of it?”155
Another motivating factor for some guardians was the missionary desire to
convert Jewish children to the Christian faith. Both Henry and his sister had been chosen
by non-Jewish couples who had made little secret of their desire to proselytize their
young Jewish charges. The most overt of these efforts was undertaken by the Barbican
154
Leverton and Lowensohn, 50.
155
Henry Kreisel, Interview 16930, VHA (1996).
56
Mission who sponsored dozens of Jewish children with the stated objective of converting
them to Christianity.156 Ostensibly, the children’s families had given written permission
for such conversions, but many felt coerced into such agreements by the fear that their
children would not reach safety otherwise.157 Henry was old enough at ten to know that
he was being proselytized when his fundamentalist Christian foster parents required him
to attend church and say the Lord’s Prayer. After four or five months, when Henry finally
refused to accede to their wishes, “they arranged for me to leave.”158 His younger sister
did not have the gumption or maturity to stand up to her own Christian foster parents in
the same way and as a result, stayed with them and was converted to Christianity.159
Paula Hill remembers her thirteen-year-old brother being taken to task when he refused to
allow the authorities at Dovercourt to place her with a non-Jewish family. “‘How dare
you behave like that. You are lucky to be here and we no longer have Jewish homes
willing to take refugee children. We will have to send you back to Germany,’ they
threatened. Stoically, my brother replied; ‘then that is what you must do’”160 In her
second foster home, Vera lived with a woman who showed her “little Czech refugee” off
to her Methodist women’s club bragging that “if it wasn’t for me she’d stand here naked.
156
Turner, 248.
157
Ibid., 249.
158
Ibid.
159
Ibid.
160
Gershon, We Came, 147.
57
If it wasn’t for me, she’d go hungry.”161 She tried to convert Vera to the Methodist faith,
requiring her to attend church and Sunday school and to read the Bible on Sundays.162
While deliberative conversion attempts were not uncommon, many more children
were alienated from their Jewish faith merely by a lack of exposure to Jewish religious
instruction and a gradual absorption into the dominant culture. One Kind recalls, “As a
girl of nine I went to foster parents who were members of the Church of England, and
from then on my Jewish faith seemed to recede further and further from my
mind.”163Although two local Jewish families befriended the girl, “gradually I seemed to
lose touch with them and over the years became closer to the C.of E.”164 For some of
these children, the religious question was clearly secondary to that of finding a secure
substitute family. One girl recounts:
I came as a girl of nine and shared my foster home, a vicarage, with two other
Jewish girls. The Jewish Children’s Committee tried on several occasions to
remove us to a Jewish hostel. We fought like mad to stay and were eventually left
alone. Having found some security in our lives we were reluctant to give it up. I
was fourteen when we were all three baptized.165
The estrangement of refugee children from their Jewish faith, either by lack of access to
religious instruction or the active proselytization of host families and other sponsors was
the most contentious issue in the entire Kindertransport enterprise, overshadowing many
other concerns about the children’s wellbeing.
161
Harris and Oppenheimer, 202.
162
Ibid., 203.
163
Gershon, We Came, 65
164
Ibid.
165
Ibid., 66.
58
Those who wanted a refugee child to raise as their own or convert to Christianity
might be considered well-meaning if misguided, but it is difficult to construe other foster
parents’ motives as anything but selfish. Ellen Kerry Davis’s childless older guardians
were quite forthright in letting her know that they had volunteered to foster the ten-yearold because they wanted someone to look after them in their old age. To this end, they
did not treat Ellen as a daughter, but as someone who had to be made over in their image.
The very first day, the girl’s long blond braids were cut off and the foster mother
renamed her Ellen because she did not like her given name Kerry. “I looked in the mirror
and saw a stranger—my plaits were gone, my name was gone, I was a stranger among
strangers.”166 Ellen was trained in the family’s tailoring business and when her kindly
foster father died during the war, she had to support her foster mother. The only one of
her six siblings to survive the Holocaust, she often heard her foster mother say, “If it was
not for me you’d be in the gas chambers with your brothers and sister.”167 At nineteen,
Ellen entered into a “marriage made in hell” in a desperate attempt to extricate herself
from the emotionally abusive woman. Lorraine Allard’s foster parents were not
malicious, but their motives were nonetheless self-interested. Lorraine had been acquired
for the express purpose of romantically distracting the seventeen-year-old son of the
family, who had upset his parents by falling in love with a non-Jewish girl.168
166
Ellen Kerry Davis, Interview 14724, VHA (1996).
167
Ibid.
168
Leverton and Lowensohn, 13; Harris and Oppenheimer, 123, and Turner 119.
59
Many Kinder were acutely aware of the fact that their foster families had sought a
child for their own needs, and bore the pain of knowing that their lives were valued not
for their worth as individuals, but for what they could provide in the way of labor,
companionship or financial recompense. The most common motivation was acquiring
domestic help, and legions of young girls found themselves treated not as members of a
family but working as maids, housekeepers, cooks and nannies. Harry Kreisel, who
expressed qualified gratitude to his sponsors, felt that they had used his thirteen-year-old
sister in this way. The day she arrived in the Landsman’s home, they fired their maid and
expected the refugee girl to look after their seven month old baby.169 Sixteen-year-old
Bertha Leverton arrived at Dovercourt with her much younger brother Theo, who was
almost immediately chosen by an English family as a playmate for their son. Bertha
agreed to live with a childless working class couple in order to be near her brother.
“[T]he family who took me chose me as a maid. Only I didn’t know I was supposed to be
a maid. I hadn’t ever thought of becoming a servant.”170 Bertha managed to get her two
siblings into the home, which was some compensation for the difficulties they faced as
the foster children of the exploitive couple. After two years as a maid, Bertha went to
work in a cotton factory and Theo joined her when he turned fourteen. Bertha recalls,
I lived with Uncle Billy and Aunty Vera for five years. It was difficult. The
memory of those five years can never be erased. Aunty Vera…tormented us in
many different ways, little unkindnesses, things which hurt me very much at the
time….But Aunty Vera’s spitefulness and her torment was nothing compared to
Uncle Billy’s ‘trying to be friendly-ness’ which I successfully managed to avoid
169
Harry Bebring, Interview 32914, VHA (1997).
170
Harris and Oppenheimer, 147.
60
for five years. I didn’t let him become friendly…Of course, I had to deliver my
wage packet…every week, from which I was paid an eighth of what I’d earned.171
The foster parents received an allowance from the RCM for the upkeep of the refugee
children in their care, but continued to garnish Bertha’s and Theo’s wages.172
Kindertransport literature and testimony abounds with examples of labor
exploitation similar to Bertha Leverton’s. Thirteen-year-old Rosa Sacharin’s, second
family “were older and really wanted an 18 year old, who could help in the house. When
I arrived they said, ‘Oh well, you will do.’...I was unable to relate to the people and felt
lonely and unhappy. I carried out my duties but felt frustrated and useless.”173 Monica
Saxton recalled her first placement at fourteen, “I wasn’t happy, as I was always left on
my own watching their three year old girl.” After she inadvertently allowed a burglar
posing as a repairman to enter the home while the parents were out, the foster family
asked the refugee committee to find another home for her.174 A girl who was at
Dovercourt remembers, “There were rumours that if you were lucky in your adoption, the
people might help your parents—but it was also said that girls of fifteen like myself were
only wanted by English families as servants.”175 Lorraine, too, was expected to work,
cleaning the house and starting in the family’s clothing shop “from the word go. I had a
171
Ibid., 210.
172
Ibid., 169. See also Gershon, We Came, 65. Although unattributed, the account is almost certainly
Bertha Leverton’s.
173
Sacharin, 51-2.
174
Ibid., 58.
175
Gershon, We Came, 39.
61
hard life. It was difficult. But I was saved, which I have to look at.”176 Longing to
recreate the loving family she had lost, Lorraine, like Ellen, married young to a man she
barely knew, though the marriage last less than a year.177
Labor exploitation also occurred with refugee boys, who were often sent to
factories and farms or worked in a family trade. At least one Kind remembers the
guardians at Dovercourt telling him that if he volunteered for farm work, the refugee
agency would bring his father from Germany, a promise on which they made good.178
When he was nine, Robert’s entire hostel was transferred to a farm and he remembers,
The older kids were immediately put to work, real hard farm labor. The younger
kids were put to work… too, weeding these long rows of cabbages…We didn’t
work the whole day, or every day…—I mean it was bearable— but...when I read
these stories of child laborers in India, that is really what I identify with. If I
would have thought of some adult running after my son when he was nine yelling,
“You crooked dog” if he missed a few weeds, I would have killed that guy.179
Not all boys disliked agricultural labor, however. Herbert Subak volunteered for farm
work in order to leave the childless couple with whom he felt trapped and stifled.
Exploited by the first farmer he worked for, Herbert gained responsibility and
competence in a different setting and enjoyed farm work until he entered the armed
services late in the war.180 Gunther Abrahamson also found farm life congenial after an
unhappy stint at the Priory, a boarding school attended by numbers of Kinder in Scotland.
176
Lorraine Allard, Interview 39698, VHA (1998).
177
Ibid. Lorraine married soon after she found out that her parents had been murdered. Her first
husband was physically abusive and though she had an infant, she left the marriage after nine months.
178
Paul Hart, Interview 33039, VHA (1997).
179
Harris and Oppenheimer, 138-139.
180
Sacharin, 67-68.
62
“They treated me as one of the family and, at fifteen, I was happy to leave school and the
Priory and work on their farm where I stayed until 1946. They still regard me as a
member of the family.”181
Although less common, younger children were not exempt from labor
exploitation in foster homes. Mary Arnold was just five years old when the Coles family
took her in as a companion to their daughter Sonja. Never treated as one of the family,
Mary was physically bullied by both mother and daughter. Punished with food
deprivation, at seven Mary was put to work in the kitchen, preparing food, setting the
table and cleaning up after meals. She began to wet the bed and worried incessantly about
her parents. After a brief evacuation to a much more caring family during the Blitz, the
Coles reclaimed her. “I wasn’t happy to be back with the Coles family. I had to do all the
work again. I asked Mrs. Coles to be kind to me and love me. She cuddled me for a few
minutes and I thought she would be nicer to me, but she wasn’t for long. Why didn’t she
love me? Why was she so unkind to me?”182 Mary was finally sent away for good when
Mrs. Coles got pregnant, but she was not allowed to take her moneybox with her.
“Although the money that was in it was given to me by the Coles’ relatives and visitors,
she said it was hers, as she had kept me for years and nobody gave her any money for
me.”183 Margaret Furst, who lived with a family in Coventry recalls: “After school…I
had to clean the house and I worked to the best of my ability (which wasn’t very good).
181
Leverton and Lowensohn, 12.
182
Ibid., 19-20.
183
Leverton and Lowensohn, 20.
63
More often than not I burned the stuff or ruined it in some fashion. At ten years old I
wasn’t too adept in the kitchen.”184 Denied visitation with her brother who lived nearby,
she was teased and tormented by her older foster brother and forced to share a bed with
her incontinent foster sister. After the family was evacuated, her foster mother was often
away looking after her shop in Coventry. “Whenever I was alone in the house with Mr.
Simmons he would chase me all around the table and assault me.”185
Sexual harassment and abuse such as that alluded to in Margaret and Bertha’s
testimonies was probably more common than the literature indicates. Tremendous shame
undoubtedly attached itself to such revelations, and there were compelling reasons for the
Kinder to tolerate unwanted sexual advances. One girl remembers being very happy in
her foster home and school. “Unfortunately the husband made mildly amorous advances
to me one evening, which I confided to his daughter. This, a few days later resulted in my
dramatic eviction.”186 Franziska’s foster mother was worried about the teenaged girl’s
relationship to her much younger husband and requested that Franzika be sent to a
different foster family.187 Bertha Leverton revealed that although she made enough
money to support her siblings, she continued to live with her foster family because she
knew they would never let go of her sister Inge, to whom they had become very attached.
“And I realized I couldn’t leave her there. She was fourteen then and in danger, not only
for the housework that she would have to do, but in danger of Uncle Billy. And I couldn’t
184
Ibid., 112
185
Ibid., 113.
186
Gershon, We Came, 62.
187
Turner, 126.
64
risk a thing like that.”188 Bertha’s parents survived the war and after the family was
reunited, reproached her for staying with a family that exploited the children’s labor.
Bertha never revealed the real reason for staying. “We never told. That was the one thing
our parents never got to know.” Bertha was one of three girls among the thirty-eight Dorit
Whiteman interviewed who admitted to having been sexually harassed or molested.189
Sexual advances were one thing, outright sexual assault quite another. Very few
cases have been publicly revealed. Barry Turner, the only one to have been given access
to the Kinder’s dossiers, includes a lengthy excerpt from the RCM files in …And the
Policeman Smiled regarding a particularly egregious sexual violation of a brother and
sister from Germany. Fritzi and her brother Mickey had lived with one family for three
and a half years before the RCM became aware of the abuses. The foster mother had
forbidden Fritzi to reveal that she had been sexually violated by both the husband and the
couple’s nineteen-year-old son. It was later discovered that Fritzi’s brother had been also
sexually molested by one of the father’s employees.190
Perhaps the most abhorrent of such cases is detailed in the memoir, Rosa’s Child.
Too inflammatory and disturbing to be recorded in the first person by the victim, the
story is a narrated account interspersed with the victim’s interview and diary excerpts.
Susi Bechhofer and her twin sister Lotte came to England as three year olds and were
adopted by a childless Baptist reverend and his wife. When Lotte developed a brain
188
Harris and Oppenheimer, 230.
189
Whiteman, 227.
190
Turner, 129.
65
tumor at the age of nine, the reverend began sexually molesting Susi, abuse which lasted
more than a decade. Only after she sought therapy as an adult was she able to express her
feeling in writing. “I was asked to express how I feel about you, E.J. Mann—you were
given a gift—a child to love—what you did was DESTROY—I FEEL A DEEP
BITTERNESS-- RESENTMENT AND ANGER—the latter I am scared of. It might
ERUPT and destroy all I have bravely fought to build. And so I bury this emotion
knowing that as I do this I am partly immobilized.”191 To be sure, violations like this
were not common, but had families been rescued together, such instances would
undoubtedly have been even rarer. The refugee agencies, tasked with guarding the
children’s welfare, failed on these occasions to act as substitute parents.
In place of absent parents, the refugee agencies were supposed to monitor and
report upon the well-being of every refugee child, but most Kinder report little direct
contact with representatives of these committees. Lorraine remembered that “When I was
in Lincoln, I was never contacted by anyone from…any refugee committee…I was
completely on my own. I think I just slipped through the net.”192 Those who do remember
visits from RCM local or regional representatives overwhelmingly report that such visits
were ineffective in providing the children an opportunity to reveal their mistreatment or
unhappiness. After Bertha Leverton’s evacuation from Coventry, she reports, “we were
really cut off from any Jewish contact; but there must have been a Committee who knew
about us, for twice a year a young Rabbi…came to see us. There was no point in
Jeremy Josephs with Susi Bechhofer, Rosa’s Child: The True Story of One Woman’s Quest for a
Lost Mother and a Vanished Past, (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 132.
191
192
Harris and Oppenheimer, 216.
66
complaining to him about our treatment. It was our word against theirs, and by that time
we were so cowed, we just accepted our fate.”193 Another Kind remembers “the Refugee
Committee, did on rare occasions come to see us. ‘Well, how are you my dear?’ (This in
their presence…) ‘I can see you are well looked after here. Do you need any clothes? No,
I can see they keep you all well dressed.’ The thought never seemed to occur to the
visitor that we paid for all our clothes. And so she went happily on her way, unaware of
the silent heartbreak.”194 Ellen Fletcher, who was desperately lonely with her cold and
belittling foster mother, remembered that, “A lady came to the house and in the living
room with my foster mother present, asked me how things were going for me. With my
foster mother being present I couldn’t tell her.”195
The refugee agencies, with little or no support from the British government, were
clearly unprepared for the task of dealing with the needs of thousands of children.
Nevertheless, home visits did occur, and far more frequently than Kinder memories
would indicate. Although not open for research purposes, the JRC still holds files on most
of the Kinder, including records of each child’s contacts with the refugee organizations.
Tantalizing glimpses of this material can be gleaned from Barry Turner’s book which
includes uncited quotes from RCM home visits and confidential records. Turner quotes
visit reports that found one girl “ill at ease…undersized, slightly hunchbacked and
abnormal in her figure,” another who was in “a very nervous and agitated state of mind,
193
Leverton and Lowensohn, 183.
Gershon, We Came, 65. Although anonymous, this account is almost certainly Bertha Leverton’s
and seems to indicate that both Rabbi and the RCM visited the home where Bertha lived with her two
siblings.
194
Ellen Fletcher, response to author’s questionnaire, October 2010.
195
67
looking worn out and depressed.”196 Turner quotes an RCM report on the bitter
guardianship battle between a child’s real and foster mothers. The foster mother wanted
to adopt the child and threatened to send Liesl away unless the mother signed over legal
rights to her.197 In another chapter, Turner mines the RCM records for details of Kinder
who fell afoul of the law and those who descended into serious mental illness. Several of
those diagnosed with schizophrenia were subjected to lobotomies.198
The sensitive material Turner had access to is generally absent from the RCM
public records, but even here it is possible to locate signs of the despair that separation
engendered in some of the Kinder. The minutes of the RCM’s October 1943 Executive
Committee meeting reveal such information:
It was very much regretted that there were three deaths to report:
Fritz Kopstein has been found gassed in his room
Hans Schmier had thrown himself from a building.
Martin Schmitz had died at Miss Essinger’s school as a result of an accident in
which he had been playing with a rope hanging from a tree.
There was a discussion on the subject of the mental strain which many of our
children were suffering due to either bad news, or lack of news from their parents
and other relatives and to the uncertainty as to the future… there was an increase
in the number of those cases…in London and… in the provinces…The
Committee fully agreed to the suggestion that there was at the moment the need
for the employment of a trained psychiatric social worker. 199
196
Turner, 125-127.
197
Ibid., 131.
198
Ibid., 228-9.
199
Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief Archives 1933-1960, (CBF), 27/28/166 Refugee
Children’s Movement: Executive Committee Minutes and Papers, Executive Committee Meeting Minutes,
October 20, 1943, 3-4. MF Doc 27.
68
Here, buried among financial reports and other administrative minutia is a rare admission
of the effect that separation from and fear for parents was having on large numbers of
children. It is also noteworthy that it took until 1943 for the RCM to recognize the
severity of the problem and to finally add a trained mental health worker to its staff. This
report attests to the challenges the Movement faced in its impossible task of replacing the
lost parents of thousands of refugee children.
Although the expectation at the outset of the Kindertransport movement was that
all the children would find private foster care, the reality was that there were just not
enough homes, let alone enough suitable homes for 10,000 children. The solution was the
establishment of a number of small hostels, boarding houses, private schools and other
group homes to house older children and those whose foster families no longer wanted
them. Some of these were organized for orthodox children so that they could continue to
honor their religious principles. Bernd Koschland lived at such a hostel in Tylers Green,
remembering it as a place “that left a deep impression on me…the warden and his
assistant, their wives and other helpers took a personal interest in us… a firm but loving
one.”200 Others, like the famous Gwrych Castle which housed 200 refugee children, were
training institutions for those preparing for Aliyah.201 Vera Gissing remembers the special
boarding school created for Czech children that “really changed my life. We were more
like an extended family. There were many children who came on the Kindertransport,
who shared my anxiety about what was happening to our parents…I spent three and a
200
Leverton and Lowensohn, 175.
201
Ibid., 77. Aliyah is Zionist the term for emigration to Eretz Ysrael, then Palestine, now Israel.
69
half years at this school. They were the happiest I had in England.”202 Several Kinder
have good memories of the Beacon Hostel in Tunbridge Wells where “we tried to make
the best of our life and were like a family.”203 After leaving the Coles, Mary was sent to a
hostel she hated, then back to the Coles and finally to the Beacon. “As soon as I got there
I felt at home…I just felt I belonged for the first time.”204 In the Beacon’s cook, Mary
finally found the mother figure she had been longing for, “a lovely warm English lady
who loved all the girls.”205 Many children who had had unhappy experiences in private
foster homes eventually found a measure of love, acceptance and belonging in a group
setting, enjoying the companionship and camaraderie of others who shared the same
background, challenges, and concerns.
Children in group establishments often report having had a better experience than
those placed in private foster homes, but there were exceptions. Many of these seem to
have been in haphazardly run boarding houses set up on the fly to meet the desperate
housing needs of the RCM. One Kind remembered a badly run hostel where he was
bullied. Despite asking repeatedly for new lodgings, he recalled being told, “‘You must
be grateful for what you have...You’re lucky to be here’”.206 He ended his account with
the words, “Oh, how miserable I was. How lonely I felt.”207 Robert ruefully noted,
202
Harris and Oppenheimer, 204.
203
Leverton and Lowensohn, 267.
204
Ibid., 20.
205
Ibid.
206
Gershon, We Came, 84.
207
Ibid., 84
70
“[w]hen you see your life has been saved, and you’re brought into a hostel which is clean
and there’s food there, and there are other children there, how could you not be happy in
that place? But to me it smelled of orphanage, which, of course, in due course it
became.”208 Robert noted that his friend’s sister, living in the same hostel wrote in her
diary “things which as boys we wouldn’t even permit ourselves to think…She wrote…‘I
would give a kingdom for a kind word.’ We were not able to articulate this, that we were
treated in such an unkind way.”209
The proprietors of some of these establishments appear to have been motivated
mostly by greed, collecting the upkeep allowance for each child but expending little of it
on the children’s welfare. Susanne and her brother ended up in one of these places.
There were fourteen children and fourteen dogs. The dogs had preferential
treatment. We were allowed one bath a fortnight. The five elderly spinster sisters
did not seem to like children...I wrote…that I was unhappy and mentioned that we
were having to pray for our ‘daily severely rationed bread!’ Before we left, I was
taken into the huge, dark and unused dining room, and told how ungrateful I was,
that Hans and I had been accepted for less than the normal fees and that I would
regret what I had done.210
Eight-year-old Ruth and eleven-year-old Martin were sent to a boarding house where
they found hundreds of children running about unsupervised. “We could do as we
liked…There were some adults around, but they just popped in and out without any
apparent influence.”211 After playing in a meadow flooded with sewage-contaminated
water, Martin contracted hepatitis. For weeks, Ruth tried to minister to him, selling her
208
Harris and Oppenheimer, 136.
209
Ibid.
210
Leverton and Lowensohn, 127.
211
Whiteman, 261.
71
dolls for a few pennies to buy apples for her brother. When a doctor finally came, he
found Martin near death. The other children disappeared after the doctor’s visit and Ruth
and Martin went to their second set of foster parents.212
Multiple foster placements were the rule rather than the exception for the Kinder,
and their peripatetic lives subjected them to sequential traumas of separation. Some of
these uprootings, such as the mass evacuations of children in response to the wartime
bombing campaigns were unavoidable. Others were occasioned by the inability of foster
families to cope financially or emotionally with their refugee charges.. Vera Reichman’s
first foster family, “possibly tired of the responsibility, had me transferred to a refugee
school in Folkestone.”213 Although happy there, war soon closed the school and she was
evacuated first to an elderly couple, then another foster family in Tintern where she lived
contentedly for about eighteen months. When the Bnai Brith refugee committee decided
Vera needed a more Jewish environment, she was sent to a hostel where she spent ten
unhappy months before it too was closed. Vera was on the move again, this time to a
London hostel where she spent three weeks before a brief reunion with the Tintern family
and then evacuation a second time to a hostel in Surrey. “For the umpteenth time I
packed my little black suitcase and left for a new home…The by now familiar lump rose
in my throat as I surveyed the unfamiliar surroundings.”214 Between the ages of eight and
212
Ibid.
213
Leverton and Lowensohn, 254.
214
Ibid.
72
eleven, Vera had moved eight times, living with three different families and in four
different group homes.
Continual dislocation was an added hardship for children seeking to replace the
security they had lost after the first uprooting from their parents. Lenore Davies
remembered that after a series of cultural misunderstandings with her first foster mother,
“my hostess…said that she could not out up with me any longer—and so suddenly I was
out on my ear.”215 Sent to a hostel, she was then evacuated. “This time I was the more
experienced—I had seen it all before, not knowing where I would be the following night
or who would be with me.”216 Another woman’s hostel was closed and she moved “from
pillar to post, moving digs from one to another, frequently. It was a difficult time. I
moved about six times in six months.”217 Each dislocation replicated that first separation
and reminded the Kinder of the loss of home, family and identity.
The children nurtured hopes of reunification with their loved ones and many of
the older children actively worked to make it a reality. Many of these children left
Germany and Austria bearing a heavy mantle of responsibility for their endangered
families and thought of little else but securing the precious work visas that would allow
their parents to emigrate. Lore recalled that as soon as she arrived at Dovercourt, “[I]
remembered very promptly that is was my job to save my parents, and my grandparents,
and my aunt and the twins…I had a sense that when I was lying in bed I was wasting
215
Leverton and Lowensohn, 65.
