The Kindertransport: History and Memory

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

HISTORY

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, SACRAMENTO

FALL 2010

THE KINDERTRANSPORT: HISTORY AND MEMORY

A Thesis

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

Abstract

THE KINDERTRANSPORT: HISTORY AND MEMORY

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

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

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

1―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).

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

2Muriel 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).

3Mark 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.

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

4Stephen 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-war- 2/6138441/ 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-kids- recreate-train-trip/tabid/423 /articleID/119856/Default.aspx (accessed September 29, 2009).

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

5It 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

6Louise 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

7Ibid., 121.

8Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23, no.1 (2004) was dedicated entirely to aspects of the Kindertransport.

9Caroline 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.

10Leonard Smith, ―Thank God for the Kindertransport,‖ Letters to the editor, History Today 54, issue 5, (2004): 92.

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 ‗no- parent‘ 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

11Amnon 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).

12Phyllis 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.

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,

13Tony 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.

14Christopher 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).

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

15Ellen Kerry Davis, Interview 32914, Visual History Archive, (USC Shoah Foundation Institute, 1996). (Hereafter VHA); Leverton and Lowensohn, 63.

16Anonymous, Living Memory of the Jewish Community British Library National Sound Archive National Life Story Collection, Ref. No.: C410/007, 1988.

17Dorit Bader Whiteman, The Uprooted: A Hitler Legacy, (New York: Plenum Press, 1993), 108, 130, 135, 147-9, 157, 182, 216-17, 223.

18Milena Roth, Lifesaving Letters: A Child’s Flight from the Holocaust, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004),

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

19Roth, 123.

20Marianne 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.

21Emanuel 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

22The Kindertransport Association, http://www.kindertransport.org/history09_FAQ.htm (accessed September 20, 2009).

23Originally 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

24Paula 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.

25Hill, 159; Sharples, ―Reconstructing the Past.‖ 41.

26Norman Bentwich, They Found Refuge: An account of British Jewry’s work for victims of Nazi oppression, (London: Cresset Press, 1956).

27Ibid., 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

28Ibid., 66, 73.

29Ibid., 74.

30Ibid.

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

31Lord 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.

32, Barry Turner, …And the Policeman Smiled: 10,000 Children Escape Nazi Germany, ( London: Bloomsbury, 1990).

33Hill, 2,3,5, 159 and Sharples, ‗Reconstructing,‖ 41.

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,

34Ibid., 2-3.

35Ibid., 32.

36Ibid., 21, 48-9.

37Ibid., 124.

―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

38See for example, Turner, Chapter 7, ―Home from Home.‖

39Gottlieb, 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

40Whiteman, 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).

41Iris 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.

42Kushner, Remembering, 141-180.

43Ibid., 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

44There 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.

45David 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.

46Ibid., 11.

47Alan Gill, Interrupted Journeys: Young Refugees from Hitler’s Reich, (Sydney: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 156.

48Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews 1933-1946 (New York: Norton, 2009), 164-84.

49Ibid., 168.

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

50Caroline Sharples, ―Kindertransport,‖ History Today and ―Reconstructing the Past,‖ Holocaust Studies.

51Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23, no.1 (2004): 28-40.

52Susan 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.

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

53Ute 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.

54Kushner, 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.

55Jack Gilbert, ed., Unaccompanied Child Refugees: Have the Lessons Been Learnt? (London: Jewish Council for Racial Equality, 2001), 4.

56Ibid., 5.

57Glibert,14; Kushner, Remembering, 170.

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.

58Karen Gershon, ed., We Came as Children: A Collective Autobiography of Refugees, (London: Victor Gollancz, 1966).

59Ibid, preface, n.p

60Kushner, Remembering, 161.

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

61Harris 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).

62Leverton 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).

63Ibid. 145.

64Ibid., 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 .

65Ibid. 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.

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

66 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.

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).

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

68Karen Gershon, Collected Poems, (London: Paperrmac, 1990), 22-3.

69Ibid., 166, 39.

70Gershon, 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

71Gershon, We Came, 19; Leverton and Lowensohn, 57, 95, 99, 149; Whiteman, 146-7, 153-4.

72Leverton and Lowensohn, 15-16.

73Ibid., 134.

74Ibid., 157, 62, 95, 112.

75Gershon, 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

76Leverton and Lowensohn, 154.

77Ibid., 40.

