VOLUME 8 NO. 12 DECEMBER 2008 iwivJ journal ^ Association of Jewish Refugees Underpaid, underfed and overworked: Refugees in domestic service ast month's front-page article was were exposed to callous and inhuman devoted to the Jewish refugees treatment by employers who, ignoring the who came to Britain on Kinder- emotional trauma of their flight from their transports. Far less attention has homelands and their separation from their L loved ones, simply saw them as skivvies. been focused on another group of refugees, who were admitted to Britain for menial Domestics were notoriously at the mercy of purposes and whose image does not tug at their employers, isolated as they were within the public heartstrings as does that of the the confines of a household not their own. rescued children: the thousands of Jews from Refugees alone in Britain experienced such Germany and Austria, predominantly conditions almost as a form of women, who were admitted to Britain as imprisonment. domestic servants. Many of them were The memories of those who came as young women barely older than the young girls frequently dwell on specific Kindertransportees. experiences: living in unhealed and The British authorities permitted insanitary rooms or sharing rooms with no refugees who had found positions as private space; struggling to survive on domestic servants to enter the country to Kushner estimates that as many as 20,000 wages below a pound a week; having only work. Consequently, especially under the refugees came as domestic servants. one free aftemoon a week; suffering constant conditions of intensified persecution of 1938- Responsibility for refugee domestic hunger; and having to empty chamber pots 39, Jews from the Reich sought desperately servants rested with the Ministry of Labour and perform other degrading tasks. Above to find domestic positions, for themselves until late 1938, when it was taken over by all, they suffered from the sense that their or for daughters too old to qualify for the the Home Office; as the latter was less employers saw them as second-class human Kindertransports. Advertisements appeared influenced by trade unions wishing to keep beings, oblivious to their feelings and in large numbers in the Jeunsh Chronicle and immigrant labour out of Britain, the change sensitivities at a time when they were in papers like The Times appealing for benefited the refugees. But the wage rates desperate for human warmth and support. positions in British households for Jews for domestics remained paltry: many These features of thankless drudgery, of trapped in Germany and Austria. They refugees were paid the fixed minimum of acute loneliness and homesickness and of make pitiful reading today because of the 15 shillings per week. The task of being barred from participation in normal evident desperation of those advertising administering the admission and allocation family life and activities, like joining in a their services, who were sometimes middle- of refugee domestic servants passed to Christmas meal, remain central to most class, mature and educated people prepared Bloomsbury House, where the Domestic memories of domestic service. to clutch at any straw, however demeaning, Bureau coped as best it could; it is not fondly Many of these young women were wholly to escape the Nazis. remembered by its former clients. unprepared for domestic service. This is Unlike the Kindertransport children, the Domestic servants endured some of the certainly true of two former domestics admission of domestic servants can hardly worst treatment experienced by refugees, known to me personally, whose experiences be seen as a humanitarian gesture as it was resulting from their lowly status in the are probably fairly typical. Hortense Gordon, plainly aimed at satisfying the demand for households in which they were employed who came from Breslau in 1939 aged 19, was domestic labour in British middle-class and from the work they had to do there. the daughter of a well-to-do doctor's family households. Professor Tony Kushner has Many of them were from comfortable who had found her a job with an affluent argued this point forcefully in his aptly titled middle-class homes and found the British family in Surrey; they kitted her out article 'An Alien Occupation - Jewish indignities of life as a domestic intolerable, with an evening dress and parting Refugees and Domestic Service in Britain, though they were probably treated no worse instructions to leam bridge, the key to social 1933-1948', which appeared in the volume than other servants, including servants in life in England. But the two and a half years Second Chance: Two (Centuries of German- middle-class households in Vienna or Berlin. she spent as cook-general in Famham were speaking Jews in the United Kingdom (1991). Underpaid, underfed and overworked, they I continued overleaf I AJRJOURNAL DECEMBER 2008 REE('GF:ES I.