216
Ibid.
217
Sacharin, 53.
73
time, that while I was playing…or while I was laughing that might be the moment in
which I could have and should have been doing something about this demand on me that
I should bring my parents out.”218 Lore and many others were successful in their quests.
Lore’s parents did manage to secure domestic servant visas and arrived in England on her
eleventh birthday. Another boy recalled, “[t]he last thing my mother said to me was ‘If
you go there, make sure that you do something for us.’”219 This fifteen year old was able
to help his four younger siblings get to England, and his widowed mother and younger
sister arrived on domestic servants’ visas. Bertha Leverton convinced her foster parents
to sponsor her sister Inge who was left behind when Bertha and her brother came on one
of the early transports.220
Most were less fortunate, some missing by only days in their heartbreaking efforts
to obtain promises of work for their parents and loved ones. Lorraine Allard, fearful of
imposing any more on her foster family’s largesse, instead went from door to door asking
in her broken English whether anyone would sponsor her parents as servants. She was
successful late in the summer of 1939, but her parents’ visas were incomplete when war
broke out, and they both perished in Auschwitz in 1944. Lorraine remembered that when
war dashed all hopes of getting her beloved parents to safety she collapsed. “How was I
going to manage without my parents? How were they going to survive in Germany? I
218
Harris and Oppenheimer, 171.
219
Sacharin, 34.
220
Harris and Oppenheimer, 168.
74
think I cried for, not weeks, not months, I cried for years.”221 Some children did ask their
foster parents to help, only to be told, as Rosa was, that “she felt unable to help. She said
that she already had me. I did not know who else to approach.”222 Paul remembers that
once he and his older sister got to England, the parents sent “pleading letters.” Paul and
his sister both asked, “but we weren’t successful. Nothing happened.”223 Hedy is still
troubled by the knowledge she was unable to save her parents who were murdered in
Auschwitz. Her father had pleaded with the fourteen-year-old to enlist her guardian’s
help in getting them to safety. “It took a long, long time before I was able to forgive
myself that I didn’t push Mrs. Mayer hard enough, but I didn’t know how then.”224
Worry about the fate of parents shadowed the children from the moment of their arrival,
and guilt about not being able to do more to save them was a lifelong burden for many of
the Kinder.
A few guardians provided the greatest gift of all to their Kindertransport foster
children when they sponsored one or both parents to come to safety on domestic or other
work visas. Laura Gabriel, who immediately bonded with her foster family wrote, “What
makes my experience…even more outstanding is that once I explained to my foster
parents my parents’ dilemma of waiting for their American Quota numbers to come up,
they obtained for them a permit to come to England…Mr. Benabo even gave my dad a
job in his business. So three weeks before the war began my parents arrived in England
221
Ibid., 181.
222
Sacharin, 52.
223
Paul Zell, Interview 44405, VHA (1996).
224
Harris and Oppenheimer, 178.
75
thanks to my foster parents’ generosity.”225 Mr. Epstein, Ralph Samuel’s foster father,
sponsored Ralph’s mother to come to England but in an arrangement that was much less
egalitarian. Ralph’s mother, who had lived a life of ease in pre-Nazi Germany with
servants of her own came to England as Mr. Epstein’s maid. While Mr. Epstein treated
Ralph as a member of the family, his mother was required to serve her seven-year-old son
and the rest of the family and take all her meals alone in the kitchen.226 How she felt
about such an arrangement will never be known, for to her dying day she steadfastly
refused to discuss any details of those years with Ralph.
Those Kinder whose parents were able to get to England before the end of the war
recall moments of reunion with emotion. When Paul was reunited with his parents early
in 1940, he described it as “the greatest feeling in the world.”227 Similarly, Paul H., who
saved his father by agreeing to work on a farm in England, recalls their reunion as
“unbelievable joy, tears—you can’t really describe it…as far as I was concerned things
were going to be all right now.”228 Most poignant, perhaps, is the recollection of a Kind
whose parents were able to join her in England on the eve of war. “Often that first winter,
we sat in my parents’ bed to keep warm. Every week father queued up...for his week’s
225
Leverton and Lowensohn, 114.
226
Ralph Samuel, interview with author, August 2010.
227
Paul Zell, Interview 44405, VHA (1998).
228
Paul Hart, Interview 33039, VHA (1997).
76
allowance—which often ran out before more money was due. But we were happy, we
were free, we were together, we were human again.”229
Those few whose parents managed to get to England before the war were indeed
more fortunate than their fellow Kinder, but many of them still faced wrenching
separations and strains. The vast majority of these parents had been forced to leave the
Continent penniless and had gained entry to the UK on domestic visas. With no financial
resources and housed in servant quarters or rented rooms, they had few options for
collecting their children and living together as families once again. One girl remembers
that although her mother was in England, “I only saw her about once a year—there
wasn’t money for my fare.”230 Robert Sugar’s mother worked as a maid in “this cold,
fancy house where they were exploiting the European maids. If you’ve ever been the
child of a maid, you know maids are not supposed to have children. You can’t stay
there.”231 Limited to visiting on weekends and holidays, the continual partings took their
toll. Robert recalled these painful moments. “It was time for her to leave, and all the
things that had gone on before just welled up I me and I wept…My heart was breaking. I
felt abandoned. She was leaving and I couldn’t do anything about it.”232 When she
departed after her second visit, “I remember feeling a sort of relief. I just couldn’t live in
two worlds any more. To visit your mother in some fancy house and not be allowed out
229
Gershon, We Came, 51-2.
230
Gershon, We Came, 56.
231
Harris and Oppenheimer, 135.
232
Ibid., 137.
77
of the kitchen. At that point I wanted to be with the other kids. The first time she left
something broke in me, I guess.”233
In some cases, the parents had to compete with foster families for their children’s
affections. A Kind who arrived in Great Britain at the age of six wrote,
[M]y mother followed just before the war. I stayed with my foster parents and
found it impossible to love two people as my mother. As first, my mother’s visits
and especially her departures were agony. Gradually, as my foster mother took
over my affections—and I welcomed this—my own mother’s visits were still an
agony but now because of the guilt feelings they aroused in me”234
Renate and her sister, whose parents were servants for a local dentist, visited them most
weekends. “These meetings were painful for everybody. It was hard for our parents to see
us as someone else’s children, and I found each parting agonizing…Later our parents
moved further away and we visited them only for school holidays, an arrangement kinder
to everyone.” Her younger sister was very attached to the foster parents, however, and
“she never really bonded to our parents again when years later she came to live with them
once more.”235 Whether together or apart, those whose parents were in England were
undoubtedly the luckiest of the Kinder, for they at least had the hope of benefitting from
parental guidance as they reached milestones in their lives.
A number of Kinder testimonies indicate how different their lives might had been
had their parents also been offered rescue by the British government. Even those children
whose parents’ jobs as domestic servants precluded their living together in England had
233
Ibid., 138.
234
Gershon, We Came, 56.
235
Leverton and Lowensohn, 50.
78
parental guidance and advocacy in a crisis. The person to whom Susanne appealed about
the boarding school overrun with dogs was her mother, who had managed to come to
England and find work in a hospital. The mother immediately got her children into more
suitable lodgings.236 Susanne was able to be with her mother and brother at holiday times
and “[d]espite the bombings we were happy together and I looked forward to the precious
days.”237 Similarly, Margaret, whose mother worked as a domestic servant, appealed for
help when the sexual advances of her foster father became too much. “I took as much
abuse as I could stand and then finally had enough guts to let my mother know what was
going on.”238 Forthwith she sought the help of the RCM to remove her daughter from the
Simmons’ household and send her to a boarding school where “the teachers were like
mothers to us….I was happy.”239 Gerald Weiner’s mother, working in Oxford as a
midwife, interceded on behalf of her ten-year-old son and was able to arrange a foster
placement for him near her that included an excellent education at Christ Church
Cathedral Choir School.240 Alice, whose foster mother was using her as a maid and
pocketing Alice’s living allowance, called her mother who was working as a domestic in
London and “the family where she was working…let me stay with her to get my act
together.”241 The luck of the draw often determined whether a child’s sponsors helped
236
Ibid.
237
Ibid., 113.
238
Leverton and Lowensohn, 113.
239
Ibid.
240
Sacharin, 80-81.
241
Turner, 132.
79
bring the parents to safety, but sadly, those who were reunified with family members
before the war began were few indeed. Those lucky few had advocates who much more
vested in overseeing their children’s physical, emotional and educational well-being than
the overworked, understaffed and underfunded refugee agencies.
For those who were not fortunate enough to have a parent who had secured a lifesaving English visa, the war years were marked by never ending worry about the fate of
loved ones still in Nazi lands. Many Kinder mention the letters they were able to
exchange with their parents until war broke out, and the twenty-five word Red Cross
postcards they could exchange every few months thereafter. The majority also mention
the moment when even these fragile lines of communication ceased, usually sometime in
1941 or 1942. Hedy recalled the last such postcard she received from her mother. “[I]t’s
written in real shaky handwriting. And she’s saying that she’s travelling to the east, and is
saying a very final goodbye to me.”242 Hedy denied for years the import of those
unsteady words.
I would understand that she’s saying she’s travelling in an easterly direction. Then
I would say to myself: well, maybe she’s going back to Kippenheim…And the
final goodbye I didn’t understand either…Both my parents had written “It may be
a long time before you hear from me again.” How long is a long time? Is it a
week? Is it a month? A year? Ten years? So I just kept on saying to myself, “A
long time just isn’t over yet and I have to wait some more.”243
Chance had determined that Hedy ended up with a foster family who could not or would
not help her parents come to England, and all her patient waiting was in vain. Both of
Hedy’s parents were murdered in the Holocaust.
242
Ibid., 191.
243
Ibid.
80
Chance was a major factor in the Kinder’s academic opportunities too, and
bitterness over educational curtailment is lamented keenly in testimonies and memoirs.
Many of the Kinder had suffered their first educational disruption under Nazi rule when
they were expelled from the public schools. For these children, England offered not only
the promise of safety and freedom, but also the chance to resume their interrupted
educations. The reality, as Karen Gershon’s sister Lise discovered at Dovercourt, was
that such hopes might not materialize. “In Germany...I had never dared to hope for a
career—my schooling had been interrupted when I was thirteen. When I came to
England, I thought that now I would be like everyone else, that my life would be normal.
When I was asked what I wanted to be I said a doctor. The woman who was filling the
form in said: ‘I can’t put that down—you must remember you are a refugee’”244
Many of the Kinder from solid middle or upper-middle-class homes had been
raised to consider higher education their birthright. One wrote, “I had been brought up to
think of becoming a doctor and following my father. This was quite out of the question
now…I hated leaving school and would have dearly liked going on to university, but did
not like to even mention this to my guardian.”245 Monica, who was fourteen when she
arrived, lived with several different families in Scotland. “There was no chance of
continuing my education…I am still annoyed that the circumstances prevented me from
244
Gershon We Came, 40. For confirmation that this quote is from Lise, see Gershon, A Tempered
Wind, 41.
245
Gershon, We Came, 120.
81
going to university, as I would have done in Germany, like all my family. Nevertheless, I
took several Highers at night school, which showed me what I could have done.”246
Both financial and cultural factors determined that the majority of the Kinder
were unable to fulfill their educational dreams in their teens and early twenties. The RCM
and other refugee organizations simply did not have the resources to sponsor the children
past the normal English school leaving age of fourteen or fifteen. Whether an individual
child’s guardians chose to pay for his or her education was entirely up to them and
dependent upon their resources. There are examples of fortunate children whose
guardians did guarantee their higher education. One was Ralph, whose foster father had
chosen him on the basis of his name, had sponsored Ralph’s mother as his maid, and,
after Ralph and his mother left the home, continued to pay for Ralph’s education.247 One
lucky boy was chosen at Dovercourt by representatives from the Bishop Storford College
and received the kind of English education enjoyed by the elite, eventually earning a PhD
at University College London.248 Children like these were the fortunate few, however.249
Most foster families could not or chose not to finance their wards’ further
educations. Ursula Schlochaauer’s foster father, though quite well off, “did not want to
246
Sacharin, 58-9.
247
Ralph Samuel, interview with author.
248
Sacharin, 18-19.
Turner also makes this point in Chapter 10, ‘Willingly to School,” 202.
249
82
pay for an education. I could stay with them as long as I liked, he said, but no money for
an education was forthcoming.”250 For Ellen Fletcher the issue was not just money.
My foster mother also drilled into me that I was incompetent and would never
amount to anything. She didn’t allow me to take the qualifying exam for
secondary education…at the age of eleven, saying I wouldn’t pass it anyway, so
there was no point in my taking the exam…I left school at age 14… I had no
academic ambitions. I had become convinced that I was unqualified and too
incompetent for further education. Secondary education had to be paid for, which
I presume was the reason I was not allowed to take the qualifying test.”251
Lorraine Allard never got over the abrupt termination of her formal education. Lorraine’s
husband testified about her Kindertransport experience. “[S]he feels rather sensitive that
she never had from the age of fourteen upwards...a formal education…Of course the
loneliness when she came to England...to a family who tried...but never gave her the love
she required...the formative years were just not there. No parents’ guidance. No
education...I think that sums it up.”252
Many of the Kinder whose academic careers were cut short were to suffer bitter
disappointment at having to leave formal schooling at the age of fourteen and enter the
workforce, often in low wage blue collar or service jobs. A Kind living in a mining region
was summoned before the local refugee committee at the age of fourteen to decide on his
future career. “‘How would you like to become a printer?’ the chairman asked cautiously.
‘Yes,’ I replied without hesitation, for I dreaded the prospect of the mines.”253 Another
250
Leverton and Lowensohn, 226.
Ellen Fletcher, response to author’s questionnaire, September 2010; Ellen Fletcher essay, War
Stories Project, n.d.
251
252
Lorraine Allard, Interview 39689, VHA (1998).
253
Gershon, We Came, 99.
83
wrote, “As a boy of fourteen I was sent to work in some tailoring factory which I hated. I
would have liked more schooling, for which I was just too old.”254 Another wrote, “I
realize intensely the unalterable loss of education when I was put to work at fifteen in a
flour mill. It took years of study…and lots of weary keeping at it…to learn anything at
all, and although I now have a reasonable position, it is not what I could have had and
been, with only an ordinarily reasonable education.”255
Most of the Kinder were funneled into jobs for which they had no desire or
inclination. “There was little choice, so I decided to take up nursing.”256 “I was sixteen
when the war broke out. I was too old to go to school and too young to go into the
army…I wanted to be a motor mechanic. I was told that I could not do that…since I was
classed as an enemy alien…They then gave me a list…you could become a barber, tailor,
presser or gardener and so I decided to become a presser.”257 This Kind, like many others,
eventually joined the armed forces, which was regarded as a way to assert independence,
leave dead end jobs, seek adventure and express gratitude for the country that had given
them shelter.
Many Kinder achieved their educational goals later in life by dint of their own
hard work and sacrifice. While working and supporting a family, Harry Bebring, who had
been employed as an errand boy by his foster father, attended night school three nights a
254
Ibid., 98.
255
Ibid., 119.
256
Ibid., 99.
257
Sacharin, 5.
84
week for fourteen years and attained an engineering degree.258 Lenore Davies, who
passed her exams in 1943 but had no money to attend university, joined the WAAF and
eventually began her degree studies in 1947. She became a grammar school physics
mistress and “when in 1964 one of my pupils gained a Physics Exhibition to Cambridge,
I felt after twenty-five years I had arrived.”259 Although the majority of the Kinder appear
to have forged productive and fulfilling careers, some feel that the circumstances of the
Kindertransport permanently blighted their lives.
Bitterness about lost opportunities is only second to that about having been cut off
so suddenly and forever from one’s family...this loss made it extremely difficult
for me and...many others to get anywhere at all later in life....this double loss of
parents and education inevitably wrenched one’s life to a lower and extremely
limited path...it was a struggle I never caught up with.260
The severing of family bonds was the result of the cruel calculus of the Kindertransport.
The children’s lives were saved, but they lost the support of their loving parents whose
protection might have spared them so many of the hurts and disappointments they would
suffer in the years to come.
258
Harry Bebring, Interview 32914, VHA (1997).
259
Leverton and Lowensohn, 66.
260
Gershon, We Came, 119.
85
The Consequences of Separation
Our parents let us go
knowing that who stayed must die
but kept the truth from us
although they gave us to reality
did they consider what it meant
to become orphaned and not know
to be emotionally freed
when our childhood seeds were spent
When we went out from Germany
carrying six million lives that was Jewish
history but each child was one refugee
we unlike the Egyptian slaves were
exiled individually and each in
desolation has created his own
wilderness
from “The Children’s Exodus,” Karen Gershon, Collected Poems261
The Kinder’s reflections always cycle back to that fundamental loss from which the other
losses in their lives flowed—the separation from and loss of parents. When the war ended
and the truth about the Holocaust emerged, the Kinder were forced to confront the reality
that one or both parents had perished.
The end of the war meant that one had suddenly to come to terms with everything
one had pushed away while it was going on. The continued anxiety about our
families had been partly submerged in the sheer mechanics of coping with
everyday life. Now the truth was inescapable. All my family...had perished. The
terrible facts of how it all happened were perhaps more unbearable than death
itself. Even now I feel unable to look them squarely in the face.262
While some were able to find out the details of their families’ fates, others were stymied
in this pursuit. Otto Hutter spent many evenings “helping to compile lists of survivors,
but it was a hope in vain: despite many inquiries over the years I still do not know when
261
Gershon, Collected, 22.
262
Gershon, We Came, 113
86
and where they perished.”263 Many Kinder remained unable to read their parents’ letters
or to discuss the facts of their demise with their own children and loved ones.
The Kinder struggled to reconcile feelings of grief, guilt and abandonment. “I had a great
hatred for my parents for a long time, especially of my mother. I should have been old
enough to understand why she sent me away…and when I found out that they had both
died in concentration camps I thought for a long time that they must have deserved it…I
just could not admit to myself what a terrible loss they were to me, and so I pretended I
was well rid of them.”264 Herbert Holden and his eight-year-old sister left their parents
and an infant sister behind when they came to England. Herbert found out after the war
that his father had been selected to work, but instead “crossed the line” at Auschwitz to
accompany his wife and child to the gas chambers. Herbert admitted that his father’s act
was “somewhat admirable,” but he also confessed that “a part of me asks, ‘Didn’t he
think about us?’”265
For those whose parents survived, reunification often brought the difficult
realization that the long separation had irrevocably altered both the parents and their
former relationships. Inge Sadan remembers rushing to meet her parents after five years’
separation. “I knew they were my parents, but it wasn’t the same parents.” Having lost all
her German, she could only speak their names. “We just stood there looking at each
263
Sacharin, 19.
264
Ibid., 159.
265
Herbert Holden, Interview 35952, VHA (1996).
87
other. It was such a traumatic moment. It was wonderful, and yet it was terrible.”266 Inge
had hated her foster family and eagerly awaited reunion with her parents. For others, it
was a different story. “[M]y sister and I…were given a letter from our parents. The first
news for years!...They wanted us home again…We were flabbergasted and horrified. No!
We didn’t want to go. We belong to you, Aunt and Uncle! We can’t go! So it was left to
Uncle to write this difficult letter to suggest we finished our education here and [we] did
not go through another upheaval.”267
Reunions were complicated by the span of time apart, during which the Kinder
had grown up. Parents remembered the little children they had put on trains, and reunited
with young adults. “The situation was highly charged emotionally—Mother wanting to
protect me and make up for the long absence and I wanting to be independent. I found it
difficult to establish a relationship.”268 Kurt Fuchel remembers his first meeting with his
parents. “My parents let go of a seven-year-old and got back a sixteen-year-old. My
mother, especially, wanted to carry on where she left off. But a sixteen-year-old doesn’t
wasn’t to be treated like a seven-year-old.”269 Ruth, now fourteen and finally adjusted to
English life, suddenly heard from her parents in 1949. “I remember when my mother
came; she was a total stranger to me…I did not want to speak to her. I felt that I had got
my life at last on a stable basis, and I did not want her intruding and upsetting it all
266
Ibid., 229.
267
Gershon, We Came, 114.
268
Ibid.
269
Harris and Oppenheimer, 234.
88
again.”270 Ruth’s was one of the many tragedies of the Kindertransport. The years of
displacement and upheaval had taken their toll; the parent the four-year-old desperately
longed for was now the impediment to the stable life the young adolescent sought above
all other considerations.
Some of the saddest of all were those families that were permanently shattered by
the Kindertransport and the war. These Kinder, whose surviving parents stayed in Europe
or emigrated overseas, often went years before seeing them again. “Mutti came to
England to visit us, It was the first time in 24 years that we met.”271 “My parents have
been over to England several times to stay with us, but I have never been back to Vienna.
Although it is rather sad to have grown so much away from my parents, I do feel that
Auntie and Uncle are more my parents than my own.”272 “My mother…lives in
Hamburg. We visit each other occasionally but the years we were separated have proved
too great to be bridged.”273 Siblings, often separated once they arrived in England, also
became strangers. “Why my brother and I were not sent to England together I don’t
know. He came over a few weeks later and …I did not see him again until 1943. It was
really tragic that we were separated as I’m sure, had we been together, it would have
made a lot of difference to me.”274
270
Whiteman, 266.
271
Gershon, We Came, 116.
272
Ibid., 115.
273
Ibid.
274
Ibid., 117.
89
In an effort to recreate what was lost, a number of Kinder made hasty or illadvised marriages in the immediate aftermath of the war. Many feel that their
Kindertransport experiences were at least in part responsible for failed marriages. Karen
Gershon married young, to a man from her hometown in Germany. She acknowledged
that she did not love him but married him out of loneliness and homesickness. Separated
from her entire family, she thought, “If I could have been together longer than fleetingly
with any one of them, I would not have had to get married, at least not yet, or perhaps not
to Walter. He was my Bielefleld.”275 Ellen realized much later how the Kindertransport
had affected her relationships.
I believe that my experience growing up in England led, indirectly, to the
breakup of my marriage…Because I never had the opportunity to discuss feelings
with anyone, as well as hearing repeatedly that children should be seen and not
heard… I was married for 24 years, and over time I grew resentful of some of my
husband’s behaviour, but it never occurred to me to discuss that with him. So I
grew very silent, which of course didn’t help our relationship.276
In contrast, Elfreide Colman married “a lovely man who was forbearing and patient and a
loving father,” but “my deficient childhood made me incapable of giving the unstinting
love they all deserved, and it wasn’t until in my late thirties that an extended period of
psychotherapy turned me into a reasonably adequate human being. By that time my
marriage was at an end; my husband deserved much better.”277
Few Kinder were untouched by their experiences and many endured lifelong
psychological and emotional problems of identity. “I was in their care for five and a half
275
Gershon, Tempered Wind, 134.
Ellen Fletcher, response to author’s questionnaire.
276
277
Leverton and Lowensohn, 60.
90
years, during which time they fed and clothed me and about forty to fifty other refugee
boys. They were altogether miserable, barren, fruitless years.”278 Another recalled, “In a
more adult light, I saw that my years with them had not been at all what I in my necessity
had imagined them to be. Later, it became painfully clear how deluded I had been as a
youngster to think that I was ever anything else to them than a refugee boy.”279 In
response to Karen Gershon’s prompt, “What is a Refugee?” one person wrote, “As long
as he wishes to return to his country of origin he remains a refugee, even to himself. But
once he ceases to feel the urge to return he just becomes an uprooted individual in an at
best indifferent alien community.”280
The Kinder’s remembrances rarely challenge the dictate that only the children be
saved, and they consistently praise Great Britain for their salvation, avoiding
confrontation with the political and economic calculations that cost most of them their
families. The Kinder were conditioned for many years to consider themselves “the lucky
ones” to whom “nothing happened,” suppressing their pain and distress.281 Robert,
separated from his beloved mother and placed in a cold, unloving hostel was able to
articulate how the straitjacket of gratitude affected a young child. “People wonder how
anyone whose life was saved could qualify how it was saved. He should just be happy to
278
Gershon. We Came, 70.
279
Ibid.,71.
280
Ibid.,150.
Author’s conversation with Helga Newman, Marie Donner and Stephanie Smith, September 2010.
281
91
be saved and take anything. But real life isn’t like that when you’re eight years old.”282
The testimonies cited above, a mere fraction of the total, challenge the fiction that
because the Kinder were rescued they did not suffer. In sharing the impacts of their
wrenching experiences, the Kinder have proven conclusively that they have not all lived
“happily-ever-after.” Indeed, the losses the Kinder endured are denunciations in their
own right, and their painful individual testimonies are implicit indictments of the policies
that caused them such suffering. In the end, it is not necessary for the Kinder to overtly
confront the British national myth of rescue. Their memories of pain, loss and sorrow are
enough to challenge that myth forever.