78Ibid., 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.

80See 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.

82Ibid., 278, Harris and Oppenheimer, 111.

83Ibid., 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.

84Leverton and Lowensohn., 24.

85Gershon, 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.

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

86Gershon, We Came, 26. The father‘s health had been destroyed by a stint in Dachau after Kristallnacht.

87One 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.

88Ibid., 49. Also 76,79, 115, 243,248, 268. See also Harris, 105-6.

89Ibid., 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

90Leverton and Lowensohn, 138.

91Ibid., 162.

92Ibid., 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.

93Ibid., 114. Also, 146-7, 154; Harris and Oppenheimer, 99-103.

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

94Gershon, Collected, 24.

95Whiteman, 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,

96Movement 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.

97Gershon, 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.

100Gershon, We Came 31-36.

101Sacharin, 51.

102Gershon, 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

103Ibid., 36.

104Diane Samuels,. Kindertransport. (New York: Plume, 1995), xiv.

105Ibid., xii-xiii.

106Ibid. 33.

107Jacob Newman, Kinderertransporte: A Study of Stresses and Traumas of Refugee Children, (London, 1992), 69-70.

108Ibid., 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

109Gershon, We Came, 39-40. See also Harris and Oppenheimer, 145-6.

110Harris and Oppenheimer, 146.

111Sacharin, 51.

112Gershon, 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:

113Ibid., 40.

114Ralph Samuel, personal interview with author, August 2010.

115Nora Danzig, Interview 18654, VHA (1996).

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 loving- kindness, the simplicity of a good family relationship…and motherly guidance…to this

116Leverton and Lowensohn, 167.

117Henry Kreisel, Interview 16930 VHA (1996).

118Gershon, We Came 59.

119Ibid., 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

120Leverton and Lowensohn, 298.

121 Ibid., 40.

122 Ibid., 96.

123Harris and Oppenheimer, 207.

124Leverton 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

125Ibid., 331.

126Leverton and Lowensohn, 331

127Lorraine Allard, Interview 39689, VHA (1998).

128Nora Danzig, Interview 18654, VHA (1996).

129Gershon We Came, 57-8. Slightly different versions in Turner, 115 and Whiteman ,241.

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.

130Leverton and Lowensohn, 293.

131Harry Bebring, Interview 32914, VHA (1997).

132Gershon We Came, 59

―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

133Harris and Oppenheimer, 212.

134Ellen Fletcher, response to author‘s questionnaire.

135Ibid., 207-8.

―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

136Leverton and Lowensohn, 120-121.

137Sacharin, 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

138Eve Soumerai, Interview 25315, VHA (1996).

139Whiteman, 214.

140Gershon We Came, 151.

141Ibid., 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

142Hedy 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

143Whiteman, 259-261. See also Turner, 120 and Leverton and Lowensohn, 214.

144Whiteman, 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

145Ibid., 218-219.

146Leverton and Lowensohn, 59.

147Ibid., 59-60.

148Roth, 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

149Ibid., 81, 87.

150Roth, 119-121.

151Ibid., 112.

152Ibid., 122-3.

153Ibid., 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

154Leverton and Lowensohn, 50.

155Henry Kreisel, Interview 16930, VHA (1996).

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.

156Turner, 248.

157Ibid., 249.

158Ibid.

159Ibid.

160Gershon, We Came, 147.

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.

161Harris and Oppenheimer, 202.

162Ibid., 203.

163Gershon, We Came, 65

164Ibid.

165Ibid., 66.

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-year- old 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

166Ellen Kerry Davis, Interview 14724, VHA (1996).

167Ibid.

168Leverton and Lowensohn, 13; Harris and Oppenheimer, 123, and Turner 119.

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

169Harry Bebring, Interview 32914, VHA (1997).

170Harris and Oppenheimer, 147.

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

171Ibid., 210.

172Ibid., 169. See also Gershon, We Came, 65. Although unattributed, the account is almost certainly Bertha Leverton‘s.

173Sacharin, 51-2.

174Ibid., 58.

175Gershon, 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).

177Ibid. 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.

178Paul Hart, Interview 33039, VHA (1997).

179Harris and Oppenheimer, 138-139.

180Sacharin, 67-68.

―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).

181Leverton and Lowensohn, 12.

182Ibid., 19-20.

183Leverton and Lowensohn, 20.

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

184Ibid., 112

185Ibid., 113.

