JOURNAL the Association of Jewish Refugees
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
VOLUME 19 NO.7 JULY 2019 JOURNAL The Association of Jewish Refugees Two sides of exile BIRTHDAY HONOURS When Judith Kerr died the tributes poured out. “Her stories and We were delighted to see seven AJR members named in The Queen’s Birthday illustrations are ageless and timeless, and endlessly uplifting,” wrote Honours list. You’ll find details of these members on the back page. The Daily Telegraph. As our Chief Executive Michael Newman said, “these richly deserved awards reflect their personal dedication and huge commitment to this critical subject”. Also in this issue is a very interesting article about the refugee children who were housed in the Lake District during the war, and the first in our new series Remembering & Reflecting on the Kindertransport. We hope you enjoy reading these and other articles as well as looking at the lovely photos from AJR’s recent trip to Nottinghamshire. News ............................................................ 3 Judith Kerr with OBE for services to children’s literature and Holocaust education in 2012 New faces .................................................... 4 Letter from Israel .......................................... 5 Letters to the Editor ...................................... 6 She was a national treasure. Not just scenes. This may seem a strange thing A song that resonates................................... 7 because her books were hugely popular. to say but in some ways Judith Kerr is an Art Notes...................................................... 8 Remembering: Wilfrid Israel ......................... 9 She wrote almost forty books and, recently, underrated writer. From Auschwitz to Ambleside ...............10-11 The Tiger Who Came to Tea sold its Reviews .................................................12-13 millionth copy. Not many children’s writers Kerr was born in Berlin in 1923. She was Financial Destruction .................................. 14 Looking for / Lviv ....................................... 15 are interviewed on Newsnight or by Alan the daughter of Alfred Kerr, the most Five days in May ........................................ 16 Yentob on BBC1’s art programme, Imagine. famous theatre critic in Weimar Germany, Obituary..................................................... 17 and his wife, Julia, a composer. He was Around the AJR .......................................... 18 Adverts ....................................................... 19 But Judith Kerr was more than just a nicknamed the Kulturpapst (“Culture Events & exhibitions ................................... 20 popular children’s writer and illustrator. The Pope”). Their house in Grunewald was Guardian spoke of “the triumph of good cultured and assimilated. Einstein, Arthur over evil Judith Kerr’s life represented.” Her Schnitzler, HG Wells and Bernard Shaw AJR Team trilogy, Out of the Hitler Time, told of her were family friends. Chief Executive Michael Newman experiences as a child refugee, fleeing with Finance Director David Kaye her family from Nazi Germany in 1933, four When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit tells the Heads of Department days after the Reichstag fire, and coming to story of how Judith’s family escaped from Community & Volunteer Services Carol Hart London in 1935. Germany and spent the next two years in HR & Administration Karen Markham Switzerland and Paris before coming to Educational Grants & Projects Alex Maws Social Work Nicole Valens Many have paid tribute to these books but London in 1935. In 1933 her father left few have read them carefully or noticed for Prague after a tip-off from a friendly AJR Journal how complex they are. They don’t simply policeman warning him that his passport Editor Jo Briggs Editorial Assistant Lilian Levy tell a tale of “the triumph of good over was about to be confiscated. He and Contributing Editor David Herman evil”. The books become darker and his family got out just in time. Later that Secretarial/Advertisements Karin Pereira contain some extraordinarily moving Continued on page 2 1 AJR Journal | July 2019 Two sides of exile (cont.) secretary. Her struggles with learning to depression. All of this erupts during an cook and sew are painfully described: angry conversation with her children, now year his books were burned, his German in their thirties. She has moved to Berlin, nationality revoked and his property “Then suddenly Mama made a sound with taken an overdose and her children have confiscated. which by now they were all familiar. ‘My flown out to see her. For the first time in chicken!’ she cried and rushed off to the the trilogy, she speaks out: But exile was a double-edged experience kitchen.” for Alfred Kerr and his family. They escaped “You had all your lives to come. Whereas I but by the time they came to Britain, Alfred It was the children who adapted most … All those years I spent in dreary boarding Kerr was almost seventy. He had lost his easily. Judith was twelve when they houses worrying about money, I was audience and his language. The family were arrived in Britain, her brother Michael was getting older. It should have been the best to spend the next thirteen years in poverty. fourteen. Within four years he was studying time of my life…” law at Cambridge and went on to become What do these books tell us about being a distinguished judge, Sir Michael Kerr QC. And then the children start to row. While a refugee? First, that like so many central Judith, of course, became a famous writer, her brother had swanned off to Cambridge European refugees, the Kerrs didn’t simply married to Nigel Kneale, one of the great and the law, Anna spent all those years escape from Germany to Britain. It was a TV dramatists of the 1950s and ‘60s worrying about her parents, their poverty, constant question of choices. First, he went (Quartermass, 1984). her father’s nightmares, her mother’s to Prague, then Switzerland and Paris, all depression. popular destinations for Jewish refugees in In the first two books, the saddest stories the mid-1930s. When he decided to leave are about others. Those like “Uncle Julius” We are a long way from the happy and Paris, he was torn between New York and who didn’t get away, and later commits very English families in The Tiger Who London but the offer of £1000 to write a suicide in Berlin taking an overdose and, Came to Tea or the 18 Mog books. Read film script for Alexander Korda tilted the above all, Uncle Victor. Perhaps the most carefully, Judith Kerr offers a dark and balance. His sister and her daughter, by powerful moment in the trilogy comes disturbing vision of the life of refugees. contrast, went to Palestine in 1937. He when Anna (the Judith figure in the books) This is perhaps her greatest lasting never saw them again. Interestingly, they “suddenly realised that there was someone achievement. barely feature in the trilogy. standing outside, staring in”: David Herman Second, how crucial the mother was, as “The figure at the door was old and quite in so many families, in keeping the family bald and there was a curious lopsided look together, supporting the children and going about the head which had a scar running out to work. Judith’s father was elderly, he down one side. It was dressed in a kind of KITCHENER CAMP couldn’t write English and couldn’t earn shift and as Anna looked at it, it moved The 80th anniversary of the much of a living. Judith describes her father one hand in a vague gesture of silence in a moving scene: or farewell. Like a ghost, thought Anna, Kitchener Camp for refugee but the eyes that stared back at her were men and boys is being “In her mind she saw him in his poky room human.” with his typewriter that kept going wrong commemorated in two ways and his writings that no one wanted to Victor’s wife, Aunt Dainty, tells Anna that this September. publish, in a country whose language he her husband had been in a concentration did not speak.” camp. This is his only appearance in the In 1939 nearly four thousand men book, though there is another desperately were given visas to travel to the camp Later, returning after his death to look sad scene later at his funeral. at Richborough near Sandwich, Kent, at the boarding-house in Putney which many of them following imprisonment had been his last home, she found it In the Jewish Restitution Successor Office in Nazi concentration camps. demolished: in Berlin met Herr Birnbaum who has lost fourteen relations, including his wife and Eighty years on, a mobile exhibition “The only thing that had been the same three children (“’My cousin Samuel,’ he about the camp has been developed was the bench at the end of the street said pointing…. ‘age 36. Last-known and will be launched at London’s where Papa had sometimes sat in the sun address Treblinka.’”). He’s the sole survivor Jewish Museum at a special event on with his pipe. He had eked out the tobacco of his family. Sunday 1 September. with dried leaves and rose petals and for lunch he had eaten bread toasted over These three men are desperately sad On Monday 2 September a plaque the gas ring and spread with exactly one figures. By contrast, the Kerrs seem almost will be unveiled at the Bell Hotel seventh of a jar of fish paste.” untouched. Increasingly, though, in the in Sandwich, which was a popular final book of the trilogy, it becomes clear meeting place for the refugees. In so many refugee families the father lost that exile has taken a terrible toll on them. his ability to earn and with that went his Alfred commits suicide with an overdose For more information about the camp authority within the family. Mothers were during a visit to Germany in 1948. His wife, and these events please visit often better at adapting. Judith’s mother Julia, it is revealed, attempts suicide several www.kitchenercamp.co.uk spoke good English and got a job as a times and has struggled hard against 2 AJR Journal | July 2019 TAX EXEMPTIONS A DAY IN DULWICH FOR KINDER Freddy Kosten, Ruth Barnett, AJR has secured tax and Dr Bea Lewkowicz on exemptions for Kinder stage at the receiving the 2,500 euros Dulwich Festival compensation paid by the German government through the Claims Conference.