10,000 children have 10,000 individual stories, yet their common experiences
provide ample evidence that much of their suffering resulted from separation from their
parents. Although it has become accepted as an incontestable necessity, the official
decree that in order to be saved, the children must come to England alone demands
scrutiny. Karen Gershon’s reflections fifty years after the event that rescued her but not
her parents, fittingly sums up the tragic repercussions of that decree.
I still cannot have much of a relationship with anyone; I still need to struggle
against the feeling that people don’t really matter because my parents were
enslaved and killed as if they did not matter and I cannot see anyone, especially
myself, as mattering more than they did.283
282
Harris and Oppenheimer, 136.
283
Karen Gershon, We Came as Children, reprint edition, (London: Papermac, 1989), preface, n.p.
92
Chapter 4
GOVERNMENT POLICY AND THE KINDERTRANSPORT
I want you to imagine my parents’ predicament, as well as that of
thousands of other parents. Mine had to choose between putting two
young children ages eight and ten, onto a train, knowing only that they
were going to England and might never be seen by them again, or keeping
the children with them, thus hindering their own chance of escape. The
other possibility was for all to be deported to a concentration camp.284
Great Britain’s refusal to loosen its restrictions on the immigration of Jewish refugees
from Nazi controlled lands in the years before the Second World War forced Emmy
Mogilinsky’s parents to make this agonizing Solomonic choice. Instead, the British
Parliament and Home Office agreed only to allow an unspecified number of
unaccompanied children under the age of seventeen to enter, stipulating that there was to
be no drain on the public coffers and that the children would be re-emigrated or
repatriated upon reaching their majority. Limiting its involvement to the waiver of
individual visas for the children, the government ceded all financial and physical
responsibility for the children to the many private organizations, both Jewish and nonJewish, which had pressed for and eventually organized the rescue operation.
The disconnect between the Kindertransport’s conventional portrayal as a
redeeming act of humanitarian rescue by the British government, and the reality of the
traumas reported by the child refugees demands that the policy that gave rise to the
program be evaluated in a more nuanced way. Why did it take so long for Britain to
respond? Why did Britain not allow the families to remain intact and emigrate together?
284
Whiteman, 142.
93
Did the government consider the very real possibility that these families would be
permanently shattered, or the effect that this would have on the children? Was it possible
to have saved even more children? The British Parliamentary debates on immigration and
refugee policy offer many answers to these questions. They also provide considerable
insights into the context in which the Kindertransport took shape and the concerns and
considerations that determined its parameters and outcomes.
Parliament was not ignorant of the numbers of people who wished to leave Nazi
lands, nor were they heedless of the dangers inherent in separating families. Furthermore,
Parliament hewed to the British self-image of generosity to asylum seekers, and
recognized the fact that it possessed a huge empire within which to settle refugees.
Members of Parliament were also aware of the imminence of war and the need for urgent
action on the refugee question. In spite of all this, the British government, constrained by
decades of anti-alienism and antisemitism, combined with Depression-born economic
nativism and an over-reliance on international solutions, was unwilling or unable to
formulate an immigration policy that was fully responsive to the unfolding disaster. The
Kindertransport, a rescue effort that predicated children’s survival on separation from
their parents, reflects a British immigration policy in which national self-interest
triumphed over humanitarian concerns.
British Refugee Policy
Despite a national self-image as a land of refuge, by the late 1920s Britain had ceased to
be a country of immigration. “The ‘right of asylum’ in so far as it exists or ever existed is
94
not a right attaching to an alien, but is a right of a Sovereign State to admit a refugee if it
thinks fit to do so...the question of alien immigration is now indissolubly bound up with
other broad questions of national domestic policy.”285 This 1929 statement, made in
response to a Jewish delegation’s quest for a clarification of British asylum and refugee
policy, definitively articulated what was to become the guiding principle for British
immigration policy in the 1930s. The attitudes about immigration that shaped the
Kindertransport began forming long before Hitler came to power, and by 1938 were
hardened to an extent that prevented the most humanitarian approach from even being
considered, let alone effected.
Less than a month after Hitler came to power, Member of Parliament (MP)
Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, who throughout his Parliamentary career was an unrelenting
advocate for a liberal refugee policy, began questioning the Home Secretary about
relaxing the Aliens Act for refugees from Nazi Germany.286 Passed in 1905 largely in
response to an influx of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe and Russia, the Aliens
Act established the system of immigration officers and port inspections that remained in
place for the next half century. The Aliens Restriction Act and the supplementary 1920
Aliens Order conferred enormous exclusionary latitude on individual immigration
officers and gave almost unlimited power over immigration to the Home Secretary and
285
Tony Kushner and Katherine Knox, Refugees in and Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local
Perspectives during the Twentieth Century, (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 64-65.
286
Hansard, House of Commons v. 274, 21 February 1933, c.1597-8. (Hereafter HHC).
95
his officers. 287 Significantly, this Order also explicitly tied the entry of aliens to the
economic conditions of Great Britain, a stipulation which would have a profound impact
on the 1930s refugee crisis.
The hardening anti-alien sentiment of the 1920s, compounded by the hardships of
the Depression in the 1930s, coincided with rising demands for asylum from the victims
of Nazi persecution. Together these forces favored an increasingly stringent interpretation
of the Aliens Act, guided only by the general principle that “aliens are only allowed to
come in for residence if their settlement here is consonant with the interests of the
country, [which] must predominate over other considerations,” including, presumably,
the preservation of family units.288 England had no official quotas such as existed in the
United States, and this gave the government the maximum amount of maneuverability on
immigration issues. Setting and adjusting firm quotas would have involved legislators
much more directly in immigration policy, but the Home Office wanted to maintain its
sovereignty in this area, fearing that explicit policies would entrap Britain into assuming
greater responsibility for solving the refugee crisis.289 In 1933, the Home Secretary
signaled a policy shift when he stated that economic self-sufficiency was now only one of
the factors immigration officers would take into account when deciding whether to allow
an alien to land, declining to state other factors that might be considered.290 By 1938,
287
London, 16; Kushner and Knox, 5, 25, 73. Only steerage class had to pass a poverty test, but those
who were refused had the right of appeal to the Immigration Board.
288
HHC v. 274, 21 February 1933, c. 1597-8.
289
290
London, 8-10.
HHC v. 276, 12 April 1933, c. 2557-8.
96
Parliamentary refugee advocates were still asking for a definitive refugee policy, but it
remained Whitehall’s sole prerogative to modify and amend immigration policy without
interference from Parliament.291
The imprecision of England’s immigration policy caused consternation to both
those who favored and those who opposed a more humanitarian approach. While some
members of Parliament were certain that the Home Office and its agents at the ports were
interpreting the Aliens Order too strictly in a deliberate effort to exclude Jewish refugees,
others were convinced the government was opening the door far too widely. 292 As the
refugee crisis intensified a significant number in Parliament complained that England had
done almost nothing but rigidly exclude refugees, and that immigration officers” actions
were “high handed and unworthy of the traditions of this country.”293 These concerns
were confirmed when the government, which had dropped visa requirements for Austria
and Germany in 1928, reinstituted them in May 1938.294
Throughout the 1930s, a Parliamentary faction vocally espoused a humanitarian
policy favoring a relaxation of alien restrictions. These champions of an open door
attempted to shame Whitehall into action. The government consistently paid lip service to
the notion that Great Britain was a haven of refuge, giving the bland reassurance that “in
accordance with the time honored tradition of this country no unnecessary obstacles are
291
HHC v. 336, 18 May 1938, c. 379-80.
292
HHC v. 275, 9 March 1933, c. 1351-2.
293
Hansard, House of Lords v. 95, 6 February 1935, c. 837. (Hereafter HHL).
294
HHC v. 335, 3 May 1938, c. 698-9. London, 21.
97
placed in the way of foreigners seeking admission.”295 An unconvinced MP raised his
suspicions. “France has taken something like 17,000 Jewish refugees, and...we have
taken in rather less than 1,000. I fully recognise the tremendous difficulties involved, but
I should like to have an assurance... that the alien regulations are being operated as
generously as possible.”296 MP Josiah Wedgwood warned, “We must not keep them out
of this country. For our honour’s sake we dare not keep them out. We cannot be less
generous than the French.”297
The Home Office, however, sided with the Parliamentary majority who chose
cold reason over what one MP dismissed as “humanitarian sentiment.” “[W]e must...put
out of our minds so much that is humanitarian...If we fly off the handle, moved by
sentiment to break down barriers even for the limited time that is suggested...we are
treading on very dangerous ground.”298 Such arguments set the stage for a policy that
would break up families and bring thousands of unaccompanied children to the United
Kingdom. Home Secretary Samuel Hoare assured Parliament of his desire to maintain
Britain’s tradition of political, racial and religious asylum, but noted the “obvious
objections to any policy of indiscriminate admission.” “Such a policy would... create
difficulties from the police point of view...[and] have grave economic results in
aggravating the unemployment problem, the housing problem and other social problems.
...[I]t is essential to avoid creating an impression that the door is open to immigrants of
295
HHC v. 276, 12 April 1933, c. c. 2557-8.
296
HHC v. 280, 5 July 1933, c. 390-1.
297
HHC v. 333, 22 March 1938, c. 1005.
298
HHC v. 333, 22 March 1938, c. 1007-9.
98
all kinds.”299 Hoare explicitly addressed the economic concerns of housing and
unemployment, but his references to “police difficulties” and “social problems,” alluded
to the specter of antisemitism, which was unquestionably part of the British refusal to
allow unrestricted refugee entry.
The issue of antisemitism appeared in Parliamentary debate in two distinct
contexts. During debates on immigration, some members of Parliament expressed explicit
antisemitic sentiments. Several times in 1933, Conservative MP Edward Doran asked the
Home Secretary whether he was aware “that hundreds of thousands of Jews are now
leaving Germany and scurrying from there to this country?” Further, he inquired that
since “the invasion of undesirable aliens is causing great resentment and anxiety in this
country...cannot he see his way to give them notice to quit before serious trouble
develops?”300 Doran’s hyperbole and his depiction of an “invasion” of “scurrying,”
“undesirable” Jewish refugees, conveys more than a whiff of antisemitism, while his
warning about “serious trouble” developing hints at the specter of anti-Jewish violence.301
The Home Office was careful with such questions from Parliament because it was
officially unacceptable to base British policy upon blatant antisemitism.302 Whenever
MPs asked the Home Office about the number of Jewish refugees who had come into the
country since 1933, the standard evasive answer was that it was not the practice of the
299
HHC v. 333, 22 March 1938, c.991-2.
300
HHC v. 275, 9 March 1933, c. 1352. HHC v. 276, 11 April 1933, c. 2360-1.
One historian went so far as to call Doran “an out-and-out anti-Semite.” Geoffrey Alderman,
Modern British Jewry, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 184.
301
302
London, 276.
99
Home Office “to differentiate between a Jewish and any other foreign immigrant...and
figures are not therefore available.”303 Immigrants had to state their nationality but not
their religion or racial origin, so the Home Office could quite legitimately maintain that it
did not have figures on Jewish migration to Great Britain.304 The Home Office in fact
deliberately refused to compile statistics on the number of Jewish refugees in the country,
making it easier to prevaricate when asked by Parliament or the press about such figures.
Whenever it needed to know, Whitehall could obtain accurate statistics from the Jewish
agencies that dealt with such refugees.305 Reluctance to compile or disclose exact figures
on Jewish immigration reflected Britain’s concerns about the effect of a large influx of
Jews on the British populace.
The British government held what they believed to be well-founded fears that a
large influx of Jewish refugees would arouse antisemitic feelings in the population at
large. Edward Doran’s suggestion that undesirable aliens caused resentment and anxiety
spoke to that very fear, and gave credence to the widely held assumption that
antisemitism was, at least in part, caused by Jews themselves.306 Fomenting an
antisemitic backlash in Great Britain was something that both the government and the
303
HHC v. 310, 19 March 1936, c.592.
304
HHC v. 358, 5 March 1940, c. 221-2. Since almost all the refugees seeking entry from Germany
and Austria in the 1930s were Jewish, however, the answer was disingenuous, and figures on national
origin would certainly have yielded a reasonably accurate total of Jewish immigrants.
305
London, 9.
306
HHC v. 276, 11 April 1933, c. 2360-1.
100
Anglo-Jewish community were anxious to avoid.307 For its part, the government was
wary after the rise of the British Union of Fascists under former MP Oswald Mosley in
the early 1930s and of outbreaks of antisemitic violence, such as the Cable Street Riot in
1936.308 They firmly adhered to the calculus that more Jews would lead to more
antisemitic unrest. Lord Marley stated the belief without equivocation when he noted that
“where a large number of...refugees are Jews you also get growing up Anti-Semitism
which causes...such immense misery and suffering.”309 In a major 1938 speech on
refugee issues, the Home Secretary warned, “there is an underlying current of suspicion
and anxiety ...about alien immigration on any big scale. It is a fact...that below the
surface... there is the making of a definite anti-Jewish movement. ...That is...why I have
to... be careful to avoid...anything in the nature of mass immigration.”310 Unaccompanied
Jewish children, presumably, were less likely to arouse such anxieties and suspicions.
Fears about arousing antisemitism had an impact on all aspects of the refugee
issue. The core concern may have had as much to do with British fears over upsetting
social homogeneity, as it did with explicitly antisemitic feelings.311 The Jews were widely
perceived as a distinctly alien group, and fears about any kind of ethnic or religious
diversity were heightened in countries that had little cultural heterogeneity in the
307
London, 38-9. See Chapter 4 below for a more complete discussion of this issue.
308
Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, (London: MacMillan, 1981), 393-402.
309
HHL v. 95, 6 February 935, c. 823-4.
310
HHC v. 341, 21 November 1938, c 1468.
311
London, 277-281.
101
1930s.312 The important thing to note is that the government tethered its immigration
policies to an unquestioning belief in the populace’s anti-Jewish feelings despite evidence
to the contrary.313 The British government also feared that, not only Germany and
Austria, but Poland and other countries would be encouraged to expel their Jewish
populations if they knew countries like Great Britain were willing to open their doors.314
The number of potential Jewish refugees from those countries alarmed Parliament and the
government’s unwillingness to liberalize immigration on this account reflects economic
concerns as well as nativism. Any analysis of British responses to the refugee crisis, must
consider antisemitic factors, but always within the context of other issues.
Depression-related economic anxieties dominated the Parliamentary debate about
immigration throughout the 1930s. Unemployment was the most frequently cited
justification for keeping refugees out. Fears about a flood of aliens while 3,000,00three
million were unemployed in Britain were met with the assurance that the government
gave “no consent to employment ...unless it is clear that no displacement of British
subjects will result.”315 Despite these assurances, MPs continued to question whether
British men were losing their jobs to competition from refugees.316 Unemployment, the
de facto bar to immigration, was an issue that cut across party lines. MPs responded to
the economic hardships of their constituents, and unemployment concerns had an
312
Ibid., 277.
313
Ibid., 14-5.
314
Ibid., 87.
315
HHC v. 281, 16 November 1933, c. 1132-1133.
316
HHC v. 281, 16 November 1933, c. 1094-5.
102
enormous impact on the decision to admit only children and not their working-age
parents.
Parliament and the Home Office also resisted using public money to support
refugees or the agencies that helped them. Jewish community organizations established
the precedent of financially supporting refugees in early 1933. In exchange for what they
hoped would be a more liberal open door, they promised that no refugee would become a
burden on public funds, and that the Jewish community would provide for the refugee’s
maintenance and transmigration.317 Accustomed to this arrangement, members of
Parliament often responded to requests for funding of refugee initiatives with questions
such as “Why should we give away public money on these refugees from other
countries?” and “Should not our own unemployed come before these refugees?”318 The
fact that refugees were increasingly forced to leave their homelands penniless detracted
further from their desirability. After Germany’s 1938 annexation of the Sudetenland, the
Chancellor of the Exchequer reiterated the principle that the maintenance of refugees in
England was “a matter for voluntary contributions and is not an object to which it would
be proper to appropriate public funds. I can hold out no hope of an exception to this
principle being made in the present case.”319 This strong aversion to the use of public
317
London, 28-9.
318
HHC v. 336, 23 May 1938, c 835-6.
319
HHC v. 340, Ibid., c. 379-80. In fact, the British government allocated a £10,000,000 loan to
Czechoslovakia for the maintenance and settlement of refugees from the Sudetenland. Chamberlain also
announced that the government had authorized the temporary admission of 350 Czech refugees to the UK
to which Miss Rathbone promptly inquired, ‘Why only 350?” HHC v. 340, 1 November 1938, c. 76-79.
103
funds for the benefit of refugees would have a profoundly limiting effect on the scope
and operation of the Kindertransport.
The solutions to the refugee crisis that emerged from the Evian conference in July
1938 were mere reaffirmations of existing British responses. The first “solution” was the
wholly financial one of pressuring Germany to allow emigrants to keep their assets.
Typifying Parliamentary hand wringing over this issue, one MP opined, “It is perfectly
clear that no thickly-populated country can be expected to accept persons who are
deprived of their means of subsistence before they arrive.”320 Another MP suggested a
deal with Hitler:
[W]e have to say..."We appreciate that you wish to get rid of some hundreds of
thousands of your people. We will help you, but you must...play your part...[and]
allow each individual to take a percentage of his property with him." That makes
it... so much easier to deal with public opinion... [There is]...the danger of
raising...anti-Semitic feeling, unless this question is handled tactfully...321
Aside from the jarring suggestion that Britain “appreciated” that Hitler wished to rid
himself of hundreds of thousands of Jews, this MP also implied that penniless Jewish
refugees created antisemitism. For the Kindertransport refugees, the ramifications of
such thinking were enormous: if the parents had to leave Nazi lands penniless, then they
were not welcome.
In seeking a global response to the refugee crisis, the thorniest issue for Britain
was the capability of the Commonwealth to absorb refugees who sought asylum. While it
was the accepted wisdom by 1938 that Great Britain could not, because of its “vast
320
HHL v. 110, 27 July 1938, c.1243-4.
321
HHC v. 338, 29 July 1938, c. 3557-8.
104
figures of unemployment” take a large number of refugees, many in Parliament agreed
that settlement was possible on “those large undeveloped tracts of the British Empire
which are hungering for development.”322 Following Evian, the House of Lords noted
“We are the owners...of one quarter of the whole of the earth’s surface, and we [must]...
think of how we can collaborate internationally to use that vast area to meet [the refugee]
problem.”323 However, Great Britain had no jurisdiction over the Dominions of Canada,
Australia and New Zealand and could not compel them to take refugees.324 Consideration
was given to British Guiana and other African possessions, but in each case impediments
such as climatic conditions and the sensitivities of native populations lead to the
conclusion that “there is no territory in the Colonial Empire where any large-scale
settlement is practicable.”325 Despite its resources, and despite making a show of finding
a solution, Great Britain did not have the will to embrace a radical large-scale resolution
to the refugee crisis of the 1930s.
In seeking a place for Jewish refugees outside the UK, Parliamentary debate
focused most frequently on Britain’s mandate, Palestine, where the British had promised
the Jews an eventual homeland. Responding to calls in 1933 for throwing the doors of
Palestine open to Jewish settlement, the government made it very clear that the same
rules applied there as in Great Britain itself: immigration was “governed by the economic
HHC v. 338, 29 July 1938, c. 3553-4. “We have always boasted that we hold these vast territories,
not...for our own selfish ends, but as the trustees of a civilised world.”
322
323
HHC v. 338, 29 July 1938, c. 3557-8, also, HHL v.110, 27, c. 1229-30.
324
HHC v.110, 27, c. 1245-6.
325
HHC v. 333, 30 March 1938, c. 1984-5.
105
absorptive capacity of the country.”326 From this position, the government never wavered.
The issue was more than one of mere economic absorption though, since the British were
engaged in maintaining a delicately balanced relationship between the Jews and the
Arabs in Palestine. One of the few truly innovative solutions to the refugee problem that
Parliament considered in the pre-war period, was a 1938 proposal to give Palestinian
passports to all European Jews who had been stripped of their native citizenship. “They
would then become...protected persons under the Mandate and freemen of a State.” 327
The bill was defeated over the concern of “adding...to Arab fears without doing the Jews
the slightest good.”328 Once again, fears of arousing antisemitism and economic concerns
won the day.
Britain’s complicated relationship with Palestine is an enormous subject in its
own right, but it did bear upon domestic immigration in significant ways. Palestine
absorbed about 170,000 Jewish refugees from 1933 to 1939, the majority arriving before
1937.329 While quotas were anathema for British domestic immigration, they were finally
applied to Palestine in response to Arab concerns about Jewish immigration. A White
Paper in May 1939 set the quota at 10,000 settlers per year over the succeeding five years
and an additional 25,000 refugees, “as soon as the High Commissioner [of the League of
Nations] is satisfied that adequate provision for their maintenance is ensured, special
326
HHC v. 276, 3 April 1933, c. 1420-1.
327
HHC v. 334, 12 April 1938, c. 943-5.
328
HHC v. 334, 12 April 1938, c. 945-6.
329
HHC v. 389 19 May 1943, c. 1151-2. See also London, 95. Bernard Wasserstein quotes a figure of
215,232 in the same period, with at least 74,000 from Poland. Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of
Europe 1939-1945. 2nd ed.. (London: Leicester University Press, 1999), 11.
106
consideration being given to refugee children and dependents.”330 The intervention of war
a few months later precluded the fulfilling of even a tiny portion of this quota. Palestine’s
mere existence as a potential haven for Jewish refugees meant that debate over its
possible use for refugees occupied the entire pre-war period. Palestine always promised
the hope of a solution, while simultaneously enabling Great Britain to maintain its
tightfisted control over domestic immigration.
Despite its inaction, by mid-1938, Parliament was well aware of the precarious
position of Jews and their children in Nazi-controlled lands. In a debate on Austria’s
refugee crisis, one MP informed the House that in Austria, “no fewer than 85,000 [Jews]
have already registered as desiring to find refuge and homes elsewhere. ...[S]ome 18,000
are children whose future, if they remain, is an absolute blank.”331 This was the moment
to get those endangered children and their families out of Nazi Europe, but Parliament
and the government failed to act. By the time the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 910, 1938 finally roused the British Parliament and Home Office into action, it was too
late to do more than apply emergency measures. They had squandered the opportunity to
save tens of thousands of Jewish children and their parents from an awful fate.
Kristallnacht and the Kindertransport
Parliament discussed the events of Kristallnacht for the first time on November 14,
demonstrating that they finally understood the severity of the situation. The indomitable
330
331
Wasserstein, 18.
HHC v. 338, 29 July 1938, c. 3556-7.
107
Colonel Wedgwood took the opportunity to ask the Prime Minister yet again, “Can we do
nothing for the refugees by allowing them to come either into this country or into
Palestine? Cannot [the] Government show the feeling of this country by attempting to do
something for the victims of this oppression in Germany?”332 The Prime Minister refused
to answer “without notice.”333 However, MP George Lansbury finally asked the question
that that had been scrupulously avoided for the previous five years.
Would it not be possible to...find some place in the British Commonwealth...for
these people, considering how relatively few the numbers are in Germany—
500,000, I understand, all of them, men, women and children? Is it impossible to
say to the world, "Great Britain will take them and find them a place to start
afresh in life"?334
That the question was posed in Parliament indicates that it was not unimaginable to save
all the Jews who now wished to leave Germany and Austria. What was lacking was the
government’s political will to do so. The Prime Minister responded with the usual
platitudes, sidestepping any responsibility for solving the refugee crisis. “That is not a
matter for the British Government, as the right hon. Gentleman realises, but I have no
doubt we shall be taking into consideration any possible way by which we can assist
these people.”335 Parliament, reflecting public opinion, had signaled its willingness to act.
332
HHC v, 341, 14 November 1938, c. 504-6. Kristallnacht is the term for the pogrom that occurred
November 9-10, 1938 across Nazi Germany and Austria which destroyed Jewish synagogues and property
and resulted in thousands of arrests. The event shocked the world and was instrumental in changing British
minds about the threat to Jews in Nazi occupied Europe.
333
HHC v, 341, 14 November 1938, c. 504-6.
334
HHC v, 341, 14 November 1938, c. 504-6. Emphasis added by author.
335
HHC v, 341, 14 November 1938, c. 504-6.
108
In the following week Whitehall, perhaps sensing that the time had come to make a
liberalizing gesture in immigration policy, responded.