186Gershon, We Came, 62.

187Turner, 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

188Harris and Oppenheimer, 230.

189Whiteman, 227.

190Turner, 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

191Jeremy 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.

192Harris 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,

193Leverton and Lowensohn, 183.

194Gershon, 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.

195Ellen Fletcher, response to author‘s questionnaire, October 2010.

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

196Turner, 125-127.

197Ibid., 131.

198Ibid., 228-9.

199Central 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.

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

200Leverton and Lowensohn, 175.

201Ibid., 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,

202Harris and Oppenheimer, 204.

203Leverton and Lowensohn, 267.

204Ibid., 20.

205Ibid.

206Gershon, We Came, 84.

207Ibid., 84

―[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

208Harris and Oppenheimer, 136.

209Ibid.

210Leverton and Lowensohn, 127.

211Whiteman, 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

212Ibid.

213Leverton and Lowensohn, 254.

214Ibid.

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

215Leverton and Lowensohn, 65.

216Ibid.

217Sacharin, 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

218Harris and Oppenheimer, 171.

219Sacharin, 34.

220Harris 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

221Ibid., 181.

222Sacharin, 52.

223Paul Zell, Interview 44405, VHA (1996).

224Harris 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

225Leverton and Lowensohn, 114.

226Ralph Samuel, interview with author, August 2010.

227Paul Zell, Interview 44405, VHA (1998).

228Paul 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

229Gershon, We Came, 51-2.

230Gershon, We Came, 56.

231Harris and Oppenheimer, 135.

232Ibid., 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

233Ibid., 138.

234Gershon, We Came, 56.

235Leverton 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

236Ibid.

237Ibid., 113.

238Leverton and Lowensohn, 113.

239Ibid.

240Sacharin, 80-81.

241Turner, 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.

242Ibid., 191.

243Ibid.

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

244Gershon We Came, 40. For confirmation that this quote is from Lise, see Gershon, A Tempered Wind, 41.

245Gershon, 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

246Sacharin, 58-9.

247Ralph Samuel, interview with author.

248Sacharin, 18-19.

249Turner also makes this point in Chapter 10, ‗Willingly to School,‖ 202.

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

250Leverton and Lowensohn, 226.

251Ellen Fletcher, response to author‘s questionnaire, September 2010; Ellen Fletcher essay, War Stories Project, n.d.

252Lorraine Allard, Interview 39689, VHA (1998).

253Gershon, 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

254Ibid., 98.

255Ibid., 119.

256Ibid., 99.

257Sacharin, 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.

258Harry Bebring, Interview 32914, VHA (1997).

259Leverton and Lowensohn, 66.

260Gershon, We Came, 119.

The Consequences of Separation

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

261Gershon, Collected, 22.

262Gershon, 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

263Sacharin, 19.

264Ibid., 159.

265Herbert 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

266Ibid., 229.

267Gershon, We Came, 114.

268Ibid.

269Harris 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

270Whiteman, 266.

271Gershon, We Came, 116.

272Ibid., 115.

273Ibid.

274Ibid., 117.

In an effort to recreate what was lost, a number of Kinder made hasty or ill- advised 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

275Gershon, Tempered Wind, 134.

276Ellen Fletcher, response to author‘s questionnaire.

277Leverton 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

278Gershon. We Came, 70.

279Ibid.,71.

280Ibid.,150.

281Author‘s conversation with Helga Newman, Marie Donner and Stephanie Smith, September 2010.

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

282Harris and Oppenheimer, 136.

283Karen Gershon, We Came as Children, reprint edition, (London: Papermac, 1989), preface, n.p.

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 non-

Jewish, 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.

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

285Tony 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.

286Hansard, 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.

288HHC v. 274, 21 February 1933, c. 1597-8.

289 London, 8-10.

290HHC v. 276, 12 April 1933, c. 2557-8.

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

291HHC v. 336, 18 May 1938, c. 379-80.

292HHC v. 275, 9 March 1933, c. 1351-2.

293Hansard, House of Lords v. 95, 6 February 1935, c. 837. (Hereafter HHL).

294HHC 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

295HHC v. 276, 12 April 1933, c. c. 2557-8.

296HHC v. 280, 5 July 1933, c. 390-1.

297HHC v. 333, 22 March 1938, c. 1005.

298HHC 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

299HHC v. 333, 22 March 1938, c.991-2.