\ DOMESTIC .SERVICE continued from page 1 ^EMIGRAVriON more reminiscent of the servants' quarters Hill she was for once treated as one of the IMTO LIFE* in Upstairs Downstairs as she toiled from family. My predecessor Richard Grunberger, dawn to near midnight to supply a series of a Kindertransportee from Vienna who spent copious and frequent meals and was treated an unhappy period as a handyman with an strictly in accordance with her status in the upper-class English family, was then taken kitchen. in by an Anglo-Jewish family who offered Edith Argy, who came from Vienna in him a tailoring apprenticeship and gave him 1938 also aged 19, recalls: a new start in life. I had never so much as held a broom Lotte Humbelin, Viennese-bom but now and I was supposed to keep a fairly a Swiss citizen, experienced three types of large house clean, and heaven knows employers - Anglo-Jewish, British and what else I was meant to do. I wasn't refugee Viennese - in the few months that used to eating in the kitchen - poor she spent in England before re-emigrating though we were, we had had all our to Switzerland in summer 1939. On her copy of the autobiography of AJR meals, except perhaps for a hasty arrival in December 1938, she was taken to A member Eric Sanders was presen­ breakfast, in the living room - nor was an Anglo-Jewish family where the lady of ted to Austrian President Dr Heinz I used to eating alone. I found the food Fischer at a reception in his office for the house, on learning that she had a a Goethe Gymnasium delegation. Mr hard to swallow - quite tasteless - and domestic permit, tried to engage her as a Sanders was expelled from the Vien­ I had never had malt vinegar before. I servant. Lotte Humbelin was dismayed at nese school following the Anschluss was cold in bed. I missed my duvet. The the total lack of interest in her plight as a and left Austria in August 1938. In 2005 thin blankets seemed to provide no refugee - hardly what she expected from a he unveiled a plaque at his former school in memory of pupils and teach­ warmth at all. I was desperately fellow Jew - and refused the offer. homesick. I wanted to die. ers who were victims of the Nazi Her first, short-lived position, with a So desperate was she that she even regime. young British journalist, involved a applied for a German passport with the Eric Sanders's autobiography. manageable amount of work, but she was Emigration ins Leben: Wien - London und intention of retuming to Vienna. affronted at being treated as if she did not nicht mehr Retour (Vienna: Czernin Like many domestics, Edith Argy had a exist as a human being, commenting that it Verlag), was published earlier this year string of short-lived jobs, most of which she and reviewed in the July issue of the was in 'democratic England' that she came remembers with undiminished bittemess. It Joumal. to understand what differences of class and was common for refugee domestics to try status really meant. She then spent a month to escape poor conditions by switching jobs, in London's Golders Green with an emigre but change seldom brought improvement. family from Vienna, Jewish and Social Some of the worst experiences they endured were at the hands of British employers who Democrats, who expected her to work 15 r t7/ie C)/ia(r//uf//, had lived in the colonies, where they had hours a day indulging their whims and those learned to treat servants as an inferior breed of their guests. A typically depressing story. f/a/ia^e/ne/tt (w/n/iu'ffee The outbreak of war in September 1939 of human being, or had worked in a/n/ dtg^ organisations like the police force, where initially had a severe impact on the refugee right-wing, hierarchical views fostered anti- domestics, who became 'enemy aliens' and iM^A a// Semitic attitudes. Some refugee domestics often lost their jobs in consequence. But as were mothers with small children; they had men were called up for the forces, the to display particular flexibility and demand for female labour to replace them a f/Ui/)/)ij (i/ia/uiAoi initiative in order to remain in regular increased massively. The vast majority of contact with their children, feats of refugees left domestic service at the earliest fortitude and self-sacrifice that have often possible opportunity, happy to take almost passed imsung. any other position on offer and delighting A considerable number of refugees in their new-found freedom; many found A)R Directors Gordon Greenfield sought employment in Jewish households in employment in jobs that contributed to the Michael Newman Britain, where they were for the most part war effort.