Since the Home Office exercised complete control over amendments to
immigration policy, the Kindertransport depended upon the tenacious advocacy and the
deal-making offers of Anglo-Jewish leaders. On November 15, leaders of the Jewish
community met with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and pressed the case for
easing temporary entry including the urgent admission of children up to age seventeen on
the basis of “education and training” and ultimate re-emigration. Although Chamberlain
was initially non-committal, he took the deputation’s ideas to the full Cabinet the
following day.336 The most reluctant member was the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare,
but even he was eventually persuaded that public opinion favored a more generous
response by the Home Office. Although Hoare was wary of making promises about mass
or permanent settlement, he was prepared to relax restrictions on transmigrants, including
unaccompanied child refugees.337
Two and a half hours into a very intense House of Commons debate on “Racial,
Religious and Political Minorities” the program known as the Kindertransport was born.
The Home Secretary made the announcement.
Lord Samuel and a number of other[s]... came to me with a very interesting
proposal about the non-Aryan children...I believe that we could find homes in this
country for a very large number without any harm to our own population. The[y]
...would be prepared to bring over here all the children whose maintenance could
be guaranteed, either by their funds or by generous individuals, and...all that...the
Home Office [needs to do is] to give the necessary visas and to facilitate their
336
London, 100-105.
337
Ibid., 104-105.
109
entry into this country. I told Lord Samuel, without a moment’s hesitation, that
the Home Office would certainly be prepared to provide facilities of that
kind...Here is a chance of taking the young generation of a great people, here is a
chance of mitigating to some extent the terrible sufferings of their parents and
their friends.338
Treading carefully around issues of finance and “harm to our own population” Hoare
managed to sound magnanimous, when it was clear that the government’s role was
actually quite minimal. What was less clear is Hoare’s apparent belief that forcing
families to make the wrenching decision to send their children into the homes of strangers
would mitigate their “terrible sufferings.” It is also worth noting that not one member of
the government considered including the families in the “rescue” plan. Revealingly, after
Hoare’s announcement in Parliament the debate continued with no further comment on
the child admission proposal. Once it was clear that British taxpayers would not be
encumbered with any financial liability for the children’s rescue scheme, the lawmakers
raised no further objections that night. In any case, since the Home Office had complete
jurisdiction over such an offer, it was pointless for Parliament to demur, for it was a fait
accompli.
Hoare was not immune to the parents’ plight, however, and he acknowledged it in
the same speech. It is important to note that the Home Secretary himself recognized the
wrenching choice his seemingly humane proposal created for parents. “I could not help
thinking what a terrible dilemma it was to the Jewish parents in Germany to have to
choose between sending their children to a foreign country, into the unknown, and
continuing to live in the terrible conditions to which they are now reduced in
338
HHC v. 341, 21 November 1938, c.1473-5. Emphasis added by author.
110
Germany.”339 Hoare had received assurances from Quakers working with Jewish
agencies in Germany who told him that “Jewish parents were almost unanimously in
favour of facing this parting with their children and taking the risks of their children
going to a foreign country, rather than keeping them with them to face the unknown
dangers with which they are faced in Germany.”340 Although this information may have
salved the lawmakers’ consciences, they seemed oblivious to the reality that this “terrible
dilemma” was not imposed on those Jewish parents by Germany, but by the English
government. Hoare’s sympathetic tone belies the harsh reality that after their children’s
rescue, the parents would continue to face the dangers to which he alluded. His words
carried no hint that the other option—allowing the families to come to England
together—had even been considered. The assumption that the British government had no
other choice than to bring unaccompanied children to England emanated from Hoare’s
framing of the issue and was reinforced in later public discussion of the Kindertransport.
Parliament and Child Migration
The issue of separating families was not a new one to Parliament. Several members of
Parliament made specific references to the hardships that immigration posed for Jewish
families, emphasizing the unique strength of Jewish family bonds. In a 1936 debate about
immigration to Palestine, one MP noted, “the admission of relatives... is being made more
difficult. There are two reasons why I think that very unfortunate, one is the very strong
339
HHC v. 341, 21 November 1938, c.1473-5.
340
HHC v. 341, 21 November 1938, c.1473-5.
111
family ties which exist in Jewish families; they feel the severance of the family tie
enormously.”341 In July 1938, the Marquees of Reading, a prominent Jewish politician,
demonstrated full awareness of the dangers of separating children and parents.
Jews...have a strong sense of family life. Yet you have now the spectacle of
parents begging that their children may be taken away from them, realising that
they themselves cannot get out of the country, begging...that their family life may
be shattered, so that at least their children may be enabled to start a fresh life,
albeit in a strange land where they will lack the guidance and protection of their
parents just at the age when they are most in need of them.342
Despite his sympathy for the Viennese parents, Reading did not suggest that Great Britain
ought to alleviate the suffering of the Viennese Jews or their children. Along with nearly
all in Parliament, he automatically accepted the notion that the parents were trapped and
that there was nothing that the British government could do for them.
The apologia that because child psychology was little understood at the time and
the British government and people could not have foreseen the consequences of
separating families is refuted by the evidence. A newspaper reported that during the
Kindertransport debate Parliament specified that the children “should be between the
ages of 5 and 17. It is thought that those under five should not be taken from their
parents.”343 Although no such stipulation had been made, it is noteworthy that the
reporter felt the need to reassure the British public that very young children would not be
subjected to the trauma of separation from their parents.
341
HHC v. 310, 24 March 1936, c. 1100-01.
342
HHL v. 110, 27 July 1938, c. 1231-2.
“Thousands of German Jewish Children Coming Here: Offered English Homes,” Evening News,
November 22, 1938.
343
112
Even more compelling are the Parliamentary debates concerning the migration of
unaccompanied children to the Dominions, a different program that had distinct parallels
to the Kindertransport. A “Settlement of Empire,” debate in 1937 revealed that
Parliament was fully cognizant of the dangers inherent in such schemes. Discussing the
out-migration of children under state care to the Dominions, one MP stated,
I believe family migration to be by far the best form of migration... I do not wish
to encourage the shoveling of little children overseas. ..These Poor Law children
are of equal importance as human beings as our own children, and we ought to
take as much care of them....In many cases these children will not be treated as
members of the family....[I]t is a detestable and inhuman suggestion. I do not
believe these young children...should be carried overseas and left to the mercies
of people there. I do not say all of them are badly treated...but many of them are
mere drudges, and I do not intend...to enable such a thing...again.344
The situation under debate here was closely analogous to the Kindertransport. Besides
advocating strongly for keeping families intact, this MP freely admitted that the Poor
Law children he mentioned had no parental protection and were at the mercy of the
placement abroad, which often resulted in the child becoming a mere servant, not a
member of the family. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that if “Jewish” were
substituted for “Poor Law,” the statement would accurately describe the Kindertransport.
Like the poor children of Britain sent to Canada and Australia, many of the Kinder were
deprived of warm family relationships and treated as “mere drudges” in their new homes.
344
HHC v. 319, 25 January 1937, c. 606-10. Interestingly, both the governments of Australia and
Great Britain have in the past year formally apologized to these former child migrants and their families for
the mistreatment they received after their removal from Great Britain. See, John F. Burns, “Apology Opens
Wounds of British Migrant Program ,” New York Times, November 9, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com
/2009 /11/23/world/23children.html (accessed November 10, 2009); “UK apologizes over 'shameful' child
migration program” CNN World, February 10, 2010, http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/02/24/
uk.child .migrant.apology/index.html (accessed March 2, 2010). The Canadian government has not joined
Australia and the U.K in apologizing to the forcibly migrated children.
113
There were also precedents in Great Britain for offering refuge to children and
families threatened by war. When Hoare announced the Kindertransport scheme in
Parliament, he mentioned one of these precedents in his opening remarks. “Lord Samuel
and...other Jewish and...religious workers...pointed back to the experience during the war,
in which we gave homes here to many thousands of Belgian children, in which they were
educated, and in which we played an invaluable part in maintaining the life of the Belgian
nation.”345 Here Hoare was engaging in a bit of historical revisionism, for it was not a
child rescue scheme but a virtual open door for Belgians, a quarter of a million of whom,
men, women and children, were allowed into Britain as refugees during the Great War.
The War Refugees Committee oversaw their care and upkeep. Putatively a voluntary
organization, it was largely, if quietly, state funded.346 How different it would have been
for the Kinder and their families had the Belgian rescue operation actually been used as a
model for their own rescue. Had Britain demonstrated the same will to rescue German
and Austrian Jewish families in 1938 as it had in rescuing Belgians in 1914, it would
have found the numbers of refugees in both cases roughly the same. Had they thus kept
families intact and furthermore undertaken to finance the scheme with state funds, Hoare
could then have rightly claimed the Belgian experience as model for the later rescue
operation. As it was, the two programs bore only superficial similarities with one another.
Although the Belgian refugee program differed from the Kindertransport in
almost every way, it did represent a precedent of sorts. Hoare was not prevaricating when
345
HHC v. 341, 21 November 1938, c. 1473-4.
346
Kushner and Knox, 48-49.
114
he suggested that the Belgian children were encouraged to maintain the life of the
Belgian nation. Belgian native language and culture were preserved, largely through the
policy of allowing asylum to whole families who were much more likely to maintain and
affirm the native customs and tongue. In contrast, the imperative to assimilate quickly
meant that most of the German and Czech speaking children of the Kindertransport
quickly suppressed or lost their native language and customs.347 The British did have an
ulterior motive in preserving Belgian cultural integrity, for they regarded the Belgians as
alien temporary residents and wanted to limit their assimilation, ensuring that they would
willingly return home at the end of the war.348 The friendly treatment of the Belgians only
extended so far, however, and many regulations constricted their lives in England.349
Having to register with the police, enduring restrictions on domicile and travel, and
facing the persistent feeling of being a foreigner were common experiences of both
Belgian and Kindertransport refugees, and about 1000 Kinder were subject to internment
as enemy aliens.350
The other precedent, the temporary rescue of Spanish children during the Civil
War of 1936 to 1939, was a bona fide child refugee scheme, but it differed from the
347
Ibid., 62. The first recommendation in Do’s and Don’t’s for Refugees, was “Don’t talk German in
the streets, in public places, or any place where others may hear you.” Central Office for Refugees, Do’s
and Don’t’s for Refugees, (London: Bloomsbury House, n.d.)
348
Ibid.
349
Ibid., 61.
Refugee Children’s Movement, Second Annual Report:1940, (London: Bloomsbury House, 1941),
3.(Hereafter SAR) 6. A discussion of the interment of Kindertransportees is beyond the scope of this study,
but it is well documented in individual memoirs, the collective autobiographies, and by Turner, Bentwich
and others.
350
115
Kindertransport program in scope, intent and outcome. After the bombing of Guernica,
Parliament pressed Neville Chamberlain to help the innocents caught in the maelstrom.
The situation was politically delicate, for Great Britain had opted for non-intervention;
however the rescue of children was seen as suitably humanitarian to win approval of
Parliament.351 Though not underwritten by public funds, four thousand Basque children
aged five to fifteen, were quickly brought to England and housed in “colonies” created
especially for them, rather than in private homes. The Spanish authorities took a keen
interest in their welfare and insisted they retain their language, culture and religion. 352
The experience of the Belgian and Basque children differed markedly from that of the
Kindertransportees who lacked the support of home country representatives to look after
their interests and who were robbed of the possibility of repatriation to families and
homeland. Split up among thousands of private homes, small group hostels and schools,
most of the Kindertransportees were actively discouraged from retaining their language
and customs and many were deprived of the companionship and camaraderie of other
refugees.
After the war began, Parliament contemplated another child migration scheme
that also bears comparison to the Kindertransport. Aimed at removing English children
from the dangers of bombardment and possible invasion, the government would ship, at
state expense, an unspecified number of children aged five to fifteen to the Dominions of
the parents’ choice. The state would pay for war widows to accompany their children,
351
Ibid., 105-9.
352
Ibid., 108.
116
and the government stipulated further that “a mother or an adult, who has a child, can
obtain permission to go overseas, if they go as fare-payers, and make their own shipping
arrangements.”353 This scheme differed from the Kindertransport in the critical respect
that at least the English parents were given the option of remaining with their children.
Interestingly, in the course of debate over this plan, several MPs showed concern about
the children becoming “excessively homesick,” a concern not even once voiced in
relation to the refugees from Nazi Germany.354 This evacuation program related to the
Kindertransport in another telling way. When the proposals were announced in
Parliament in 1940, the ever-vigilant Colonel Wedgwood asked whether “the children of
German Jews in this country are included in the benefits of the Dominions evacuation
scheme?” The Dominion Affairs representative replied, “No, Sir. The scheme applies
only to the children of Allied refugees.”355 Apparently, generosity to the Kindertransport
children extended only so far. At many junctures, the British government gave evidence
that it understood the distress and suffering attendant upon children’s separation from
their families, but rarely were those concerns acted upon in dealings with the Jewish
refugee children.
353
HHC v. 362, 2 July 1940, c. 699-760.
354
HHC v. 362, 2 July 1940, c 804-5.
355
HHC v. 362, 25 June 1940, c. 277-9.
117
Parliament and the Kinder
In the days after the announcement of the Kindertransport, Parliamentarians questioned
the scheme and debated its details. Not surprisingly, most of the questions dealt with
finance. Some proponents argued for contributing pound for pound to the aid
organizations for maintenance of the children.356 The Minister responded by citing the
Evian maxim that, “[g]overnments of the countries of refuge and settlement should not
assume any obligations for the financing of involuntary emigration.”357 MP William
Shaw, one of the most vocal opponents of the Kindertransport, asked what educational
arrangements were being made for the refugee children and “whether the cost is to be
borne by the Treasury, local authorities, or by the people making themselves responsible
for the children?”358 Shaw was probably not pleased when the Education Minister
confirmed that the education costs of those refugee children who enrolled in state schools
would be borne by the local school boards.359 Shaw’s continued deprecation of the
Kindertransport prompted several MPs to request that such questions be discouraged
“[i]n the interests of the good name of this country.”360.
Other issues of pressing concern to those monitoring the program were
remigration and employment. Some MPs obviously viewed the Kindertransport as a kind
356
HHC v. 341, 24 November 1938, c. 1928-30.
357
HHC v. 341, 24 November 1938, c. 1928-30
358
HHC v. 342, 28 November 1938, c. 21-22.
359
HHC v. 342, 28 November 1938, c. 21-22.
360
HHC v. 341, 24 November 1938 c. 1928-30. On another occasion, Shaw was criticized for
suggesting “that these refugee children should be excluded because they might become a charge to the
British Treasury; and is it not time that this disgraceful suggestion should cease to be repeated in the
interest of the good name of this House?”
118
of Trojan Horse, and questioned the government’s ability to keep track of the children
and make certain they left at “a fixed age.”361 The skeptics were assured that the refugee
children were in the country purely for education, were not permitted to work in
“ordinary employment,” and would be re-emigrated once their education or training was
complete.362 Those who disliked the entire idea were concerned about the children
eventually becoming permanent residents, and there were questions about naturalization.
Once again, the Home Secretary attempted to dampen those fears by assuring those
members that since the children were all to be re-emigrated, “the question of their
naturalisation does not arise.”363 Members who continued to express reservations about
the scheme and its effects were reminded that “there is a very great deal of public
sympathy with these unfortunate children.”364 Public sympathy, which did translate into
donations of money and homes, unfortunately could not make up for the separation of the
children from their families and homes.
Finances and re-emigration became critical issues as the children’s transports
continued to arrive and the aid agencies exhausted their resources. Not only was the
number of children who could come to England reduced, it triggered a reevaluation of the
whole notion of the children’s re-emigration when they reached eighteen years of age. In
March 1939, the Home Secretary announced that the RCM was financially struggling and
that it was now necessary for the Movement to find guarantors who would pay £50-£100
361
HHC v. 341, 24 November 1938 c. 1928-9.
362
HHC v. 341, 24 November 1938 c. 1928-30.
363
HHC v. 342, 8 December 1938, c. 1345-6.
364
HHC v. 342, 8 December 1938, c. 1347-8. .
119
for the child’s maintenance, education and emigration when he/she reached eighteen.365
Colonel Wedgwood complained about the financial hardship this considerable sum
placed upon those who sincerely wanted to sponsor children and the effects of this
financing plan on the possibility of bringing in more children.
While arguing against forced re-emigration, Wedgewood also broached the
delicate issue of formalizing the relationship between foster families and child refugees.
[T]he people who want really to adopt the children lose all pleasure in doing
so...[when] the children are to be sent off to ...some other country. That is not
what these people want. They want somebody who will be with them in their old
age, when ties of affection have grown up. Why should these children be
compelled to re-emigrate?366
This speech was significant in several respects. Wedgwood called into question the
original criteria of re-emigration for the Kindertransportees and acknowledged, at least
implicitly, that these children were likely to be in England for a very long time, perhaps
even becoming orphans. Additionally, some of the families who had taken in children
had evidently developed bonds with them, and MPs continued to openly discuss
adoption, even before the war broke out. “[I]f...those who have taken [a child] up desire
to make it their child...there should be some legal machinery by which such a thing could
be possible.”367 This contention shows quite clearly that some MPs, believing these
365
HHC v. 345, 17 March 1939, c.1987-8. This figure represents a current value of at least 2,0004,000 GBP, a substantial financial burden for all but the wealthy to bear.
HHC v. 345, 6 April 1939, c. 3062-3. Wedgwood continued, “We have a falling birth rate, and we
have an urgent need for men, and yet we are doing our best to keep out children and able-bodied men from
Germany.”
366
367
HHL v. 113, 5 July 1939, c. 1033-4.
120
children to have permanently severed ties with their families, ought now be absorbed into
British society.
The tone of the debate about the children changed as war became imminent,
causing a reevaluation of the entire Kindertransport raison d”etre. The children were no
longer viewed merely as temporary visitors upon whom to lavish British hospitality, but
potential future assets to the nation. Lord Derwent, taking the long view of the benefits of
the immigration program suggested that though it was a “thorny issue,” it might be
advantageous to admit children as permanent citizens. “In view of the declining
birthrate… such stock might be a real acquisition to the country.”368 Britain’s falling
birthrate was a continuing concern throughout the period that Parliament was also
discussing immigration liberalization.
If the failing birthrate was such a concern, it begs the question why the Home
Office was simultaneously denying entry to thousands of young Jewish families.
Derwent’s added qualification might explain this inconsistency. “I have so far been
principally thinking of Aryan immigrants, but... in view of...the failure of the Evian
Conference [we have] this golden opportunity of satisfying our own glaring needs from
the need of these very unfortunate people.”369 The implicit antisemitism in these remarks,
as well as the slightly unpleasant characterization of the children as a kind of commodity
upon which the nation could capitalize casts an even longer shadow over the
government’s decision, enacted with Parliament’s acquiescence, to exclude the families
368
HHL v. 113, 5 July 1939, c. 1033-4.
369
HHL v. 113, 5 July 1939, c. 1049-50.
121
of these children. National self-interest, not humanitarian compassion, provided the basis
for Derwent’s argument. In any event, his suggestions were moot. With the advent of
war, Great Britain suspended all immigration and the 9,354 children who had already
arrived under the auspices of the Movement constituted the entirety of the children’s
transport program.
The question of whether it was possible to have saved even more children remains
unanswered. When the Home Secretary announced the program, he was scrupulous in
avoiding mention of specific numbers of children. He would only say that numbers would
“depend on the capacity of voluntary organizations to provide for their support”370
Certainly the government’s adamant refusal to contribute to the finances of the RCM or
other aid agencies had the most constricting effect on the number of children who could
be brought to England. This restriction was further exacerbated by the imposition of the
£50-100 cash guarantee that was required after March 1939. However, money was not
the only limiting factor. While the Home Secretary announced that visas had been waived
for the children, he did not mention the cumbersome process by which the children
obtained the passes they needed to enter a British port. Health certificates, photos, and
other documentation had to be exchanged overseas twice before the permits were in
order. Faced with this bureaucratic tangle, the underfunded and understaffed aid agencies
were unable to bring even half the children on their lists to England.371
370
HHC v. 342, 28 November 1938, c. 18-22.
For a description of these problems see Trevor Chadwick’s account in Gershon, We Came, 22-25
and Sybil Oldfield, “’It is Usually She’: The Role of British Women in the Rescue and Care of the
Kindertransport Kinder,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23, no. 1 (2004).
371
122
Once England was at war, there was a dramatic change in the status of the refugee
children in regards to both work and citizenship. No longer were they viewed with
suspicion as potential competitors for scarce jobs, but increasingly considered as valuable
assets in the workforce. One MP expounded upon this revised assessment:
[T]here is absolutely no reason why these [refugee] children of school
age...should not be British subjects permanently to the enrichment of this
country.... it is the duty of the Minister of Labour to...do something ... regarding
the employment...and the future of refugee children in this country.372
Lawmakers also began to reassess the issue of granting the Kindertransportees
citizenship. Recognizing the reality that the children were becoming Anglicized, an MP
summarized the children’s new status as permanent residents: “We ought...to look
forward to the acquisition of British citizenship by refugee children who...will have been
five, six or seven years in this country, and...will hardly remember the country of their
birth, and will have no tie of sentiment...to it. They will make admirable citizens.”373
It became clear after February 1940 that the government would have to step in to
underwrite the refugee program. The voluntary organizations were out of money and war
meant that the children were in England for the foreseeable future. The government
eventually assumed the cost of maintaining these newly acquired young citizens. In 1940,
Parliament voted to provide £27,000 per month to the relief agencies who maintained
their primary role in supervising the children’s placements, and from October 1941, the
RCM survived on a “Grant-In-Aid” from the government covering seventy-five percent
372
HHL v. 113, 5 July 1939, c. 1047-8.
373
HHC v. 357, 22 February 1940, c. 1644-5.
123
of its costs and additional monies for the maintenance of the children. 374 In 1944, the
Guardianship Act installed the Chairman of the RCM, Lord Gorell, as the children’s legal
guardian, and finally, in 1947, the refugee children, now young adults, were offered
expedited naturalization.375 The Kinder who remained in Britain were quietly absorbed
into English society, and disappeared from the pages of Parliamentary debate.
Postwar Parliamentary Perspectives
The conviction that Parliament had responded nobly and irreproachably to the refugee
crisis was briefly challenged at the end of the war. As the dimensions of the Holocaust
were gradually revealed to a horrified English public, the government’s humanitarian
failures in the 1930s, when much more could have been done to save Europe’s Jews,
were magnified. One MP pointedly summarized these failures and their consequences.
During the Hitler persecution...energetic efforts were made to find some place of
refuge...to which the Jews of Germany, Austria...might go...There was
unanimity...on two points: first, that the Jews should be given a place of refuge
somewhere; and, secondly, that it should be somewhere else…[after] ten years of
International Conferences, Committees and Commissioners...out of that vast
reservoir of misery and murder only a tiny trickle of escape was provided. Ten
years of talk with the minimum of action...You will ... understand, therefore, the
bitterness...to-day among the...Jewish people...when they remember that...at the
time of the effort to exterminate the Jews in Europe, tens of thousands, and
probably hundreds of thousands, might have found their way into Palestine and so
saved their lives, but in fact were kept where they were for the gas chambers or
for death from starvation.376
HHC v. 365, 7 November 1940, c 1512-13. Refugee Children’s Movement, Third Annual Report
1941-42, (London: Bloomsbury House, 1942), 1-2.
374
375
Gottlieb, 131-133.
376
HHL, vol. 138, col, 499, 10 Dec. 1945.
124
The speaker, Viscount Herbert Samuel, had had a long career in government, including
High Commissioner to Palestine (1920-5) and Home Secretary (1931-2).377 In Parliament
and on behalf of the CBF he had argued doggedly but fruitlessly throughout the 1930s for
a loosening of immigration restrictions on Jewish refugees, and had been a vital supporter
of the Kindertransport program. Samuel was affirming what this Colonial Office official
had articulated years earlier, “I don’t know what is wrong with the colonial Empire, but
its absorptive capacity seems to be nil.”378
The immediate postwar period was a critical moment in terms of what Tony
Kushner calls “heritage construction.”379 Would the British face up to the shortcomings
of its refugee and immigration policies and confess to the injuries such policies had
caused 10,000 children, or would it retreat into comforting myths of heroic response? The
government was now faced with the grim truth that most of the desperate Jews who had
tried in vain to leave Germany and Austria before the war, including the parents of a
majority of the Kinder, were now dead. Samuel’s condemnation exposed unpalatable
truths and challenged the sense of national purpose that had been cultivated in Britain
during the Second World War. It now had a chance to atone for its decidedly
parsimonious response to the refugee crisis of the 1930s.
Britain’s self-image of moral and political exceptionalism, however, was much
more compatible with the safe and comforting story of helpless children magnanimously
377
Gottlieb, 64.
378
Wasserstein, 42.
379
Kushner, Remembering, 145.