300HHC v. 275, 9 March 1933, c. 1352. HHC v. 276, 11 April 1933, c. 2360-1.

301One historian went so far as to call Doran ―an out-and-out anti-Semite.‖ Geoffrey Alderman, Modern British Jewry, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 184.

302London, 276.

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

303HHC v. 310, 19 March 1936, c.592.

304HHC 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.

305London, 9.

306HHC 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

307London, 38-9. See Chapter 4 below for a more complete discussion of this issue.

308Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, (London: MacMillan, 1981), 393-402.

309HHL v. 95, 6 February 935, c. 823-4.

310HHC v. 341, 21 November 1938, c 1468.

311London, 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

312Ibid., 277.

313Ibid., 14-5.

314Ibid., 87.

315HHC v. 281, 16 November 1933, c. 1132-1133.

316HHC 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

317London, 28-9.

318HHC v. 336, 23 May 1938, c 835-6.

319HHC 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

320HHL v. 110, 27 July 1938, c.1243-4.

321HHC 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

322HHC 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.‖

323HHC v. 338, 29 July 1938, c. 3557-8, also, HHL v.110, 27, c. 1229-30.

324HHC v.110, 27, c. 1245-6.

325HHC 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

326HHC v. 276, 3 April 1933, c. 1420-1.

327HHC v. 334, 12 April 1938, c. 943-5.

328HHC v. 334, 12 April 1938, c. 945-6.

329HHC 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 9-

10, 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 Wasserstein, 18.

331HHC 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.

332HHC 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.

333HHC v, 341, 14 November 1938, c. 504-6.

334HHC v, 341, 14 November 1938, c. 504-6. Emphasis added by author.

335HHC 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

336London, 100-105.

337Ibid., 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

338HHC 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

339HHC v. 341, 21 November 1938, c.1473-5.

340HHC 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.

341HHC v. 310, 24 March 1936, c. 1100-01.

342HHL v. 110, 27 July 1938, c. 1231-2.

343―Thousands of German Jewish Children Coming Here: Offered English Homes,‖ Evening News, November 22, 1938.

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.

344HHC 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

345HHC v. 341, 21 November 1938, c. 1473-4.

346Kushner 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

347Ibid., 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.)

348Ibid.

349Ibid., 61.

350Refugee 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.

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,

351Ibid., 105-9.

352Ibid., 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.

353HHC v. 362, 2 July 1940, c. 699-760.

354HHC v. 362, 2 July 1940, c 804-5.

355HHC 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

356HHC v. 341, 24 November 1938, c. 1928-30.

357HHC v. 341, 24 November 1938, c. 1928-30

358HHC v. 342, 28 November 1938, c. 21-22.

359HHC v. 342, 28 November 1938, c. 21-22.

360HHC 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

361HHC v. 341, 24 November 1938 c. 1928-9.

362HHC v. 341, 24 November 1938 c. 1928-30.

363HHC v. 342, 8 December 1938, c. 1345-6.

364HHC 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

365HHC v. 345, 17 March 1939, c.1987-8. This figure represents a current value of at least 2,000- 4,000 GBP, a substantial financial burden for all but the wealthy to bear.

366HHC 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.‖

367HHL 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

368HHL v. 113, 5 July 1939, c. 1033-4.

369HHL 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

370HHC v. 342, 28 November 1938, c. 18-22.

371For 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).

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

372HHL v. 113, 5 July 1939, c. 1047-8.

373HHC 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

374HHC v. 365, 7 November 1940, c 1512-13. Refugee Children‘s Movement, Third Annual Report 1941-42, (London: Bloomsbury House, 1942), 1-2.

375Gottlieb, 131-133.

376HHL, 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

377Gottlieb, 64.

378Wasserstein, 42.

379Kushner, 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

380Phyllis Lassner, Anglo-Jewish Women, 8.

381HHL, vol. 138, col, 509, 10 Dec. 1945.

382HHL, 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

383HHC 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,

384Sam 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/ article- 1211245/British-Schindler-welcomes-steam-train-carrying-evacuees-helped-escape-Holocaust- children.html#ixzz13PuUoo5z.(accessed October 10, 2009).

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 Anglo-

Jewry 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

385Amy 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.

386Gottlieb, 2-3; Sybil Oldfield, ―It is Usually She,‖ 57.

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,

387Gottlieb, 2-3.