125
embraced by a generous people.380 The uniqueness of the Kindertransport, an effort
unmatched by any other western nation, and the paltry efforts of other countries to succor
Jewish victims as a whole helped to sustain this belief and provided a comfortable moral
cushion upon which to rest the Kindertransport narrative. It was this interpretation that
animated the Archbishop of York’s response to Herbert Samuel’s indictment. “Great
Britain is being vehemently accused day by day of...callous indifference to the sufferings
of the Jews, and even of responsibility for the deaths of many thousands of them. These
charges are not true...this country has done more than any other to help the Jews.”381 In
the same debate, Viscount Cranbourne enlarged on the Archbishop’s sentiments.
I would say there is no nation—I think we can say this without smugness—which
has a finer record so far as the Jewish people have been concerned. We have been
their protector in fine weather and foul...in the days of the war...at a time when
our own people were going hungry, we took in many thousands of Jewish
refugees into British territory. I think we managed to make ... in the circumstances
a remarkable contribution... Surely... we deserve the gratitude and not the attacks
of Jews...throughout the world.382
The moment for retrospection and contrition had passed. The nation adopted
Cranbourne’s interpretation and ignored or refuted evidence that was contradictory.
Presciently, an MP who feared the judgment of posterity predicted in the months before
the Kindertransport program was conceived that, “history will condemn violently the acts
of commission of many of this generation, but we shall also have to pay the penalty if we,
by any act of omission, fail to try and solve this problem [of] the persecution of the Jews
380
Phyllis Lassner, Anglo-Jewish Women, 8.
381
HHL, vol. 138, col, 509, 10 Dec. 1945.
382
HHL, vol. 138, col, 529-30., 10 Dec. 1945.
126
in Central Europe.”383 Fulfilling the MP’s fears, the government in the end both failed to
try and failed to solve the problem. However, the MP was wrong in one crucial respect: it
was not Parliament or the British people who paid the penalty—it was paid by the
families who were separated in the Kindertransport.
In the context of immigration policy, it is difficult to condemn the British
government for its concern about unemployment and other domestic socio-economic
problems. What is hard to reconcile is the sacrifice of humanitarianism to financial and
political expediencies. What is even harder to reconcile is the “not-in-my-backyard”
rhetoric Parliament used to discuss the rescue and settlement of refugees, including the
parents of the Kindertransportees. Simultaneous concern about falling birthrates while
excluding young Jewish families exemplifies the undercurrent of antisemitism pervading
the discussion. This concern may have had as much to do with valuing social
homogeneity as it did with antisemitism, but the result was the same—the failure to
consider the truly humanitarian solution of rescuing intact families. It is also
disconcerting to contemplate the possibility that unaccompanied children were preferable
because they could be Anglicized and assimilated more readily than adults.
Parliament failed to challenge Home Office hegemony over immigration policy. It
was numbed into inaction by decades of hearing that Britain was unsuitable for mass
immigration and that the interests of the British people had to come before the interests of
humanity. Parliament’s acceptance that Palestine was too politically sensitive to offer a
solution, that Britain could do nothing without international cooperation, and that the
383
HHC v. 338, 29 July 1938, c. 3560.
127
public treasury should not underwrite humanitarian efforts, justified taking a wait-and-see
approach to the refugee crisis. When Britain finally did act, ossified attitudes towards
immigration led to structuring a “rescue” scheme that divided families. Knowing that
Parliament and the government were fully cognizant of the dangers of such a proposition,
this decision seems in hindsight, unconscionable.
It is true that the British government could not have foreseen the horrors of the
Holocaust from the vantage point of 1938, based upon all that the world had heretofore
offered up in the way of antisemitic persecution. It is also true that the British lawmakers
and Cabinet officials suffered from a failure of imagination when it came to thinking
through all the implications of a project they formulated and agreed to within the space of
a few days. That it was arranged rapidly is sometimes offered up as an excuse for its
shortcomings, but what is clear from the Parliamentary proceedings is that the refugee
problem had been the subject of intense debate and discussion for fully five years before
the Kindertransport scheme was born. There was no need for any refugee rescue plan to
have been conceived or executed in haste.
Once the war ended, knowledge of what the children had been spared blunted
criticism of the Kindertransport. The fact that Britain had robbed the Nazi regime of
nearly ten thousand potential victims became a cause for unequivocal celebration and the
myth of rescue was nurtured. The children remained almost wholly silent, whether out of
gratitude or guilt, for nearly five decades. Only when they recorded their stories did the
enormity of their travails become evident. The British government was responsible for
the primary trauma and tragedy of the Kindertransport: the decree that parents must
128
relinquish their children in order to save them. The corollary declaration that no public
funds would be expended on the immigration or upkeep of the refugee children set in
motion all the ancillary traumas to which the Kinder were subjected as the burden of
administering their physical needs and welfare passed to individual British citizens and
hastily organized refugee agencies.
129
Chapter 5
THE RESCUERS
Seventy years ago as frightened children, they were saved from Hitler’s
clutches by a brave young stockbroker who became known as “Britain’s
Schindler”…On Friday, there were emotional scenes as they were reunited
with their saviour, 100-year-old Sir Nicholas Winton, who modestly
declared of his extraordinary feat that it was “wonderful it worked out so
well”.384
The seventieth anniversary commemorations of the Kindertransport confirmed Sir
Nicholas Winton as the embodiment of the Kindertransport rescue scheme. One of the
last rescuers still alive, he is adored by his “children” and honored the world over for his
selfless act of goodness in the face of evil. That such a mantle should have been bestowed
upon Winton is ironic, since his activities in Czechoslovakia were not even officially
recognized as part of the rescue of Jewish children known as the Kindertransport. It is
perhaps fitting, however, that Winton’s rescue of Czech children should have become so
emblematic of the Kindertransport as a whole, for, as Winton’s part in it will
demonstrate, the rescue scheme was not a straightforward epic of heroic
humanitarianism, but a complex hodgepodge of competing entities, fraught with financial
and logistical difficulties and lapses in oversight. The government’s abdication of
responsibility for the children’s welfare meant that no one body oversaw the financing,
documentation, travel, appropriate placement or follow-up visits for all of these children,
Sam Greenhill, “British Schindler welcomes steam train carrying evacuees he helped to escape the
Holocaust as children,” Daily Mail Online, September 5, 2009, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ article1211245/British-Schindler-welcomes-steam-train-carrying-evacuees-helped-escape-Holocaustchildren.html#ixzz13PuUoo5z.(accessed October 10, 2009).
384
130
making it patently obvious why many of them fell through the cracks, often with
disastrous consequences.
It seems almost axiomatic that critique of the rescuers is a third rail issue, integral
as their heroism is to the mythologizing narrative of the Kindertransport. Do the rescuers
bear any culpability for the tragic flaws in a program that blighted so many of the
children’s lives? How has the framing of their role, either by themselves or by later
historians, sustained the story of deliverance and noble sacrifice? It is as important to
confront the rescuers’ internal disputes and inadequacies and the sometimes tragic
consequences that flowed from these lapses, as it is to recount their triumphs and
successes. In its inadequate response to the refugee crisis, the British government morally
failed both the Kinder and the rescuers, exacerbating the children’s trauma; in the desire
to salvage an affirmative narrative from the wreckage of these children’s lives, those
combined failings were rationalized and sanitized into a simplified mythology of
salvation for the children and redemption for the nation.
The rescuers appear to be the most unambiguously heroic of all the participants in
the drama of the Kindertransport. A myriad of organizations, mostly Anglo-Jewish, but
also Quaker and secular groups, as well as individuals like Nicholas Winton and
thousands of ordinary Britons, devoted their energies, money and time to bringing the
children to England and overseeing their welfare after they arrived. Working under
extremely difficult logistical, political, financial and humanitarian conditions, these
individuals and organizations accomplished a great deal in a relatively short time. Yet
their records and the accounts they and others provided of their work reveal that the story
131
of the rescuers is as problematic as the rest of the Kindertransport saga. The primary
responsibility for the tragic decision to accept the children but not their parents falls
squarely upon the government, but it is also important to examine Anglo-Jewry’s role in
the formulation of and assent to the decision to admit only unaccompanied minors, and
their leadership in the care of the children once they were in England.
The Anglo-Jewish Community and Refugees
Anglo-Jewry’s role in the refugee crisis of the 1930s can only be understood within the
larger context of Jewish immigration to Great Britain in the late nineteenth century and
its own perceived social and political precariousness in early twentieth century Britain. It
was largely the enormous influx of Eastern European Jews in the late 1800s, and the
attendant antisemitism it engendered, that led the British government to curtail its long
held right of asylum and severely limit immigration in the Aliens Act of 1905.385 These
immigrant Jews joined an established, assimilated Anglo-Jewish community, many of
whom had achieved economic success. The political and economic leaders of AngloJewry were led by men like Lionel de Rothschild, and included the ennobled, academics,
businessmen and parliamentary and government officials.386 These men, often referred to
as the “cousinhood” took the lead in negotiating with the Home Office on behalf of
Amy Zahl Gottlieb, Men of Vision: Anglo-Jewry’s Aid to Victims of the Nazi Regime 1933-1945
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), 3; London, 16; Kushner and Knox, 25, 73.
385
Gottlieb, 2-3; Sybil Oldfield, “It is Usually She,” 57.
386
132
Jewish refugees and played a decisive role in the outcome of the Kindertransport.387
Rather than representing a united political constituency, this elite group worked
unobtrusively behind the scenes, relying upon access to the corridors of power. Their
advocacy on behalf of refugees was constrained by real or perceived concerns about
inciting antisemitism that might threaten their hard-won social and political status or
negatively rebound upon the entire Anglo-Jewish population.388
The impact of antisemitism on the formation of English immigration and refugee
policy is a contentious one. The issue is twofold: how much did the threat of antisemitism
play upon the fears and the latent antisemitic feelings of those in government, and how
much did these transmitted fears affect the Anglo-Jewish community’s approach to the
government on behalf of Jewish refugees? Antisemitism indisputably existed to some
degree or another in Great Britain, its most visible manifestation being the activities of
the British Union of Fascists during the 1930s. Among those who have studied and
written on the topic, Tony Kushner, utilizing the interwar Mass Observation social survey
documentation, concludes that an ambivalent antisemitism was pervasive in public
opinion and that it directly affected the government’s contradictory responses to Jewish
refugees in the period.389 Bernard Wasserstein, while presenting a number of what seem
to be thinly veiled antisemitic statements from a variety of British government officials,
387
Gottlieb, 2-3.
Paula Hill, “Anglo-Jewry and the Refugee Children 1938-1945,”(PhD. diss., Royal Holloway
University of London, 2001), 9, 159.
388
389
Kushner, Remembering Refugees; Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice: Antisemitism in
British Society during the Second World War, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989); Kushner
and Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide.
133
rather dismissively concludes that political factors predominated and that “conscious
Anti-semitism should not be regarded as an adequate explanation of official behavior.”390
At most, he is willing to admit that there was a “definite government tendency...to bend
with the wind of hostility to refugees rather than...build upon the more generous elements
of public opinion.”391 At the other end of the spectrum, Richard Bolechver argues that
“fear of a retributive anti-semitism” led to British Jewry’s failure to lobby the
government harder on refugee policy.392 Louise London takes a more moderate stance,
arguing that Anglo-Jewish leaders did not actively oppose a restrictive immigration
policy, fearful that an antisemitic backlash produced by a large influx of Jewish refugees
would negatively impact their own position in British society.393
The Anglo-Jewish community’s fears about antisemitism drove them in 1933 to
straitjacket themselves with a pledge to privately support all Jewish refugees.394 The
Jewish community in Britain was used to “taking care of its own,” having established
several organizations in the previous century specifically to deal with refugee and
immigrant issues, among them a Jewish Board of Guardians, the Board of Deputies of
390
Wasserstein, 317. For specific antisemitic statements and a discussion of antisemitism on the Home
Front see pages 42, 45-6, 73-119, 316.
391
Wasserstein, 317.
392
Richard Bolchover, British Jewry and the Holocaust, (Cambridge: University Press 1993), 103,
113.
393
London, 6, 39. For evidence that this specific fear persisted throughout the war see the quote of
Driberg in Wasserstein, 115.
394
Gottlieb,13-15; London 38-9.
134
British Jews, and the Anglo-Jewish Association.395 Official of these agencies met
regularly if informally with the Home Office to discuss the status of Jewish migrants.396
Anticipating a surge in appeals for entry into Britain after Hitler’s ascension to power,
this tight knit community met and agreed to form a new entity, the Jewish Refugees
Committee (JRC), a body that still exists and holds the records of all Jewish refugees who
entered Great Britain in the 1930s.397
The leaders of the Anglo-Jewish Association and several other committees were
summoned to the Home Office early in 1933 to assuage the government’s disquiet over a
sudden influx in German Jews in the country. It was at this meeting that they proposed
that the government permit the entry of all Jewish refugees who applied as well as those
wishing to extend their stay indefinitely. This proposal was offered with the pledge that
“all expense, whether in respect of temporary or permanent accommodation or
maintenance, will be borne by the Jewish community without ultimate charge to the
state.”398 Days later, the Cabinet Committee on Aliens Restrictions informed the AngloJewish leadership “the government would be prepared to consider a further extension [of
stay] provided that the Jewish community were prepared to guarantee...adequate means
of maintenance for the refugees concerned.”399 Thus, in 1933, the Anglo-Jewish
community saddled themselves with what would turn out to be an untenable financial and
395
Gottlieb, 9.
396
Ibid.
397
Ibid., 10.
398
Ibid., 13.
399
Ibid.,17-18.
135
logistical burden, while simultaneously setting a precedent that enabled the government
to absolve itself from moral, financial or administrative responsibility for Jewish
immigrants.
The pledge was based on several assumptions and fears. Anglo-Jewish leaders
believed then that the Nazi regime would be short lived and that the pledge obligated the
community for a limited duration and liability.400 The numbers of refugees they
anticipated were in the low thousands. Fears of an antisemitic backlash affecting the
entire Anglo-Jewish community should these refugees fall into destitution and become
charges on the public finance probably factored into the pledge as well, and reflected the
insecurity felt even by the wealthy and well-established Jewish leaders.401 In addition, the
Anglo-Jewish leaders likely and justifiably felt that, based on past Home Office policies
and actions, if they did not offer such a pledge, the government would allow few of the
anticipated refugees into Britain, and those already there would be in danger of forced
repatriation. In any case, they urgently needed funding to make good on the pledge, and
to oversee that effort, established a new committee, the Central British Fund for German
Jewry (CBF).402
Since Anglo-Jewish leaders took the lead in facilitating the admission of Jews into
Great Britain in the 1930s, it is important to ask why there was not more pressure put on
400
Ibid., 14.
401
Ibid., 14.
402
Ibid., 29-31. This organization, through its subsidiary committee, the Movement for the Care of
Children in Germany (MCCG) established five years later, became the primary administrative organ of the
Kindertransport in 1938. The CBF was later changed to The Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief
(CBF), and the MCCG to the Refugee Children’s Movement (RCM) in 1940.
136
the British government to plan and organize a true rescue scheme that included both
Jewish children and their families. Some of the answer seems to lie in the Jewish leaders’
misguided belief or hope that the situation was not that urgent and the CBF could take a
wait-and-see attitude.403 Several of the top administrators of the CBF actually believed
throughout 1934 and 1935 that the refugee agency would soon be able to close its doors
because the immediate crisis had passed.404 Even a partisan monograph commissioned by
the CBF incredulously notes that, “the complacency with which the CBF viewed the
position of Jews in Germany is difficult to comprehend.”405 Ultimately, however, the
author excuses the leaders of Anglo Jewry upon whom she has bestowed the title Men of
Vision, with the jarring assertion that, “[t]he seeming lack of comprehension at the CBF
of the Nazis’ intent to rid Germany of Jews cannot be censured. These men did not
possess visionary powers.”406 After the Nuremberg Laws were enacted late in 1935,
however, the CBF was alarmed into proposing a more aggressive course of action based
not on encouraging a more inclusive immigration policy at home, but upon a large-scale
migration of young people from Germany to Palestine.407
Although there is no scholarly agreement on how much Anglo Jewry, or any
humanitarian group, could have influenced the British Home Office’s immigration
policies, it is clear from even the most uncritical sources that the Anglo-Jewish
403
Ibid., 53-59.
404
Ibid., 51-58.
405
Ibid., 56.
406
Ibid., 53.
407
Ibid., 65-68.
137
community was not a monolithic one, but riven with deep ideological and religious
divisions. The extent to which these divisions prevented them from advocating
vigorously for a more humane immigration policy is open to debate. At one extreme,
Bolchover claims that the power struggles between Zionists and non-Zionists for control
of the Board of Deputies consumed virtually all their energies and precluded the
development of viable alternatives for saving Jews short of the establishment of a Jewish
nation in Palestine.408 Gottlieb, the CBF archivist, downplays the divisions, asserting,
"that their shared messianic religion...bound them together across national, social and
religious differences.”409 In her account, the Jewish philanthropic and relief organizations
consistently put aside their differences to work together for the benefit of Jewish
refugees. However, her assertions are contradicted by evidence that British Jewry was not
only ideologically split between Zionists and non-Zionists, but also between Liberal
assimilationist and Orthodox religious factions, and that there were tensions between
Ostjuden and German Jewish groups.410 A telling example of the latter division is the
CBF’s response in early 1935 to the growing plight of Poland’s Jews. Anthony de
Rothschild, no Zionist but an assimilated and patrician Anglo-Jew, remarked that while
the CBF had “done a very great deal to alleviate the position of the German Jews, Poland
was quite another proposition.”411 Regretting that he was unable to take an interest in
Eastern European Jewish problems, Rothschild agreed with others in the CBF that the
408
Bolchover, 54-55.
409
Gottlieb, 2.
410
Ibid., 31, 32-33; Hill, 242-3.
411
Gottlieb, 57.
138
Polish-Jewish problem was so enormous that it would be impossible for the CBF to even
consider it.412
In the critical period from 1933 to 1938, the power struggles between the Zionist
and non-Zionists had the most bearing upon Anglo-Jewry’s attempts to help persecuted
German and Austrian Jews, including children. Zionists dominated the leadership of the
CBF, the leading refugee organization with the greatest access to upper echelons of
government. This put the CBF on a fateful course that was to prove disastrous for Jewish
families trying to escape Nazi Europe.413 By the beginning of 1934, after the first fund
raising appeal had brought in almost £250,000, the CBF resolved to spend more than half
“to encourage and finance immigration to Palestine,” regarding it as “the preeminent
destination of German Jews and the CBF”s income.”414 For the next four years, the bulk
of the CBF efforts to resettle German and Austrian Jews were directed towards Palestine
including a 1938 proposal to send 10,000 Jewish there.415
These efforts can be interpreted a number of ways. Establishing and populating a
Jewish homeland seemed a logical undertaking for committed Zionists, of which the CBF
had many. It must have seemed the far better political gamble as well, since the grim
financial and unemployment conditions that caused the British government to balk at
412
Ibid.
413
Although Zionists were a minority on the Board of the CBF (the Chief Rabbi, Chaim Wiezmann,
Simon Marks and Neville Laski were Zionists), the Allocations Committee,, which oversaw financial
matters was dominated by Zionists, and others who worked closely with the CBF and liaised with
Parliament such as Norman Bentwich and Viscount Herbert Samuel, were also Zionists. Gottlieb, 20-28,
47, 64.
414
Ibid., 33.
415
HHC v. 341, 21 November 1938, c.1438.
139
increased immigration to the British Isles did not exist in Palestine. The focus on
Palestine may have also suited the self-interested concerns of British Jews who were
sincerely dedicated to helping their persecuted co-religionists, but who, because of
insecurity about their own social position and fears, justified or not, about arousing
antisemitism, were almost as wary of welcoming a vast influx of foreign Jews to England
as was the government.416
Regardless of the range of motivations, the fact remains that Anglo-Jewry could
not make immigration policy. Their role was at best an advisory one, and in reality, they
were most often in the position of supplicants. Nevertheless, postwar apologists for the
government attempted to place the blame for Britain’s ungenerous immigration record
squarely upon the shoulders of Zionists.
If the Zionists ....had concentrated on the humanitarian, instead of on the
political... and if they had...asked H.M.G. to treat these wretched people as
refugees and not as prospective Palestine immigrants, there is no doubt that
H.M.G. (which had a far better pre-war record than the U.S. government over
relief of Jewish refugees) would have done everything possible to assist them.”417
This simplistic assertion, with its obligatorily comparison of British and American
responses, not only ignores the fact that His Majesty’s Government actually resisted
many efforts to assist Jewish refugees, but it also accords Zionists with far too much
authority in influencing immigration policy. This argument neatly and erroneously shifts
the blame for the failure to rescue Jewish families entirely to the Jews themselves,
416
A number of scholars including Kushner, London, and Bolchover have made the same assertion,
but it has also been used to shift the focus of blame from the government, who made policy, to the Zionists,
who could only advise. It is patently unfair to claim that British Jews were unwilling to countenance the
movement of refugees to places other than Palestine. See Wasserstein, 312-313.
417
Wasserstein, 312.
140
absolving the British government and preserving the myth of pre-war magnanimity and
humanitarianism. Nevertheless, the energy spent on advocating for the Palestine solution
deflected attention from other pursuits that might have proved more satisfactory for
Jewish families. In the end, the British government severely restricted Jewish migration
to Palestine, and, after stringing the CBF and other Jewish leaders along for months, in
April 1939 finally closed the door to the dream of sending 10,000 children to Palestine.418
The Refugee Children’s Movement
The negotiations both within the CBF and between that organization and the government
that resulted in the establishment of the Kindertransport program were brief and swift.
Within days of Kristallnacht, Helen Bentwich, wife of CBF member Norman Bentwich
drafted a children’s rescue plan.419 The plan envisioned a rescue of about 5000 children,
mostly under the age of ten, who would be temporarily housed in disused summer camps
and quickly fostered out to individual families in the population at large.420 It would use
the expertise of the Inter-Aid Committee for Children from Germany, which had
overseen the sponsorship of 500 children by individual families and private schools prior
418
HHC v. 345, 06 April 1939 c.3048.
419
Gottlieb, 47. Helen Bentwich was also the niece of Herbert Samuel (later Viscount Samuel) under
whom her husband had worked when Samuel was serving as the first High Commissioner for Palestine in
the 1920s. Both Samuel and Bentwich were Zionists, and this information is provided to show how closely
knit and intertwined was the Anglo-Jewish community leadership.
420
Ibid.,100.
141
to November 1938.421 At an executive meeting convened to approve the plan before it
was presented to the government, the Anglo-Jewish community leaders made the
significant decision to embark upon a fundraising appeal outside their tight knit
community. For the very first time since 1933, Anglo-Jewry would use the non-Jewish
press to appeal to the public at large for money and support for Jewish refugees.422 That
humanitarian advocacy for refugees was the exclusive purview of the Anglo-Jewish
community in the critical period of 1933 to 1938 is underscored by this development. The
1933 pledge to “take care of their own” had meant that for nearly six years, the AngloJewish community had been the primary guarantor of refugees and custodian of the
refugee issue in dealings with the government. The move to include the wider population
in refugee matters only came after Kristallnacht, when Parliament and Anglo-Jewry
believed that there was no alternative to the emergency solution of saving only children.
In the meeting that took place on November 15, 1938, sealing the fate of
thousands of Jewish children and their families, a distinguished delegation of AngloJewish leaders pressed Neville Chamberlain, firmly but not too hard, to allow the
admission of unaccompanied minor children to British shores without delay. Reaffirming
the by-now expected guarantees absolving the state of any financial or physical
responsibility for the refugee children, the delegation asked only that the process of entry
be streamlined and that additional staff added to consular and Home Office departments
421
Ibid.,100- 101. The Inter-Aid Committee, a joint venture of the Save the Children Fund, Society of
Friends and the CBF was formed in 1935 and had as its ‘special object” the care of “Christian children of
Jewish Extraction.” Forty-five percent of the children it sponsored were Christian.
422
Ibid., 104.
142
dealing with immigration.423 MP Sir Herbert Samuel who, it has been suggested, was
hoping to be accommodated by a quid pro quo for his support of Chamberlain during the
appeasement crisis a few months earlier led the meeting.424 Although the Prime Minister
was noncommittal, he did take the proposition to a much more receptive Cabinet the next
day, and a week later, in a meeting with the Home Secretary, the delegation was informed
that the government would give them its full support.425
Why did the Anglo-Jewish leaders not ask for more from the government in light
of the widespread public revulsion for the outrages of Kristallnacht and the readily
perceived dangers German and Austrian Jews now faced? Tony Kushner suggests that it
was another example of political calculation playing on the old antisemitic fears of both
Jews and government. “The scheme to rescue children alone had been suggested by the
Jewish refugee workers not out of callousness but from a calculated assumption that it
was as far as the government could be pushed. As both shared an obsessive, and mutually
reinforcing fear of domestic antisemitism it also suited their mutual nervousness.”426 The
charge is substantiated by an RCM publication. “[I]n dispersing the children widely the
Movement was obeying the behest of the Home Office which, in granting admission to
423
Ibid., 107.