388Paula Hill, ―Anglo-Jewry and the Refugee Children 1938-1945,‖(PhD. diss., Royal Holloway University of London, 2001), 9, 159.

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

390Wasserstein, 317. For specific antisemitic statements and a discussion of antisemitism on the Home Front see pages 42, 45-6, 73-119, 316.

391Wasserstein, 317.

392Richard Bolchover, British Jewry and the Holocaust, (Cambridge: University Press 1993), 103, 113.

393London, 6, 39. For evidence that this specific fear persisted throughout the war see the quote of Driberg in Wasserstein, 115.

394Gottlieb,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 Anglo-

Jewish 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

395Gottlieb, 9.

396Ibid.

397Ibid., 10.

398Ibid., 13.

399Ibid.,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

400Ibid., 14.

401Ibid., 14.

402Ibid., 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

403Ibid., 53-59.

404Ibid., 51-58.

405Ibid., 56.

406Ibid., 53.

407Ibid., 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

408Bolchover, 54-55.

409Gottlieb, 2.

410Ibid., 31, 32-33; Hill, 242-3.

411Gottlieb, 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

412Ibid.

413Although 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.

414Ibid., 33.

415HHC 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,

416A 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.

417Wasserstein, 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

418HHC v. 345, 06 April 1939 c.3048.

419Gottlieb, 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.

420Ibid.,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 Anglo-

Jewish 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 Anglo-

Jewish 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

421Ibid.,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.

422Ibid., 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

423Ibid., 107.

424Hill, 16.

425Gottlieb, 107.

426Kushner, 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

427John Presland [Gladys Bendit], A Great Adventure: The Story of the Children’s Refugee Movement, (London: RCM, 1944), 8. (hereafter Bendit).

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

428Gershon, 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

429Gottlieb, 101. Emphasis added by author.

430Gottlieb 107. Bendit, 2. In 1940, this body was renamed the Refugee Children‘s Movement (RCM or the Movement).

431―The Settlement of Refugees,‖ Manchester Guardian, July 7, 1939.

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 non- guaranteed 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

432For 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.

433Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, First Annual Report: November 1938- December 1939, (London: MCCG, 1940), 4. (Hereafter, FAR ).

434Gershon, We Came, 21-23. Account of rescuer Trevor Chadwick.

435Gottlieb, 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

436Gershon, We Came, 31-39.

437FAR, 3.

438Ibid.8.

439Ibid., 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

440Ibid. 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.‖

441Ibid., 7.

442In 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

443Ibid.,10.

444Ibid., 14.

445Ibid. 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

446Ibid., 4.

447Ibid., 11.

448Ibid.,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.

449Newman, 130.

450Newman, 12.

451SAR, 3.

452FAR, 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

453Executive 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.

454Ibid., 8.

455Ibid., 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. Can child be maintained until it is 18? 2. Does befriender realize there is no financial assistance? 3. Does befriender realize that parents…may claim child at any time? 4. Is a maid kept? 5. What would be the sleeping arrangements for the child? 6. Religious training available for the child? 7. General views on the upbringing of children? 8. 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

456Ibid., 10-11.

457Ibid., 11.

458Ibid.

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

459Ibid., 17. Emphasis added by author.

460Ibid., 16.

461Ibid.

462Ibid.

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 non- denominational 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

463FAR, 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

464Ibid.

465SAR, 6.

466Oldfield, ―‘It is Usually She,‖ in Shofar , 68.

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

467CBF, 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.

468The 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).

469Ibid., 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

470Ibid., 2.

471Ibid., 4.

472Ibid., 5.

473Turner, 135. The religious question is the subject of his chapter ―Divided Loyalties,‖ 235-259.

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

474Bendit, 5.

475Hill, 242.

476Gottlieb, 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

477Hill, 149.

478SAR, 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

479Nicholas 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.

480Winton, 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.

481Winton, 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

482Winton, Doreen Warriner to Miss Layton. January 20, 1939. Winton, Saving the Children.

87Letter Margaret Layton to Nicholas Winton, May 24, 1939 Winton, Saving the Children ; Emanuel and Gissing, 127.

484Emanuel 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

485Mináč, Nicholas Winton: The Power of Good.

486Winton, Undated report. Winton, Saving the Children.

487Emanuel and Gissing, 88.

488Emanuel, and Gissing and Mináč ,Nicholas Winton: The Power of Good.

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 co- founder of the Inter-aid committee and wife of Central Committee member Francis

489Kushner, 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).

490Hill, 92.

491Leverton and Lowensohn, 187-8. See also Turner, 21.

492Ibid., 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).

494Oldfield, ―It is Usually She,‖ 68. For an extended discussion of A Great Adventure, see Chapter 6 below.

495Ibid., 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

496Ibid., 75.

497Ibid., 240.

498Ibid., 105, 236. See note 488 above for other figures and sources.

499Ibid., 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

500Emanuel and Gissing, 97; Trevor Chadwick in Gershon, We Came, 24.

501Chadwick in Gershon, We Came, 23.

502Ibid., 24.

503Emanuel 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.

505Gottlieb, 195, xi.

506Ibid., 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.

507Robert 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).

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

508―Child Refugees from Germany,‖ The Times of London, November 25, 1938.

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

509A.L.Easterman, ―Will Part with Baby for Ever,‖ Daily Herald, November 23, 1938.

510―In the Grey December Dawn, 200 Children Seek a Home,‖ Daily Mail, December 2, 1938.

511A.L. Easterman, ―Parents‘ Good-Bye to 300 Children,‖ Daily Herald, November 28, 1938.

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

512HHL v. 113, 5 July 1939, c. 1033-4. Emphasis added by author

513HHL 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

514―Settlement of Refugees,‖ Manchester Guardian, July 7, 1939.

515FAR, 16.

516Ibid., 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).

518British Pathe, ―Jewish Child Refugees‖ video newsreel film, 1938, http://www.britishpathe .com/record.php?id=84978 (accessed November 1, 2010).

519Archival footage and sound from Children in Exile (n.d.) in Mináč, Nicholas Winton: The Power of 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.‖

520A.L. Easterman, ―Parents‘ Good-Bye to 300 Children,‖ Daily Herald, November 28, 1938.

521―Chocolate Biscuits for 300 Child Refugees,‖ Daily Express, November 30, 1938.

522See notes 295 and 296 above.

523―Settlement of Refugees,‖ Manchester Guardian, July 7, 1939.

523FAR, 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

524Ibid., 7.

525Kushner, Remembering, 166 and Turner, 33.

526―Public and Refugees,‖ News Chronicle, July 31, 1939.

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

527―Warning,‖ Daily Express, July 7, 1939.

528―Britain Will Uphold Tradition as Sanctuary for Persecuted,‖ The Jewish Echo, June 15, 1945.

529Ibid.

530Ibid.

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

531Ibid. Emphasis added by author.

532Bendit, 3.

533Ibid., 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

534Ibid., 4.

535Ibid., 4-5.

536Ibid. The ―terrible days of November‖ is an allusion to Kristallnacht.

537Ibid., 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.

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.

538Ibid.

539Ibid., 6.

540Ibid.

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.

541Ibid., 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

542Andrea Hamel, ―Representations of Family in Autobiographical Texts of Child Refugees,‖ Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23, no.1 (2004): 121.

543Leverton 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

544Roth, 94.

545Chief Rabbi‘s Letter, Sixtieth Anniversary of the Kindertransport 1939-1999, London, 1999 in document collection 1350,Wiener Library, 1999.

546Ruth 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.

547Irene 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

548Barnett, ―Acculturation,‖ 101-2.

549Paul Hart, Interview 33039, VHA (1997).

550Gershon, 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.

551John Carey, ―Digging in the Sand,‖ New Statesman, May 20, 1966 quoted in Kushner, Remembering, 167.

552Kröger, ―Child Exiles,‖ 16.

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

553Barnett, ―Acculturation,‖101.

554Ibid.

555Reti 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

556Rebekka Göpfert, ―Kindertransport: History and Memory,‖ trans. Andrea Hammel. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23, no.1 (2004): 24.

557Anne Fox, My Heart in a Suitcase, (London: Valentine Mitchell, 1996), 150.

558Ibid., 213.

559Leverton 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

560Ibid., 149.

561Ibid., 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

562Annette Saville, Only a Kindertransportee, (London: New Millennium, 2002), 323.

563Harris 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

564The Association for Jewish Refugees (AJR) and Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief (CBF) are responsible for the inscriptions and plaques.

565HHL, 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

566Debórah 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 self- congratulatory 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 well- meaning 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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Unpublished materials