424
Hill, 16.
425
Gottlieb, 107.
426
Kushner, Remembering, 149.
143
such large numbers, urged that in their own interest that should not all be placed in cities
like London or Leeds where they would form a conspicuous Jewish enclave.”427
The political calculations of both Anglo-Jews and the British government shut the
door of rescue to tens of thousands of parents and consigned the children to lives
damaged by separation. The British government rightly bears the brunt of the blame for
this decision, but at the very least the Anglo-Jewish community’s ideological choices and
concern for its own self-interest enabled the government to take the passive and less
humanitarian path. Jewish leaders waited until it was too late to hold the government’s
feet to the fire, and then had to settle for the lives of just the children, forsaking forever
the more difficult but more generous alternative of allowing children and families to be
rescued together.
The government must also bear responsibility for the subsequent failures in the
program’s implementation. The Prime Minister, Home Office and Parliament agreed only
to allow an unspecified number of unaccompanied minor children into England. The
restrictive parameters of the scheme conveyed but a grudging welcome, since the
children were accepted only as transmigrants. Further, and perhaps most critically for the
children’s future welfare, the Government stipulated that the entire scheme be funded,
organized and supervised with little or no government involvement or oversight by
private citizens and non-governmental organizations. These groups and individuals were
John Presland [Gladys Bendit], A Great Adventure: The Story of the Children’s Refugee Movement,
(London: RCM, 1944), 8. (hereafter Bendit).
427
144
well-intentioned but professionally and financially ill-equipped to carry out such a
monumental task on short notice and for a term of many years.
The Anglo-Jewish community’s pledge to finance and look after Jewish refugees
enabled the government to shirk its responsibility to vulnerable child immigrants, and the
void created by the state’s supervisory absence was filled by an underfunded, fragmented,
sometimes fractious and largely volunteer program that often exacerbated the children’s
dislocation and unhappiness. The unfathomable absence of government involvement is
revealed by a Kind from Germany who in December 1938, hearing the rumor that Great
Britain was prepared to allow Jewish children into the country, traveled with his mother
to the nearest British Consulate only to be told,
Yes, such a scheme was being organized they believed but it had nothing to do
with the British government and they knew no details. They could only suggest
that I write to a Committee, the name and address which they gave me. I returned
home a very disappointed young man. It was inconceivable to me that the British
Government should have nothing to do with such an undertaking.428
This young man, who eventually did make it onto the first transport, expressed
appropriate astonishment that a private committee could wield so much authority. His
account also emphasizes the haphazard nature of the rescue. His information was based
on rumor, and his inclusion on chance and luck. The Home Office had not always taken
such a hands-off approach to Jewish refugee children. In 1936, when a number of
guarantors of Inter-Aid sponsored children attempted to renege on their obligations, the
Home Secretary ruled that “unaccompanied German children would no longer be
permitted for the purposes of education unless families, approved by the Home Office
428
Gershon, We Came. 20.
145
would undertake to be financially and morally responsible for them.”429 In the case of the
Kindertransport, the Home Office undertook no such role.
Beyond a requirement that the children be in good health, the government
exercised little discretion over who was chosen to come to England, ceding that authority
to non-governmental agencies at home and abroad. Almost as soon as Parliament had
approved the transfer of children to England, the CBF created the Movement for the Care
of Children from Germany (MCCG-later RCM) to oversee the British side of the child
emigration scheme’s operations.430 This was the main, but by far not the only body
responsible for the refugee children, however. An editorial in the Manchester Guardian
in July 1939 noted that, “the main volume of work for the refugees is still haphazardly
organized…in this country…there are innumerable national and local committees
depending on private funds occupied in specific aspects of the problem and six
government departments which deal in some way with the refugees.”431 The Jewish
welfare agencies to whom the British consulates referred all inquiries were the
Kultsgemeinde in Vienna and the Reichsvertretung in Germany, who in the early stages
of the operation, wielded almost complete authority over the selection and transportation
429
Gottlieb, 101. Emphasis added by author.
Gottlieb 107. Bendit, 2. In 1940, this body was renamed the Refugee Children’s Movement (RCM
or the Movement).
430
“The Settlement of Refugees,” Manchester Guardian, July 7, 1939.
431
146
of the children from the continent to Britain.432 There were over 60,000 children at risk in
these two countries alone, and selection was initially based upon those whom the on-site
refugee workers considered the most vulnerable.433
The difficulty in conceiving and planning for the transmigration of thousands of
children was made evident immediately. In the original plan, every child would have a
guarantor before arrival in England. Due to the increased sense of urgency following
Kristallnacht, and with the wholesale incarceration of Jewish men and boys over the age
of thirteen, this method was not always possible, resulting in large numbers of nonguaranteed adolescent boys going in the first transports.434 This was one of the first
unsettling disconnects in the program, since the British public who were willing to foster
a child preferred girls, seven to ten years in age, and fair. This left a surplus of boys who
had to be housed at the Movement’s expense until more permanent arrangements could
be made.435
The unhappy results of the ad hoc and hastily assembled Kindertransport became
apparent when the first transports arrived in December 1938. Sponsored children went
directly to their foster families upon arrival in England, but the majority who arrived
under the auspices of the Movement between December 1938 and February 1939 went to
For a full discussion of these procedures, see Claudia Curio, “‘Invisible’ Children: the Selection
and Integration Strategies of Relief Organizations,” trans. Toby Axelrod. Shofar, 41-56; Sybil Oldfield, “’It
is Usually She’ in Shofar, 57-70. Mary Ford, “The Arrival of Refugee Children in England,” Immigrants
and Minorities 2 (1983): 137-151.
432
433
Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, First Annual Report: November 1938December 1939, (London: MCCG, 1940), 4. (Hereafter, FAR ).
434
Gershon, We Came, 21-23. Account of rescuer Trevor Chadwick.
435
Gottlieb, 118.
147
Dovercourt and Lowestoft, with their well-documented shortcomings and miseries.436
The Movement was keenly aware of these inadequacies. The first sentence of its First
Annual Report states, “it is thought worth while...to restate some of the facts that made it
necessary to bring into this country nearly 10,000 children...and to explain to the more
critical why mistakes were made and delays occurred.”437 Of the specific conditions in
the camps, however, the RCM makes no mention. Instead, they reprinted a volunteer
worker’s letter, which unintentionally reveals the children’s real concerns.
Very few are reading, partly because it is difficult for these children to
concentrate after all the excitement of their journey...partly because the
books...are nearly all English. But there is one occupation which is unfailingly
popular among them all no matter what their age, and that is writing letters...Ten
days in the camp pass like a dream. It is bitterly cold and there is much sorrow,
but there is happiness as well...the irrepressible child like is wholesome and sweet
in spite of everything.”438
Despite the upbeat tone of the letter, it is obvious that the children were worried about
families and parents left behind and to whom they were undoubtedly writing those letters.
The Movement had to worry about logistical issues and the physical well-being of
the children as well as finances, which were a constant concern. Supporting the larger
than expected number of unguaranteed and unclaimed children was an expensive drain on
the entirely privately funded project and after April 1939, the RCM had to sharply curtail
the number of unguaranteed children it brought over.439 It then instituted a system of
bringing over only those children who had relatives or friends in England who wished to
436
Gershon, We Came, 31-39.
437
FAR, 3.
438
Ibid.8.
439
Ibid., 6.
148
indefinitely sponsor a child. As long as the guarantor agreed to support the child to the
age of eighteen, had a “sufficiently stable” financial situation and a suitable home and
posted a £50 bond towards re-emigration, these children could be immigrated, bypassing
the selection committees in Germany and Austria.440 Over two thirds of all the children
brought to England by the Kindertransports were guaranteed in this way. The Movement
noted the flaws in this system in its First Annual Report.
The ‘guarantee’ system was naturally not all that could be desired, since to a large
extent it gave preference to those children whose cases were comparatively not so
urgent. For it was usually the children of richer families who had acquaintances
abroad or relatives prosperous enough to support them. Nevertheless the condition
of all children of Jewish extraction was universally so deplorable that the policy
of rescuing the greatest number possible had to be pursued.441
No definitive study of the exact selection process or the overall demographics of the
children brought to England under the auspices of the Movement exists. Testimony such
as the above suggests however, that due to the financial constraints of privately funded
scheme, it was primarily the relatively fortunate and the well-connected in Germany and
Austria who benefitted. Those who had no relatives or friends in Great Britain, or who
lacked the resources to fund their own child’s exodus were very unlikely to have been
given the choice to send their child to safety abroad.442
440
Ibid. Even when claimed by friends or relatives, the RCM was supposed to monitor the children
and provided for their welfare when necessary. Although no study has definitively addressed this issue,
empirical evidence suggests that these children received less attention from the RCM. Many of the abuses
reported by the Kinder occurred in the homes of relatives and “friends.”
441
Ibid., 7.
442
In the first three months of the program, when unguaranteed blocks of children were still being
accepted, a number of orphanages and schools were beneficiaries of the program. FAR, 7.
149
In the rush to bring the greatest number possible out of Nazi occupied Europe, the
Movement by its own admission failed to realize the long-term implications of
responsibility for 10,000 parentless children. The First Annual Report admitted that “[a]s
more children came into the country the task of caring for them, educating them and
finding training for them became more difficult, while the eventual magnitude of this
work was not fully realized in the beginning.”443 The RCM worked diligently and
tirelessly and made every effort to organize itself, well aware of the child welfare issues
at stake in its undertaking, but these people, many of whom were volunteers, had no
special expertise in any of the administrative or psychological issues they were bound to
face. Given no blueprint, they were literally making it up as they went along, a
circumstance of which they were well aware, calling themselves a “pioneer
development.”444 The Report also noted that it received criticism for the delays caused by
the need to investigate the homes and financial status of all those who offered to foster a
child, “yet this was felt to be necessary for the financial stability of the Movement and
the welfare of the Children.”445
The Movement took several steps to cope with the enormous task of caring for
10,000 children who had been dispersed across the country. It almost immediately
decentralized its organization, setting up local Guardian Committees all over the country
to “intensify the search for homes, look after the children when they settled down and
443
Ibid.,10.
444
Ibid., 14.
445
Ibid. 4, 11.
150
help the Movement decentralize its immense work.”446 The local committees” workers
were supposed to visit every child in their district twice a year and file welfare reports
with the After Care Department of the Movement. The First Annual Report also noted
that the local committees were fundamentally on their own, no longer organized and
directed from London, and that the After Care Department acted merely in an advisory
capacity. Logistical and financial necessity dictated the diffusion of responsibility but left
the program without any real central direction, opening the door to wide variances in
after care, and leaving many children with no follow-up care at all.
The advent of war changed the focus of the Movement and brought new problems
and challenges which were not always resolved to the children’s best advantage. Travel
between London and the provinces was difficult, so the Movement further decentralized,
authorizing the establishment of twelve Regional Committees that would oversee the
work of various Local Committees in their areas. These Regional Committees were
empowered to make decisions regarding the children’s welfare, reducing the central
office to little more than a record-keeping center.447 Further, the RCM had to keep track
of changes in placement, the large-scale evacuation of children during the Blitz and the
interning of hundreds of the older boys as “enemy aliens” in 1940.448 That the children’s
lives were destabilized by these events is attested to by the testimony of one boy who
446
Ibid., 4.
447
Ibid., 11.
448
Ibid.,12.
151
reports having lived at fifteen different addresses in his five year stay in England.449 The
RCM report written in December 1939 notes that although the redistribution of the
evacuated children “has not been finally entered up in the records of the
Movement...reports of the new addresses are coming in daily.”450 In the Second Annual
Report, the RCM admitted that “[e]specially difficult has been the visiting of children in
rural areas and the work of obtaining Welfare Reports has been hampered.”451 Although
the Report details the exhaustive efforts to keep comprehensive records on each child,
inevitably, many children fell through the cracks and were not visited or were lost track
of altogether. Nonetheless, in summation the Movement assessed its task positively after
the first year.
[I]t is clear that it is impossible to ensure that everyone is happy....The
strangeness of the customs, language, food and people and the absence of all they
have been used to and all that they have loved have affected refugees generally.
By and large the children have adapted themselves to their new homes...and once
they have settled into a new routine...they...live their new life happily. The proof
of the pudding is in the eating-only about 50 children have had to be removed as a
result of incompatibility.452
Tellingly, this was the last report to cite statistics on removals. Anecdotal evidence from
children’s testimonies indicates that as the years went on such removals were
increasingly common. Telling, too, is a studied avoidance of the subject of parents, who
are increasingly absent from most of the official documentation of the Movement.
449
Newman, 130.
450
Newman, 12.
451
SAR, 3.
452
FAR, 13.
152
The Movement’s internal documents record its growing cognizance of the
magnitude and challenges of its task. Of primary importance is the May 1940 Instructions
for the Guidance of Regional and Local Committees. Hardly had the organization been
formed before it began to decentralize, of necessity ceding a great deal of autonomy to
the committees and volunteers who were tasked with placing and monitoring the children
at the local level. Not only were the regional and local committees expected to report
semi-annually on the health, education, religious instruction and welfare of the children
in their areas, they were to assist in finding employment for the older children, recruit and
inspect potential new foster homes, administer existing financial obligations and scare up
new sources of funding.453 Much of the guide concerns matters of finance: maintenance
allowances for foster parents, expenses of unguaranteed children and employment issues
among others. Specific note is made of the impossibility of the Movement providing any
funds for education, even for a “promising child” whose educational expenses “should be
furnished by local efforts or the generosity of a private benefactor.”454
The sections of the Regional and Local Committees” guide dealing with
hospitality and placement indicate the Movement’s recognition of the myriad problems
and issues that had arisen in foster placements. The committees were instructed to ask the
“befriender” the age, sex, religion, and “social position of the child required.”455 After
453
Executive Committee for the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, Instructions for
the Guidance of Regional and Local Committees, (London: Bloomsbury House, May 1940), 5-7.
454
Ibid., 8.
455
Ibid., 10.
153
ascertaining the marital status, religion and family and employment details of the
befriender, the interviewer was instructed to ask the following questions:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Can child be maintained until it is 18?
Does befriender realize there is no financial assistance?
Does befriender realize that parents…may claim child at any time?
Is a maid kept?
What would be the sleeping arrangements for the child?
Religious training available for the child?
General views on the upbringing of children?
Has the befriender been told that the home will be visited…?456
These questions implicitly acknowledge the prevalence of labor exploitation of girls,
tension between foster and biological parents, social and cultural clashes, and the
subversion of Jewish religious belief that were widespread in the foster homes. The guide
also instructed the interviewer to observe the “character, education, temperament and
social position” of the potential guardian, and the type, size cleanliness comfort and
suitability of the home.457 An addendum notes that only in exceptional cases should a
child be placed with a bachelor.”458
The tension between the needs of the refugee children and the sensibilities of the
foster families is most pointedly illustrated in Section IX of the guide, “Welfare and
General.” The Movement was by this time well aware of the children’s psychological
stresses and addressed them in the subsection titled “Problem Children:”
It cannot be too strongly emphasized that bed-wetting, petty pilfering, lying and
similar signs of instability of character are sometimes symptoms of deep-seated
nervous disturbance and should not be lightly dismissed or treated by penal
456
Ibid., 10-11.
457
Ibid., 11.
458
Ibid.
154
methods. Most refugee children have undergone such physical and mental strain
that it is scarcely surprising that they should find it difficult to settle down. Often
their emotional disturbance is due to anxiety for the fate of their parents in Nazi
Germany. These children become problem children who need and deserve
kindness and patience to help them overcome their difficulties.459
While understanding that the children’s trauma was caused by separation from their
parents, the Movement nevertheless faced an almost insurmountable task in finding
suitable homes for thousands of children, making it necessary to bend over backwards in
accommodating the needs of the foster families. The guide thus cautions visitors to
undertake their tasks “very tactfully. Some foster parents may resent these visits and
regard them as an ‘intrusion.’ They should be assured that these visits cast no reflection
upon their custody of the child…Foster parents should be given reasonable notice of the
date and time the visit will be made.”460 Acknowledging that the children, owing to their
“harrowing experiences” may have “lost confidence in themselves and others,” the guide
informs the visitors many of the children “fail to respond to the kindness bestowed on
them by their foster parents.”461 The instructions to the regional volunteers were clear.
Visitors must try to remove the misunderstanding, possibility even hostility, that
exists between foster parents and child. Tactfully, the foster parents should be
helped to realize that what they have mistaken for ‘ungratefulness’ on the part of
the child is actually a temporary attitude towards life and people… engendered by
past hardships. At the same time, the child must be helped to overcome its fear
and mistrust and sympathetically made to realize that its future happiness and
security depends largely upon its regaining confidence in itself and others.462
459
Ibid., 17. Emphasis added by author.
460
Ibid., 16.
461
Ibid.
462
Ibid.
155
In balancing the child’s need for a loving and sympathetic home against the sensitivities
of foster parents, the guide subtextually instructs visitors not to delve too deeply into the
child’s unhappiness, to coax recalcitrant children to accept their situation and to smooth
over discords in order to retain every remotely suitable residence. These instructions also
make it very clear why so many Kinder report either never having seen a visitor or seeing
one only in the restraining presence of the foster parent.
Noticeably absent from the Movement’s First Annual Report but prominently a
feature of much of the subsequent correspondence of the RCM is a discussion of the
children’s religious education or welfare, an issue that was to become the most
contentious the RCM was to face. Ninety percent of the children brought in the
Kindertransports were Jewish, but the RCM, having made the necessary decision to
appeal for money and homes from the entire nation, initially downplayed both the
children’s religion and its own Anglo-Jewish origins, priding itself on being a nondenominational and non-political organization, appealing “to all sections of the
population.”463 Although local committees were to ask a prospective foster parent about
religious beliefs, the Movement made it a priority to place children in a suitable home,
regardless of the religion of the foster family. This resulted in a number of children
becoming estranged from their Jewish faith, attending Christian services with their foster
families and even converting to Christian denominations. Revealingly, the addendum in
the Instructions for Guidance of Regional and Local Committees prohibiting placement
463
FAR, 17.
156
with bachelors also tacked on the caveat that, “where possible orthodox Jewish children
should be placed in orthodox homes.”464
By the Second Annual Report, the RCM was forced to acknowledge a growing
criticism of its religious policies from within the Anglo-Jewish community and to give
guarantees that they were taking steps to safeguard each child’s religious conscience.465
This did not assuage the Orthodox community however, and their angry letters and
demands take up a great deal of the public records of the RCM and CBF. The pressure
from the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations was unrelenting, and in 1944, the
secretary of the RCM noted in her diary, “it has been a week of difficulty in the office
owing to the violent attacks on the Movement from the wild men--at meetings and in the
Jewish Chronicle.”466
The issue of placing Jewish children in Christian homes divided the Anglo-Jewish
community and caused more lasting harm to the Movement than any other shortcoming.
At issue was a fundamental ideological impasse: should children be “saved” by any
means possible, even if it meant estrangement from Judaism, or should the primary
guiding principle be the preservation of the children’s religion? At issue was also an
ideological divide between those who advocated that the best solution for the children
was a foster home and those who believed that the children would be better served by
staying in group settings such as hostels where their religious, dietary and spiritual needs
464
Ibid.
465
SAR, 6.
Oldfield, “’It is Usually She,” in Shofar , 68.
466
157
could be more easily protected. Clearly, other issues came into play, not the least of
which were financial ones. Group homes and hostels were a drain on the Movement’s
coffers, while children in private homes were guaranteed support by their foster families.
One of the “wild-men” to whom RCM secretary Dorothy Hardisty referred was
the orthodox Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, a vehement advocate for group hostels for
Jewish children and an unrelenting critic of the RCM. Schonfeld initially tried to work
with the RCM, joining its Religious Teaching Special Committee when it formed in June
1941. He quickly came to an impasse with the RCM however, and resigned from the
committee before the September meeting.467 Thereafter Schonfeld’s relationship with the
RCM was adversarial, culminating in the release of the pamphlet, The Child Estranging
Movement, published anonymously in 1944 by the Union of Orthodox Hebrew
Congregations but widely known to have been written by Schonfeld.468
In the inflammatory broadside, Schonfeld accused the RCM of a policy of
deliberate estrangement of Jewish children from the religion of their birth. He alleged that
the Movement had from its inception, “declared its intention to make these children
forget all their past, to send them as ambassadors into the homes of Christian foster
parents where they could assimilate and create Christian good-will.”469 He charged the
Movement with discriminating against orthodox children during the selection process on
467
CBF, 27/28/161 Refugee Children’s Movement: Religious Teaching, Sub/Committee Minutes
11 June 1941 – June 1949, Sub Committee on Religious Education, Refugee Children’s Movement, 16
September, 1941, 1.
468
The Child Estranging Movement: An Expose on the Alienation of Jewish Refugee Children in Great
Britain from Judaism, (London: Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations, January 1944).
469
Ibid., 3.
158
the Continent, causing “many parents [to refrain] from making any stipulation [of
religious preference] under the implicit duress of risking the child’s rescue.”470 He argued
that the Movement had “declared against hostels as compared with homes” and that
despite the RCM”s claims that there were not enough Jewish homes, in fact there was
tremendous Jewish interest and that “much enthusiasm was damped down.”471 Citing
individual cases of estrangement, his own discordant relationship with the Movement and
the RCM”s refusal to work with Jewish committee and rabbinical associations that had
offered to provide religious instruction, Schonfeld let fly his frustration with the RCM.
“It has been made difficult for Anglo-Jewry to cite individual cases. An unwarranted
secrecy surrounds the files and dossiers even with regard to accredited representatives
who are cooperating with the Movement.”472
Schonfeld’s attacks on the RCM exposed the rifts that existed within Anglo-Jewry
and the currents of cross-purposes washing over the RCM and other hybrid refugee
organizations. Disputing Schonfeld’s accusations, Turner and Gottlieb, who had access
to the records of the RCM, assert that there were simply not enough offers from orthodox
homes to place all the orthodox children who arrived.473 However, even the Movement’s
counterattack to The Child Estranging Movement admitted that the selection process had
discriminated against orthodox children. “[T]here were insufficient offers of Orthodox
Jewish homes…and it was with heaviness of heart that the Movement had to notify the
470
Ibid., 2.
471
Ibid., 4.
472
Ibid., 5.
Turner, 135. The religious question is the subject of his chapter “Divided Loyalties,” 235-259.
473
159
Reichsvertretung that a certain number of Orthodox children had to be held back for a
specified ‘transport’”474
Theories abound to explain the shortage of Jewish and specifically orthodox
offers of accommodation for the refugee children. Some argue that the lukewarm
response stemmed from animosities that English Jews, who were mainly of Eastern
European origin, felt towards the German Jewish refugees.475 Others point to the
insularity of orthodox homes, or to the fact that the majority of orthodox Jews in England
were too poor to take on another mouth to feed. The answer may lie largely in the fact
that when the leadership of the CBF was discussing the Kindertransport plan, they did
not consult with all the stakeholders in Britain’s Jewish population. Even Amy Gottlieb
noted this failing. “Members of the ‘cousinhood’ had long been used to dominating the
boards...of communal institutions. It probably did not occur to them that wider
involvement would encourage greater community participation in the plan of rescue.”476
If the leadership of the CBF alienated a large sector of the orthodox community to
the extent that it refused to open its homes to refugee children, then the problem was
exacerbated by the RCM’s preference for private over group homes or hostels as a care
model for the children in their charge. This preference led them to place children in
private homes of any denomination, leading to the accusation from the orthodox
community that the RCM was deliberately and callously “casting Jewish refugee children
474
Bendit, 5.
475
Hill, 242.
476
Gottlieb, 102.
160
out of their faith community.”477 While this may seem too strong a charge, the RCM”s
Second Annual Report implies that the accusation was at least partially true.
Towards the end of 1940 the Movement began an enquiry into [this] matter. It is
hoped that during 1941 great progress will be made. The co-operation of the
Jewish organizations has been obtained and will be of the greatest service....no
child should be allowed to change religion without every possible effort being
made to ascertain the views of the parents or some near relative.478
The issue intensified as the war went on and it became increasingly clear that many of
these children would be the only survivors from their families. The preservation of their
Jewish faith and heritage then became more freighted with meaning and its loss felt more
deeply and tragically.
Rescuers Outside the Movement
Those who were operating independently of the Movement became entangled in the
religious controversy and additional bureaucratic aggravations as they worked outside the
purview of the RCM. The two most prominent of those, Nicholas Winton and Rabbi
Solomon Schonfeld, were responsible for bringing close to 1700 children to England
between them, and both faced enormous and unnecessary challenges in their work due to
the lack of coordination and inefficiency that resulted from the government’s decision to
leave the entire child immigration scheme to non-governmental organizations.
The CBF did not have a government mandate to bring refugee children to Great
Britain, but it dominated the available finances and the public eye and was very
477
Hill, 149.
478
SAR, 6.
161
protective of its own prerogatives. Those working independently found it difficult indeed
to accomplish the good work they set out to do. As its name suggests, the CBF was
concerned primarily with Jews of German nationality, and was expanded after the
Anschluss in 1938 to include Austrian but not Eastern or other Central European Jews.
When the Nazi designs on the Sudetenland put Czech Jews at risk, Nicholas Winton and
a few friends undertook on their own to find homes of refuge for Czech children.
The scrapbook documenting Winton’s work with Czech child refugees helps to
illuminate the inefficiencies of the entire child migration scheme, many of which could
have been avoided or moderated by government oversight. Winton became involved in
child rescue almost by accident in December 1938, when he was diverted from a ski trip
to Switzerland by a call for help from a friend who was going to Prague as an emissary
for the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia. (BCRC). Aware that the
government was allowing unaccompanied children into England, Winton and his
colleagues improvised an independent rescue program for the Czech children. In the
critical first months, they were unable to coordinate with the efforts of the RCM since the
Movement had decided that Czech children were not their responsibility.
Winton’s frustrations with the process and with the Movement are evident in
many of the documents he preserved. Within days of his arrival in Prague, he asked a
colleague in London to go to the Home Office and inquire about the most basic details.
“[F]ind out what guarantees you need... If a family wishes to guarantee for a child, what
do they have to do? If forms have to be filled can you get a few specimens? Is it easier to
get children in on the block?... Can one get a child over if someone guarantees for a year?
162
...what is the smallest cash required? ... Hundreds of children are being brought over from
Germany, so perhaps you can... get some information from some engaged in this
work.”479 Winton had to find out this basic information his own because his inquires to
the RCM on behalf of Czech children had been ignored. After asking a London colleague
to pay a visit to the CBF headquarters, he wrote, “we are all wondering what success you
had yesterday...whether you were able to make any impression on the moribund Mrs.
Skelton [an RCM founder]...as far as I can make out from this end she might as well not
exist at all.”480
The turf wars between the aid groups, all battling for an inadequate amount of
money and faced with far more children than placements, meant that the efforts of people
like Winton were to a great extent squandered. Winton complained in April 1939, that
“the Refugee Committees obtain open guarantees which are used entirely for German and
Austrian refugee children. These committees hardly know of the Czech problem and
the...Movement in their circulars have not mentioned it in fear of harming themselves.”481
Even though he had managed to secure complete dossiers and permission for nearly 600
children before he flew back to London at the end of January, and had obtained private
home guarantees for them, he did not have the money or authority to get them out of
Czechoslovakia. The head of the BCRC acknowledged the fragmentation and disunity of
the rescue efforts as he pleaded Winton’s case to London. “He has prepared the case
479
Nicholas Winton, Saving the Children, Czechoslovakia 1939 : a scrapbook recording the
transportation of 664 children out of Czechoslovakia [2 vol.], n.d. Weiner Library. Undated letter.
480
Winton, Letter to Martin Blake, January 11, 1939. n.p. Saving the Children . Mrs. Skelton was the
Inter-Aid secretary who was now working with the Movement. Gottlieb, 104.
481
Winton, Letter dated April 21, 1939. Winton, Saving the Children.
163
sheets for several hundred...children, collected all the offers and that he needs now is the
authority to go ahead...Save the Children has disclaimed responsibility, so has Inter-aid,
and our own committee is overburdened with more urgent things.”482 Up to the point that
Winton’s operation was incorporated into the Movement in May 1939, fewer than 200
Czech children had arrived. By the last transport in August, 669 of the children Winton
had documented had made it out of Czechoslovakia.483 Heartbreakingly, his final and
largest transport, due to leave Prague on September 1, 1939, never made it out. All 250
children on the transport are believed to have perished.484 In addition, his colleagues in
Prague had lists and papers for over 6000 children they hoped to get out. It is unlikely
they would have been able to emigrate all those children, but the roadblocks Winton
encountered assuredly reduced his effectiveness. Had the government been involved in
overseeing the program it approved, or had there been better coordination between aid
groups, far more children might have made it out of harm’s way.
The Winton case highlights several shortcomings of the Kindertransport scheme.
Winton’s work was associated with the Movement, but the homes he found for the Czech
children were not vetted by them nor were his children initially included in their aftercare program. Winton himself was always forthright about the fact that his main purpose
was to get as many children out of Czechoslovakia as possible, whatever the
circumstances or consequences they faced later on in England. He was not above using
482
Winton, Doreen Warriner to Miss Layton. January 20, 1939. Winton, Saving the Children.
87
Letter Margaret Layton to Nicholas Winton, May 24, 1939 Winton, Saving the Children ; Emanuel
and Gissing, 127.
484
Emanuel and Gissing, 125.
164
unorthodox methods, such as forging papers in order to achieve his goal.485 He was not
equipped to do follow up care, and it is unclear what happened to these children. Winton
was not insensitive to the children’s religious lives, as is attested by his discomfort about
the first group he managed to get out of Czechoslovakia. “25 children...have been
brought out of Czechoslovakia. These were brought out under conditions which are not
even acceptable to a large section of the British public, in so far as an undertaking had to
be given, if Jewish, that they should be baptized.”486 However, Winton is also famously
quoted as having told the Chief Rabbi, who confronted him over the placement of Jewish
children in Christian homes, “I’ve got my work to do, you’ve got yours. If you prefer a
dead Jew to a proselytized one, that’s your business.”487 Winton viewed his work as
finished once the last transport had arrived. When war was declared in 1939, he stored
the scrapbook containing records of the 669 children he had saved in an attic trunk, where
it lay untouched for fifty years.488 Although his rescue mission, now the subject of
documentaries and books, is viewed as a heroic tale of humanitarian benevolence, it is
clear that it was as burdened with difficulties, controversies and challenges as the rest of
the child rescue scheme.
Of the other independent rescuer, Dr. Solomon Schonfeld, much less is known
and even less is celebrated. Schonfeld, the Chief Rabbi’s son-in-law and himself a rabbi,
was a polarizing figure who battled with the Movement from the outset. Convinced that
Mináč, Nicholas Winton: The Power of Good.
485
486
Winton, Undated report. Winton, Saving the Children.
487
Emanuel and Gissing, 88.
Emanuel, and Gissing and Mináč ,Nicholas Winton: The Power of Good.
488
165
the Movement was deliberately excluding orthodox children from its lists, he made trips
to Germany and Austria and managed to bring close to 1000 children into Great
Britain.489 He was also a constant presence at the camps and hostels run by the
Movement, making sure there was kosher food and attending to the children’s religious
lives.490 Like Winton, he used unconventional methods and by all accounts was a strident
advocate for orthodoxy and a formidable adversary to those whose paths he crossed,
including Winton’s. He set up two orthodox hostels, taking children into his own home
when necessary, clothing them and giving them pocket money and even employment. 491
One Kind he rescued noted the rift between Schonfeld and the RCM and the fractious and
uncoordinated nature of the rescue operations in general. “The refugee committees,
which were supposed to be helping the refugees, refused to help us, claiming that Dr.
Schonfeld, who had brought us over, should look after us himself. To this day, I can’t
understand why this man who saved our lives should have been refused cooperation from
the ‘Establishment.’”492
In an attempt to cast the Movement’s efforts in a more positive light, the
“Establishment” countered Schonfeld’s Child Estranging Movement with a pamphlet of
its own in 1944. Written under the pseudonym John Presland by Gladys Bendit, a cofounder of the Inter-aid committee and wife of Central Committee member Francis
489
Kushner, Remembering, 158. Other sources put the total number Schonfeld rescued much lower.
Turner cites conflicting figures: 100 (p.105) and 250 (p.236) and Hill credits him with 300 (p.158).
490
Hill, 92.
491
Leverton and Lowensohn, 187-8. See also Turner, 21.
492
Ibid., 187.
166
Bendit, it was entitled A Great Adventure: The Story of the Children’s Refugee
Movement.493 Dorothy Hardisty noted in her journal, “we have met the attacks by the
publication of Mrs. Bendit’s Great Adventure and its reception showed that we had many
Movement friends.”494 Although the battle between Schonfeld and the Movement stayed
largely within the Anglo-Jewish community, it highlights the controversies surrounding
the children’s lives and the harm done to them in the name of rescue.
Schonfeld’s outsider status is confirmed by his treatment in the CBF
commissioned work …And the Policeman Smiled. As Barry Turner vigorously defended
the RCM’s handling of the complex issues surrounding the Kinder’s religious beliefs, he
did what Gladys Bendit had been unwilling to do fifty years earlier: vilify Rabbi Solomon
Schonfeld. Schonfeld was a hero to many but perceived as an enemy of the RCM, and
Turner’s work, a putatively balanced history of the entire children’s rescue effort, not
only marginalizes but demonizes him. Turner does give Schonfeld credit for courage and
dedication, but he also describes Schonfeld as “single-minded to the point of fanaticism,”
and “a shrewd politician whose fundamentalist views, forcefully argued, appealed to
simple souls.”495
Turner discredits both Schonfeld and those who worked closely with him. He
describes Schonfeld’s colleague Harry Goodman as “a dyspeptic character who worked
alongside Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld…[and] launched a bitter diatribe against the faint
493
John Presland [Gladys Bendit], A Great Adventure: The Story of the Children’s Refugee
Movement, (London: Bloomsbury House, 1944).
Oldfield, “It is Usually She,” 68. For an extended discussion of A Great Adventure, see Chapter 6
494
below.
495
Ibid., 23, 236.
167
hearts at Bloomsbury House.”496 “Hardly a week passed without Rabbi Schonfeld or his
chief lieutenant and propagandist, Harry Goodman, mounting an attack on the
RCM…implying that if they held the reins the race would be as good as won.”497 Turner
cites contradictory figures for the children Schonfeld saved, quoting 100 children early
in the book, and later mentioning 250, but in both cases crediting the rabbi with far fewer
than other credible sources.498 In the final pages of the chapter “Divided Loyalties,”
Turner celebrates Schonfeld’s defeat by Lord Gorell and the more “reasoned” forces of
the RCM and proclaims Schonfeld’s irrelevance to the Movement after 1944.499
Although Schonfeld always appears on the fringes of the Kindertransport story,
he is the most potent figure around which a counter narrative could have been
constructed. With his maverick rescue efforts and his attacks on the refugee agencies over
the preservation of the children’s Jewish faith, Schonfeld was one of the few who directly
confronted the Kindertransport’s guiding philosophy, policies and methods. If
Schonfeld's contribution to the child rescue programs ought to have earned him greater
approbation, his criticisms of its aftercare ensured that he would be denied his rightful
place in the pantheon of Kindertransport heroes.
Trevor Chadwick is another rescuer whose unconventional actions relegated him
to the margins of the Kindertransport saga. Chadwick, who worked closely with Nicholas
Winton in Prague, stayed in that city compiling lists and assembling documents for over
496
Ibid., 75.
497
Ibid., 240.
498
Ibid., 105, 236. See note 488 above for other figures and sources.
499
Ibid., 257-8.
168
6000 children, the vast majority of whom, due to bureaucratic delays, did not get out in
time.500 Chadwick, by all accounts a charismatic if raffish character, attempted to
circumvent these obstacles by any means necessary, even developing a working
relationship with the local Nazi official Boemmelburg, “an elderly smiling gentleman, far
from sinister, who…proved to be a great help, sometimes unwittingly. He was really
interested in my project, and his only Nazi-ish remark was a polite query why England
wanted so many Jewish children.”501 When British Home Office documents failed to
arrive, Chadwick forged them, counting on the magnanimity of English immigration
officers when the deception was discovered on the children’s arrival.502 Such exploits
might have earned Chadwick a place in the rolls of Kindertransport honor, but his
willingness to work with the Nazis, his checkered military career, neglectful fatherhood,
multiple marriages, and hard living tarnished his image, especially in comparison to his
colleague Winton, who became the iconic avatar of rescue.503 The stories of both
Schonfeld and Chadwick provide ample basis for a Kindertransport counter narrative, but
the literature, little of which has been generated by disinterested scholars, has ignored or
suppressed these perspectives.
In addition to those brought by Winton and Schonfeld, a significant number of
children made it to England in other ways before 1939. The Polish Jewish Refugee Fund
organized the rescue of 154 children from the refugee camp in Żbąszyn. 700 more were
500
Emanuel and Gissing, 97; Trevor Chadwick in Gershon, We Came, 24.
501
Chadwick in Gershon, We Came, 23.
502
Ibid., 24.
503
Emanuel and Gissing, 92-103. Kushner, Remembering, 172.
169
sponsored by Youth Aliyah, a Zionist organization preparing young people for
emigration to Palestine. None of these endeavors was funded or overseen by the RCM
and these children were not included in the official count of 9354 children rescued by
those bodies.504 Although the Kindertransport Association now considers all child
refugees who came to England in the months before the outbreak of war as part of their
number, the fact that there were all these disparate bodies operating independently to
bring unaccompanied children to England speaks strongly to fluid and uncoordinated
nature of the rescue program as a whole.
Both the CBF and the RCM were established as ad hoc organizations and were
disbanded after 1948. Like Winton’s buried scrapbook, many of their records were lost or
destroyed, others stored, abandoned and forgotten until the late 1980s.505 Neither Winton
nor the CBF sought publicity for their work. Outside the parochial Jewish press and the
tight-knit Anglo-Jewish community, little was known about the CBF”s efforts in the
scheme to save Jewish children.506 The children who had come en masse with much
fanfare and attention had been absorbed, dispersed and, as far as anyone was concerned,
had settled happily into new lives. The Kindertransport was lodged in memory as a
benevolent rescue mission, or a “great adventure,” but it vanished from the nation’s
consciousness until the late 1980s. When it re-emerged as a part of British heritage, it
was regarded as an act of generosity deserving of gratitude and immune from censure.
504
Turner, 92, 105. Turner asserts that when all the various rescued children are counted together the
total well exceeds 10,000.
505
Gottlieb, 195, xi.
506
Ibid., xi.
170
Chapter 6
CONCLUSION: THE TRIUMPHANT NARRATIVE
As the train steamed along the Rhine Valley, the river sparkling in the
sunshine, Slovak documentary maker Matej Mináč told his story. He
assembled 22 of the former Winton children in one of the pre-war
carriages for a scene in his new version of the story. "It has all the
qualities of a Hollywood drama," he said between takes. "But this really
happened - Nicholas is a truly remarkable man."507
The reenactment of the Winton train, celebrated in national and international press
reports, represents the latest iteration of a heroic and redemptive narrative about the
Kindertransport that has emerged in the seventy years since those trains carried Jewish
children away from Nazi Europe and into the homes of strangers in England. As the
filmmaker suggests, the story has attained the aura of a feel-good Hollywood drama with
heroes, villains and a happy ending.
A heroicizing myth built upon the singularity of the British response began
forming before the children’s arrival in 1938 and was nurtured in the press and by the
official documents of the refugee organizations throughout the war. Following the war,
the dramatic events of 1938 and 1939 were mostly forgotten, and the Kinder, for a variety
of reasons, maintained silence about their experiences and the circumstances that had
brought them to Great Britain. When the story of the movement re-emerged in public
consciousness in the 1980s, the redemption construct assumed its present form, never
having been challenged by a critical academic study of the child refugee movement.
Robert Hall, “Czech evacuees thank their savior,” BBC News, September 4, 2009, http://news.
bbc.co.uk /2/hi/uk_news/8237231.stm (accessed September 18, 2009).
507
171
The Emerging Myth: 1938-1945
The creation of the redemptive narrative began before the first children arrived, and two
crucial themes emerged in its construction: the assumption that separation was a tragic
but unavoidable consequence of heroic rescue and the suggestion that the parents were
somehow responsible for their own terrible predicament. The language used to
characterize the Kindertransport in press reports and appeals, even those emanating from
the Anglo-Jewish community, sustained the assumption that the parents had somehow
failed in their task, rather than having been abandoned to their fates. A British public
appeal for foster homes emphasized the noble sacrifice of the Jewish parents while
simultaneously deflecting responsibility for their desperate straits. “Heartbreaking
though the separation is, almost all the Jewish parents…wish to send their children away,
even if they can find no refuge for themselves and there is no hope for them in
Germany.”508 There is no suggestion that the parents have been repeatedly denied refuge,
only that they have somehow failed to find it for themselves.
As publicity for the Kindertransport ramped up, the press consistently
emphasized the direness of the situation and boasted about Britain’s role as a safe haven
and champion of the vulnerable. Dramatic tales of sacrifice, intended to stir the British
public’s sympathies, accompanied the announcement of the Kindertransport scheme.
“Save my baby. My husband is in prison. They have taken everything from me,
even my wedding ring. I will part from my child for ever, only help me get her
and my husband out safely.” This is part of a heartrending letter…from a Jewish
“Child Refugees from Germany,” The Times of London, November 25, 1938.
508
172
mother in Vienna…The baby from whom she is willing to part for ever is 11
months old.509
Appeals like these emphasized the desperation of parents, the cruelty of the Nazi
regime and the drama of parental sacrifice. There is no room in this narrative for the
possibility that the parents’ lives were worth saving as well. As the children began to
arrive, florid press reports highlighted the contrast between Britain and Germany,
emphasizing Britain’s promise of liberation from terror. “As the bleak dawn of a winter’s
day broke over England this morning, more than 200 boys and girls…woke from days
and nights of terror and deprivation to a new life that holds for them freedom, happiness
and careers.”510 An article in the Daily Herald contained all the seeds of the nascent
myth: the doomed children, the tragically ill-fated parents, the redemptive rescuers, and
Britain as the beacon of freedom.
Three hundred children will to-day say good-bye to their parents, themselves
unable to leave Germany, and get ready to sail to England, new homes and
liberty…These 300 are the advance guard of the scores of hapless Jewish children
who are to be brought out of Germany, where there is no hope for their future.511
There is no acknowledgment that the parents were prevented from coming to Great
Britain by exclusionary immigration policies. Instead, for reasons the author left
undefined, they were unable to leave. Additionally, emphasizing the hopelessness of the
children’s lives in Germany helped to underscore the role of the rescuers who “brought
A.L.Easterman, “Will Part with Baby for Ever,” Daily Herald, November 23, 1938.
509
“In the Grey December Dawn, 200 Children Seek a Home,” Daily Mail, December 2, 1938.
510
A.L. Easterman, “Parents’ Good-Bye to 300 Children,” Daily Herald, November 28, 1938.
511
173
the children out of Germany” and the image of Britain as savior, promising “new homes
and liberty.”
Members of Parliament, too, used language that reinforced the dual myths that
separation was unavoidable and that England promised benevolent deliverance. In a
major debate on the refugee problem in July 1939, after most of the Kindertransportees
had arrived but before the war began, Parliament broached the issue of adoption. “If a
young child of refugee parents, themselves unable to come, can get away from intolerable
conditions and be brought into this country and make its home here… there should be
some legal machinery by which [adoption] could be possible.”512 Emphasizing the
parents’ refugee status reinforced their powerlessness and sidestepped the truth that the
parents were not allowed to come. Stressing the actions of a benevolent Parliament in
allowing children the opportunity to “get away from intolerable conditions” and the
children’s good fortune in being “brought into this country” by selfless English rescuers,
denied the parents’ agency in saving their own children. The proposal that foster parents
should have the legal right to adopt these Jewish children was a tacit admission that the
parents had been effaced from public consciousness before the war even began.513 An
editorial on the same debate, quoting Lord Dufferin, noted that the Government was
considering “the possibility of absorbing some of the younger children who cannot regain
512
HHL v. 113, 5 July 1939, c. 1033-4. Emphasis added by author
513
HHL v. 113, 5 July 1939, c. 1033-4.
174
their parents in another country.”514 This deft use of language transforms the parents into
lost objects and the not-yet-orphaned children into claimable property.
The Movement’s official documents also supported the assumption that
separation was unavoidable, characterized parents as impotent and their position as
practically hopeless. The Kinder’s parents make their only appearance in the First Annual
Report’s section on Re-Emigration.
Every parent recognised the fact that England was only a temporary refuge. He
knew that he himself would not be allowed to settle permanently in England, and
he therefore first placed his child in safety and then made plans, himself, to escape
from intolerable conditions in Germany…Now war [has made it] increasingly
problematical whether parents will succeed in emigrating to another country…For
the Movement it remains to provide a chance for the children to start a new life in
a new land with the hope that, at some later and happier day, they themselves may
be able to arrange for their parents to follow them.515
In the Movement’s version of events, the ill-fated parents are reduced to dependency
upon their much more fortunate offspring for any hope of the rescue they were unable to
effect for themselves. Elsewhere in the document, the parents are virtually invisible, as if
they had played no part in the process at all. In the extremely detailed account of the
selection and reception of the children, there is only one sentence describing departures.
“When the children received the letter notifying them when to leave, they packed all their
luggage and waited excitedly for the time to arrive.”516
Once the children began arriving, the evolving storyline emphasized the British
government’s magnanimity, the public’s selflessness and charity, and the children’s good
“Settlement of Refugees,” Manchester Guardian, July 7, 1939.
514
515
FAR, 16.
516
Ibid., 7.
175
fortune and contentment. Newsreels of the day showed groups of well-dressed children
disembarking from ships, eating heartily, playing Ping-Pong and even meeting with the
Queen.517 Such films and their narration helped to perpetuate the fiction that the children
were carefree, happy and blessed. Backed by dramatic music, the narrator of one
newsreel proclaimed:
200 boys and girls wave a greeting to England, land of the free…they are between
the ages of 5and 17- the advance guard of the first 5000 Jewish and non-Aryan
child refugees from Germany who have been provided with a temporary home
here while arrangements are made for them to emigrate. Coaches take them to
camp at Dovercourt…and the youngsters tuck in as if they haven’t a care in the
world. What a blessing it is to be young!”518
Feature films such as Children in Exile show scenes of exuberant children boisterously
playing, cooking, having pillow fights, and attending school, all under the watchful eye
of a kindly headmaster in a bucolic setting. The narration proclaims “these youngsters are
some of the lucky ones who managed to get out of their countries before they were
overrun by the Germans.”519 Once again, good fortune and escape are emphasized, and
the parents, a non-presence, receive no credit for relinquishing and thus saving their
children.
The newsreel cameras featured children in group settings, but the press also
covered those who were sponsored in individual foster homes by the generous British
public. “From all parts of Britain and from every class and section of the community
517
British Pathe, “The Queen with Refugees,” 1940? http://www.britishpathe.com/record
.php?id=51819 (accessed November 1, 2010).
British Pathe, “Jewish Child Refugees” video newsreel film, 1938, http://www.britishpathe
.com/record.php?id=84978 (accessed November 1, 2010).
518
Archival footage and sound from Children in Exile (n.d.) in Mináč, Nicholas Winton: The Power of
519
Good.
176
offers of homes have poured in…An engine driver has sent 10s. saying ‘My wife and I
have no children and we will gladly give a home to two. We will bring them up as if they
were our own.’”520 The confident narrative in the early press reports, was the British
public’s lasting impression of the Kindertransport.
Chocolate biscuits are waiting for 300 Jewish children when they arrive at
Dovercourt...on Friday…Each child will get a thick jersey, a single bed and a hot
water bottle…Later they may be sent to volunteer foster parents to be trained as
domestic servants or nurses after which many may rejoin they parents and
emigrate to the colonies.521
Through a steady barrage of such articles and newsreels, the Kindertransport was
transformed into an unblemished exemplar of British decency and moral rectitude.
The emergent narrative was also predicated on a sense of British exceptionalism
in responding uniquely to the refugee crisis of the 1930s. For years, MPs had expressed
concerns that other nations were usurping Britain’s self-perceived role as the most
generous asylum nation, and these concerns continued during the Kindertransport
migration.522 “Britain’s reputation as an asylum has been outstripped by France, Holland,
Belgium and the United States. Interest as well as humanity should ensure that it is
revived,” worried an editorial in July 1939.523 By mid-1940, however, the First Annual
Report of the RCM was able to quantify Britain’s unassailable position atop the “asylum
league tables.”
A.L. Easterman, “Parents’ Good-Bye to 300 Children,” Daily Herald, November 28, 1938.
520
“Chocolate Biscuits for 300 Child Refugees,” Daily Express, November 30, 1938.
521
522
See notes 295 and 296 above.
“Settlement of Refugees,” Manchester Guardian, July 7, 1939.
523
523
FAR, 16.
177
Great Britain has played by far the greatest part in rescuing the persecuted youth
of German. Whereas in July 1939, 7,700 children had been sent to England
unescorted by parents or relatives, 1,850 went to Holland, 800 to Belgium, 700 to
France and 250 to Sweden. The U.S.A….proposed to take 20,000 children, but
nothing has been done…”524
Alluding to the fate of the Wagner-Rogers Bill in the US Congress, the report highlights
America’s failure to match Britain’s generosity to refugee children. This disparity
generated much of Britain’s sense of moral superiority in regards to refugees. It is worth
noting, however, that opponents of the bill in the US argued that it was against the laws
of god and nature to separate families in that way, a concern never publicly expressed in
Parliament or the British press.525
The summer of 1939 revealed the limits of British generosity as the numbers of
Jewish refugees swelled. In response to the results of a public opinion poll, an editorial in
the News Chronicle crowed,
It is one of Britain’s proudest boasts that she has repeatedly offered asylum to the
homeless victims of religious and political persecution. The latest survey…shows
that 70 percent of the British public are in favour of allowing refugees to enter
Great Britain. Unfortunately, there are so many refugees in the world today that
we can offer only limited asylum and the great mass of public opinion is naturally
opposed to unrestricted entry.526
The Daily Express warned that “any large increase in the Jewish population of Britain
would breed antisemitism in this country. The organizations striving to flood Britain with
Jewish refugees should listen to [this] warning…For there is a real anxiety lest the
tradition of tolerance and kindliness is Britain should suffer in consequence of the influx
524
Ibid., 7.
525
Kushner, Remembering, 166 and Turner, 33.
“Public and Refugees,” News Chronicle, July 31, 1939.
526
178
from the continent.”527 While it is apparent that British acceptance was limited when it
concerned certain refugees, the nation clung to its belief it its own magnanimity, a belief
that helped shape national perceptions of the Kindertransport.
As the war drew to a close, Holocaust survivors, including the parents of some of
the Kinder, presented a new refugee crisis for Britain and elicited a fresh round of
exceptionalist claims. A few weeks after the end of hostilities in Europe, under the
headline, “Britain Will Uphold Tradition as Sanctuary for Persecuted,” the Jewish press
reaffirmed that “this country has a long tradition as a sanctuary for the persecuted and
oppressed…” and discussed the prospects for Holocaust survivors desiring admission to
England.528 The Home Secretary stipulated that survivors, including parents of Kinder,
might be admitted if widowed and “in need of filial care.”529 Couples “might be admitted
if because of age or infirmity or other special circumstances they were unable
to…support one another and were offered hospitality by a child…in this country.530
Astonishingly, it appears that Kindertransportees’ surviving parents would have
to prove to immigration officers that they fell into one of these categories before reuniting
with their offspring, whose offers of hospitality were now necessary elements in the
process. These criteria imply a distinctly grudging attitude to parents whom the British
government had forced to make heart-wrenching choices seven years earlier. Still
unwilling, even after the horrors of the Holocaust, to appear to be throwing the door wide
“Warning,” Daily Express, July 7, 1939.
527
“Britain Will Uphold Tradition as Sanctuary for Persecuted,” The Jewish Echo, June 15, 1945.
528
529
Ibid.
530
Ibid.
179
open, the Home Secretary continued , “I think it will be the general desire of the British
people that within the limits imposed by our difficulties the utmost should be done to
maintain this country’s historic tradition of affording asylum to the distressed.”531
Despite the undercurrent of continued exclusion, self-congratulation is the dominant
theme of the Home Secretary’s remarks. Such sentiments dampened criticism of the
overall refugee response and the treatment of the Kinder and their families in particular.
While the Refugee Children’s Movement publications reached a far narrower
audience than the national press, they too engaged in deliberative efforts to blunt
criticism of their part in the Kindertransport scheme. The primary weapon in this
endeavor was the 1944 pamphlet A Great Adventure whose very title imbued the
Kindertransport with an aura of glorious exuberance. The pamphlet conforms to the
standard narrative constructed in 1938: the benevolent British government, the doomed
children, the selfless rescuers and the promise of happiness and freedom for those
fortunate enough to be saved. The author, Gladys Bendit, enumerated the children’s dire
circumstances in Germany citing an increase in child-suicides and “bands of homeless
children, some no more than infants, roaming the countryside” after Kristallnacht.532
“Even the woods around Berlin…were filled with theses pitiful vagrants, cold and often
starving. It was in these circumstances that the Movement began its work.”533 “[O]ffers
of hospitality poured in from people all over this country…anxious to help the most
531
Ibid. Emphasis added by author.
532
Bendit, 3.
533
Ibid., 3-4.
180
helpless and innocent of its victims.”534 Somewhat hyperbolically, Bendit seemed intent
on controlling the narrative as the war wound down and recriminations over the treatment
of refugees loomed.
While her assertions about the children and their sponsors may only slightly
exaggerate the truth, Bendit stretched credibility to the limit in characterizing the work of
the Movement and the role of the government. According to the publication, although the
task “of classifying and investigating these offers and of fitting the right child to each was
a formidable one,” the Movement took the appropriate steps so that “each child should be
placed in a religious and scholastic environment which accorded with the wishes of its
parents.”535 Life in Dovercourt, especially in comparison to “the terrible days of
November” ran smoothly “thanks to the untiring devotion of the camp workers.”536
Bendit, painted a picture not of a humiliating “cattle market,” but an orderly selection
process: “When hosts intimated their willingness to receive a given child, interviews
were arranged at the camps between host and guest, so that a personal relation could be
established and any individual difficulties or antipathies noted.”537 Bendit assured readers
that “The Movement has tried to give to these boys and girls what Germany denied, a
free and normal development in an atmosphere of affection, such as wise and loving
534
Ibid., 4.
535
Ibid., 4-5.
Ibid. The “terrible days of November” is an allusion to Kristallnacht.
536
Ibid., 7. For a description of the “cattle market,” see Chapter 3 above and Turner, 63-4 and 139;
Gershon, We Came, 39-40; Harris and Oppenheimer, 145-6; Sacharin, 51.
537
181
parents would give to children in their own homes.”538 While it is no doubt true that the
Movement succeeded in this endeavor for some of the children, the testimony of the vast
majority stands in stark contrast to this rosy assessment of the Kindertransport. Bendit
also gave the government a free pass, stating that the Home Office regulations, “stringent
as they appear, were not designed for the protection of the British public only…but in the
interests of the…children, who were guaranteed proper care, education and preparation
for earning a livelihood.”539
A Great Adventure was a vigorous defense of the Movement’s handling of the
entire Kindertransport. One third of the pamphlet deals with the religious question and
every effort was made to show that the RCM had acted in the best interests of the
children, even under the difficult circumstances of evacuation and dispersal. Bendit
emphasized that Kinder were encouraged to pursue educational opportunities and not
forced into “blind-alley jobs.”540 In summation, Bendit declared:
[T]he untiring efforts of the Movement’s workers, the natural kindliness of the
public and the humanity and patience of the authorities has restored to a large
number a sense of security in this society…Their zest and pride in the
contribution they are now able to make to this country…is a proof that many of
them have found, not only an abiding place among us, but a spiritual home.
These high sentiments stand in stark contrast to the accounts of neglect, abuse, loneliness,
alienation and rootlessness recorded by so many Kinder, but they do help clarify the
formation of a construct that celebrated rescue and minimized the children’s trauma.
538
Ibid.
539
Ibid., 6.
540
Ibid.
182
In closing, Bendit demonstrated an awareness of the kinds of judgments to which
the Movement, the government and the British people might be subject once the war was
over and the magnitude of the Jewish tragedy became apparent. Eager to frame the efforts
of the RCM as worthy, she short-circuited any critique of the Kindertransport by
reminding readers of the children’s fate had they not been rescued.
In the appalling total of refugees with which post-war Europe will be faced, the
figure of ten thousand is a small one, but each of these ten thousand is a sentient
human being and but for the work of the Movement—imperfect in many respects,
like all human endeavor—these children must have suffered death, or a fate far
more horrible than death…It is not a small thing in these years of suffering
without parallel, to have given to ten thousand children the opportunity to grow
up in an atmosphere of decency and normality, to work, to play, to laugh and be
happy and to assume their rightful heritage as free men and women.541
While it is true that there is heroism in saving ten thousand lives, Bendit absolved the
Movement of any culpability for the children’s traumas by emphasizing rescue and
salvation. In this way, Bendit defined the narrative and deflected criticism of the
Kindertransport, its policies and their implementation. A Great Adventure was
instrumental in propagating the myth that the children’s rescue nullified the suffering
they had experienced after being torn from their parents. The story of the Kindertransport
in the pages of A Great Adventure does not accord with the reality that is exposed in
Kinder testimony. Nevertheless, it remained the Kindertransport’s official and only
history for the next forty-five years.
541
Ibid., 16.
183
The Kinder and Narrative Construction
By the end of the war, the Kindertransport, if it was remembered at all, had become
anchored in British memory as a benevolent rescue mission. The majority of the Kinder,
who were completely unaware that they had been part of a movement involving nearly
10,000 children, had to come to terms with the Holocaust and the death of their families
at the hands of the Nazis. Scattering to all parts of the globe as they reached adulthood,
most pushed their childhood trauma into the background as they created new lives and
families of their own. Representing almost twenty percent of all Jewish refugees but
lacking any sense of group identity, the Kinder were highly unlikely to challenge the
emerging storyline.542
Gratitude was one powerful deterrent to the development of a Kindertransport
counter-narrative. From the outset of their odysseys, parents and foster parents
admonished the children to be compliant, uncomplaining and grateful. Parents sent their
children into the unknown fervently hoping they would find loving homes, and impressed
upon their children the importance of obedience. One woman recalled that her mother,
desperately afraid lest her child be sent back, wrote to her, “You must be quiet. You must
be grateful they took you. You must be very good. You must do all you are asked, and
even read their wishes from their lips before they are said.”543 Milena received a similar
letter from her mother. “One ought to try and like everybody and if you find it difficult,
you must try not to show it. You are there as if you were home, but you are a guest...and
Andrea Hamel, “Representations of Family in Autobiographical Texts of Child Refugees,” Shofar:
An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23, no.1 (2004): 121.
542
543
Leverton and Lowensohn, 197.
184
you must behave accordingly... I’m glad....you’re with such a nice Auntie and Uncle. Be
good, so they continue to like you.”544 It is not difficult to empathize with this helpless
mother, who, having relinquished the raising of her only child to virtual strangers and
anxious that her child should be loved and well cared for, could only exhort her daughter
to be as submissive as possible. In England, refugee workers and caregivers reinforced
the same message. The Chief Rabbi of England, in a letter to all the Kindertransportees,
admonished “Try to be considerate to all the people whom you meet in your new home.
Behave quietly and politely to everyone.”545 In Ruth Barnett’s words, “[t]hese
children...wanted to be ‘just like the other children.’ They...had a desperate wish to be
accepted... they did not make waves, fitting in as well as they could.”546
Many former child refugees looked back with bitterness on the admonition that
they keep their unhappiness shrouded.
I remember they even taught us a...little Yiddish song called, “Be Merry.” The
whole object was to stuff your feelings, not to talk to people about what was
hurting you...In other words, put a phony face on everything and don’t show other
people your pain, because they won’t understand your pain...The implication was
they won’t like you because they won’t know how to deal with it.547
As another Kind observed, “The effect of this taboo on Kindertransportees was that they
should avoid questioning, and they did so. This was how the "collective silence" was
544
Roth, 94.
Chief Rabbi’s Letter, Sixtieth Anniversary of the Kindertransport 1939-1999, London, 1999 in
document collection 1350,Wiener Library, 1999.
545
Ruth Barnett, “The Acculturation of the Kindertransport Children: Intergenerational Dialogue on
the Kindertransport Experience,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23, no.1 (2004):
101.
546
547
Irene Reti and Valerie Jean Chase, eds., A Transported Life: Memories of the Kindertransport, the
Oral history of Thea Feliks Eden, (Santa Cruz: Her Books, 1995), 42.
185
created and maintained for so long.”548 As a result, many, perhaps most, of the
Kindertransport children experienced what survivor Paul Hart described in a 1997
interview. “It’s only...in the last two years that I’ve really let my mind come to again.
Until then, I had a sort of brick wall around me... A lot of it is...still locked away
somewhere in the back of my mind and doesn’t really want to come out.”549
Even had the Kinder been inclined to reveal their pain, no one asked them to
discuss their experiences or share their stories until Karen Gershon sent out her
questionnaires in 1965. Gershon’s decision to publish the Kinder’s reflections
anonymously allowed the respondents much greater freedom to express the distresses
they had endured as child refugees, and continued to endure as they matured. Anonymity
obviated the necessity for the Kinder to maintain the cautions often observed in attributed
accounts and since the anthology did not come about as a result of a physical reunion of
the Kinder, there were none of the celebratory overtones of the later works. In fact, these
accounts are considerably more honest about the effects of separation, even when the
obligatory gratitude was expressed.
Over the years life for me has not changed very much, I am still single and not
happy in my way of life, which is...due to my difficulty getting on with people. ...I
feel that all this has been brought on by the fact that I came to England at an early
age and was separated from and later lost my family. This is, of course not the
fault of England, to which country I am very grateful...550
Barnett, “Acculturation,” 101-2.
548
549
Paul Hart, Interview 33039, VHA (1997).
550
Gershon, We Came, 155.
186
While their accounts are suffused with suffering, it is clear that most of Gershon’s
respondents were still gripped by the imperative to be grateful above all else. It is
arguable that at least part of Gershon’s intent was to challenge the “great adventure”
narrative, but the respondents’ anonymity militated against that impulse. Raw and
powerful as they were, these remembrances did little to counteract the story told in A
Great Adventure. Framed within the context of the wider Holocaust experience, the
Kinder’s experiences only tended to reinforce the safe and nationally comforting tale. As
a reviewer wrote of Gershon’s book in 1966, “Over here they froze…Often they were
treated as servants…Still, they lived. Brothers and sisters who stayed behind were made
into fertilizer at Auschwitz.”551
Viewing the Kindertransport through the lens of Auschwitz silenced the Kinder
and made them reluctant to recognize themselves or to be recognized by others as
Holocaust survivors. They had lived out the war in relative safety, decently fed and
housed. Most were spared the trauma of deportation, and none suffered the privations and
horror of ghettoes, forced labor, extermination camps and death marches. At the end of
the war, these young adults had to cope with the knowledge that their families, loved
ones and friends had lived through or died under unspeakable circumstances.
Consequently, the very real traumas experienced by the Kinder seemed at the time minor
by comparison and they remained silenced by shame.552 In the narrative of the “great
adventure,” the children’s rescue annulled the traumas they experienced once in England.
John Carey, “Digging in the Sand,” New Statesman, May 20, 1966 quoted in Kushner,
Remembering, 167.
551
Kröger, “Child Exiles,” 16.
552
187
Compared to those who had survived or perished in the Holocaust, the Kinder were the
children to whom nothing happened; who had been saved and lived happily ever after.
Many years later, Ruth (Michaelis) Barnett recognized this version of the events that had
changed her life. “[N]ews reels of the time [tell] a romanticized story of rescue—selected
clips of smiling children carried by or holding the hands of kindly policemen—that has
entered the factual history of the Holocaust. As far as I know, this news item was
dropped. Children brought to safety—end of story.553 However, as she confirmed, “it was
not the end of the story for the Kindertransport children,” insisting that all “were deeply
and irrevocably affected.”554
The effect of this mind-set is demonstrated in Kinder testimony. Thela Feliks
Eden, who survived deportation in October 1938 from Cologne, Germany to a refugee
camp in Żbąszyn, Poland, arrived in England the week the war began. After the war she
lived in Israel among child camp survivors, and despite having survived harrowing
experiences of her own, she revealed, “they put us in separate categories because we had
been ‘safe’ in England. ‘Safe.’ We were really not victims because we were not really in
concentration camps during the war. So what did we know, really...These were
distinctions that became very problematic for me.”555 The distinctions Thea Eden noted
still inhibit objective discussion of the children’s losses. Few Kinder are as outspoken as
Barnett, “Acculturation,”101.
553
554
Ibid.
555
Reti and Chase, 70-71.
188
Eden, and most Kinder qualify their suffering by comparing it with those who endured
greater privations.
Many factors account for the Kinder’s fifty-year silence, but it ended
resoundingly with the first reunion of the Kindertransport. The reunion coincided with
the deaths of many of the older camp survivors and the Kinder were now able to “come
out from under the shadow of Auschwitz survivors.”556 The first reunion was an
exhilarating moment when the child refugees could recapture “just a piece of our
childhood which the Nazi regime had denied us.”557 The reunion marked the beginning of
a collective memory, and as the Kinder began to compare memories they had to confront
those aspects of their lives they had suppressed and forgotten. In the words of one of the
participants, “Perhaps it is only now that we can look properly at what happened then
without shying away from the thoughts and feelings...that were too frightening or
unacceptable to be allowed at the time...Angry, hateful feelings were out of the question,
protest was unthinkable.”558
The reunion resulted in the first collective autobiography to appear since Karen
Gershon’s volume twenty-five years earlier, although the two works are markedly
different. Compared to the anonymous responses in Gershon’s volume, these attributed
accounts render difficult events more guardedly.559 Most of the respondents, constrained
Rebekka Göpfert, “Kindertransport: History and Memory,” trans. Andrea Hammel. Shofar: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23, no.1 (2004): 24.
556
557
Anne Fox, My Heart in a Suitcase, (London: Valentine Mitchell, 1996), 150.
558
Ibid., 213.
559
Leverton and Lowensohn, 249.
189
by lifetimes of gratitude and guilt were unwilling to offer a broad indictment of the
program that was their salvation, although a few reminiscences hint at conflicted
gratitude. One Kind noted: “Of my years in England, there is not much more to say. I was
not consciously unhappy, but the lack of family life has left scars...I have no complaint. I
owe the organizers of the Kindertransport my life.”560 A woman whose family perished
wrote nothing about her stay in England except, “My brother and I lived in England
throughout the war in relative safety and at least our physical needs were met.”561
Constrained by guilt or begrudging gratitude, the omissions in these statements speak
volumes about the emotional damage of the Kindertransport experience without openly
challenging the myth that the Kinder lived happily ever after. Taken as a whole, however,
the accounts in this volume, which with few exceptions remain on the level of
consciously mediated common memory, tend to support a celebratory story of rescue and
triumph for the Kindertransport.
Few Kinder attempt in their own memoirs to comment on the movement as a
whole or to proffer opinions of the policies that separated them from their parents or the
organizations that oversaw their care. Rare is the bitter honesty of Annette Saville who
asserts in her memoir, “Most of us would rather have died with our parents in
concentration camps, or, in my case, gone to Shanghai with them. The Jewish belief is
that children’s lives must be saved, but not at the cost of psychological damage, thank
560
Ibid., 149.
561
Ibid., 196.
190
you very much!”562 Like Annette’s, Robert Sugar’s parent survived, and he too agreed
that separation had been a mistake. “We were four friends, very close friends….the only
serious conversation we ever had, we all agreed, if it ever happened again, we will not
send away our children, we will stay together no matter what…As we grew older...we
said: if it ever happens again, we promise to take each other’s children in, we will not
send them to strangers.”563 In contrast, most Kinder memoirs, interested in exploring only
one child’s life, affirmatively support the image of Britain as a place of hospitality and
salvation and do little to challenge the dominant interpretations.
The legacy of the Kindertransport as a triumphant moment in British heritage is
most visibly represented by the memorials to the movement erected after its sixtieth
anniversary. The message of these monuments is unambiguous. Erected by the grateful
Kinder community in prominent spaces by which thousands pass daily, the memorials
honor the British self-image of generosity and exceptionalism. Most visible is the
sculpture group placed on the concourse of the Liverpool Street railway station. Featuring
five charming well-dressed children with suitcases and toys surveying their new
surroundings with expressions that can be read as somber, bemused, determined and even
joyful, the sculpture conveys a specific message of rescue that is reinforced by the
explanatory plaques. The plaque on a wall behind the statue informs the reader that he is
in “Hope Square: Dedicated to the children of the Kindertransport who found hope and
safety in Great Britain through the gateway of Liverpool Street Station.” The plaque on
562
Annette Saville, Only a Kindertransportee, (London: New Millennium, 2002), 323.
563
Harris and Oppenheimer, 252.
191
the memorial itself reads “Children of the Kindertransport: In gratitude to the people of
Britain for saving the lives of 10,000 unaccompanied mainly Jewish children who fled
from Nazi persecution in 1938 and 1939.”564
Both the sculpture and the plaques express an uncomplicated message of salvation
and redemption. Innocent children, saved from persecution by the British people found
hope and safety in Great Britain, which now rightfully receives their gratitude. The
parents’ sacrifice is unrecorded, and their presence is only obliquely hinted at by the
phrase “unaccompanied…children.” In this version of events, the children were not saved
by their parents’ painful sacrifice, but fled on their own volition into the welcoming
embrace of the British nation. The words on this plaque, erected in 2006, echo those of
the first commemorative memorial to the Kindertransport, placed on a wall of
Westminster Palace in 1999. “In deep gratitude to the people and Parliament of the
United Kingdom for saving the lives of 10,000 Jewish and other children who fled to this
country from Nazi persecution on the Kindertransport 1938-1939.” This inscription
acknowledges another actor in the Kindertransport drama, but it is not the parents.
Instead, Parliament is honored with deep gratitude for its part in saving the lives of the
children. The narrative of Viscount Cranbourne and not Herbert Samuel has won the day.
The rescued children give the gratitude Cranboune believed Britain deserved, while the
bitterness Samuel predicted has been suppressed and forgotten.565
564
The Association for Jewish Refugees (AJR) and Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief
(CBF) are responsible for the inscriptions and plaques.
565
HHL, vol. 138, col, 499, 10 Dec. 1945.
192
Summary
The national myth that has attached itself to Britain’s child rescue efforts, nurtured for
decades by the government and the rescue organizations and largely unchallenged by the
Kinder or academia, makes the Kindertransport a remarkably difficult subject to analyze
critically. The notion that the Kindertransport is an unqualified exemplar of British
magnanimity demands a narrative that begins with 10,000 lives saved. This essentially
false construct commences with the outcome of the story, and has the effect of blunting
and suppressing criticism of the program and inhibiting inquiry into the inception of the
scheme.
The British government recognized before 1938 that all Jews in the German Reich
were in grave danger, yet it decided to bring only unaccompanied children to safety,
abandoning the parents to their fates. Both the parents and the objects of rescue paid
dearly for that decision, as the costs of separation were high. Approaching the
Kindertransport from this context, it is essential, as Debórah Dwork has suggested, to ask
only one question: “Why was this allowed to happen?” Simply because 10,000 lives were
saved should not exempt the British government and the rescue organizations from
scrutiny. As Dwork has noted, “The treatment of the innocent and the protection of the
powerless are, after all, key issues with which we can understand and judge a society.”566
The lives of 10,000 children were irreparably altered by the British government’s
decision to spare them but sacrifice their parents. For this, and the failure to oversee this
566
Debórah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe, (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1991), 256.
193
enormous undertaking, the government must bear the brunt of blame. The cascade of
missteps and omissions that flowed from this decision all compounded the fundamental
tragedy of separation. The rescuers, good hearted and well-intentioned all, played their
parts in the tragedy. Yet the full story of the Kindertransport has not been told. The
existing interpretation oversimplifies the story of the Kindertransport, denies the Kinder
the legitimacy of their own experience and impedes objective analysis of the events and
people that created and administered the program.
Everyone involved in the Kindertransport had reason to skew the narrative
towards the redemptive and the celebratory. The government was not eager to examine its
massive failure to enact a more humanitarian immigration policy in the critical years of
the 1930s. Faced with the enormous tragedy of the Holocaust, the defensive assertion that
Britain had done more for Jews than any other country, whether objectively true or not,
became the officially sanctioned interpretation. The fact that such an assertion was based
on comparison with the even less generous responses of its neighbors and allies, most of
whom lacked the colonial or land resources of Great Britain was lost in a wave of selfcongratulatory exceptionalism. The Kinder themselves spent the majority of their lives
suppressing their own guilt, anguish and anger, afraid to appear ungrateful for the
lifesaving opportunity they were offered. The rescuers and their chroniclers resorted to
rationalizing the lapses, inadequacies and failures of the program lest the distressing
consequences of those failures call into question the validity and purpose of their wellmeaning and difficult work.
194
Looking at the Kindertransport dispassionately, it is clear that the entire concept
was tragically flawed; nevertheless, flawed as the concept was and imperfectly as it was
administered, the impulse to save the most vulnerable members of a threatened society
was a laudable one. The tragic dichotomy at the heart of the Kindertransport story is this:
in those few months of 1938 and 1939 there were thousands of parents standing on
railway platforms in Berlin and Vienna, Hamburg and Danzig, Cologne and Stuttgart,
Hanover and Prague, hugging their children for perhaps the last time. Through their pain,
they may have cursed a pitiless world for compelling them to make such a cruel decision
in order to save their children -- and in the same breath, they must have thanked England
for giving them the chance to do so. That, in the end, is both the tragedy and the
redemption of the Kindertransport.
195
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