Shofar Supplements in Jewish Studies

The Jewish Refugee Children in Great Britain, 1938-1945

Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781612492223
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

Between December 1938 and September 1939, nearly ten thousand refugee children from Central Europe, mostly Jewish, found refuge from Nazism in Great Britain. This was known as the Kindertransport movement, in which the children entered as "transmigrants, " planning to return to Europe once the Nazis lost power. In practice, most of the kinder, as they called themselves, remained in Britain, eventually becoming citizens. This book charts the history of the Kindertransport movement, focusing on the dynamics that developed between the British government, the child refugee organizations, the Jewish community in Great Britain, the general British population, and the refugee children. After an analysis of the decision to allow the children entry and the machinery of rescue established to facilitate its implementation, the book follows the young refugees from their European homes to their resettlement in Britain either with foster families or in refugee hostels. Evacuated from the cities with hundreds of thousands of British children, they soon found themselves in the countryside with new foster families, who often had no idea how to deal with refugee children barely able to understand English. Members of particular refugee children's groups receive special attention: participants in the Youth Aliyah movement, who immigrated to the United States during the war to reunite with their families; those designated as "Friendly Enemy Aliens" at the war's outbreak, who were later deported to Australia and Canada; and Orthodox refugee children, who faced unique challenges attempting to maintain religious observance when placed with Gentile foster families who at times even attempted to convert them. Based on archival sources and follow-up interviews with refugee children both forty and seventy years after their flight to Britain, this book gives a unique perspective into the political, bureaucratic, and human aspects of the Kindertransport scheme prior to and during World War II.

Chapter 1

Introduction, Rationale, and Sources

“Of course Berlin is a lovely city, I should know, I was born there!” These were Steffi’s opening words to me when we met at a Jerusalem café on the eve of my trip to the German capital in August 2010. With a twinkle in her eye, she recalled events from more than seven decades ago, describing her middle-class German neighborhood, her comfortable home, and her experiences at the Goldschmidt-Schule, the private Jewish school she attended in the Grunewald district of Berlin.¹ As she continued her story, her face took on a more somber look. “I remember when we left Berlin for England right before the war. It was the middle of March and Reenie and I were bundled up against the cold.” My sprightly octogenarian friend took a deep breath, paused for a moment, and continued. “My father was ill with Parkinson’s and bedridden. Before we left to join the other children at the train station we went in to say goodbye to him at home, and he blessed us, not knowing when he would see us again. My mother accompanied us to the station with our hand luggage. Reenie didn’t really register what was happening but I knew what was going on, I remembered Kristallnacht and was relieved to be leaving Berlin, except of course for parting from our parents.” Steffi leaned back and shook her head, as if to shake off the visions of seventy years past that had suddenly become too vivid to bear. “We left on March 15, 1939, arrived in London on the 16th, and the next day was my birthday. That day I became an adult. I had just turned eleven and Reenie was nine; we were among the lucky ones, we got out on time.”²

Steffi Birnbaum Schwartz and Reenie Birnbaum were two of almost ten thousand Jewish and “non-Aryan” Christian children (Jewish converts to Christianity or children of mixed marriages) from Central Europe who found refuge in Great Britain between December 1938 and September 1939. Most of the refugee children, the majority of whom were Jewish, came from Germany like the Birnbaum girls; the rest were from Austria or Czechoslovakia. Almost all arrived in the framework of what were known as the Kindertransport Movement—groups of anywhere between ten and five hundred children who were accompanied by caretakers, social workers, and educators, some of whom returned to Nazi Europe time and again in order to bring yet another group of children out to safety. Some of these Begleiterin—escorts—ultimately remained in Britain. Others were caught by the outbreak of war in Nazi-controlled territory and remained there throughout the war, if they survived the Second World War.

The Kindertransport children arriving in England fell into two broad categories: those sponsored by individuals who in most cases offered the children an initial home, and those whose upkeep was guaranteed by one of the refugee organizations that needed to find them foster parents. Steffi and Reenie Birnbaum were among the twelve lucky children who were sponsored by Dr. Bernard Schlesinger, chief physician at the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in London, who spared them the humiliation of the “slave market”: there, newly arrived refugee children were paraded before potential foster parents who usually chose the young, the fair, and the comely girls before all others, leaving behind the other children who wondered for hours if anyone would ever give them a home. Eventually, families were found for the younger children while, due to the lack of potential foster homes, many of the older refugee children were ultimately sent to youth hostels opened for this purpose by the refugee movements.

Steffi and Reenie also ended up in a refugee hostel, but of a very different kind. In their generosity of spirit and funds, Dr. Schlesinger and his wife realized that they had nowhere to house twelve children and decided to open a well-run hostel for their young charges. In addition, they sponsored a number of adult refugees who assisted in this endeavor: a cook, separate supervisors for the boys and girls, a rabbi for the hostel, and a young woman who assisted them with their own children and later married the rabbi. This exemplary hostel was unfortunately not the rule. Many of the older refugee children ended up in places with little supervision and guidance other than occasional visits from social-service organizations.

Originally, the Kindertransport movement was supposed to be an ad hoc solution to what was hoped to be a temporary problem. Children entering Britain on one of the Kinderstransports were given the status of “transmigrants” and were slated to return to Europe once the Nazis would no longer be in power, presumably within a year or two. In practice, however, a very different scenario developed after the autumn of 1939. Following the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939, hundreds of thousands of British children, and along with them, thousands of younger refugee children from Central Europe, were evacuated from the major cities to the Midlands to protect them from the expected German bombings. Suddenly, these children who had barely adjusted to being in England and could speak only a few words of English, found themselves in the British countryside among families who had no idea that they were getting Jewish refugee boarders and had no concept of how to communicate with them.

Some of the children such as Steffi and Reenie settled in well among families taking evacuee boarders and quickly adapted to the change. As Steffi recalled, “They thought they were getting bona fide British children and were a bit surprised to see us, but they were very good people.”³ Other children found themselves facing barely concealed hostility and worse. Some had to be resettled several times as their foster families used them as unpaid farm laborers or tried to convert them to save their souls. For a time, Steffi and Reenie faced such a situation with a proselytizing headmistress in their new boarding school in Cornwall, where Dr. Schlesinger thought they would be safer from the bombs than in the Midlands. As Steffi recalled: “It was absolutely dreadful. I sat in church but never kneeled down and refused to pray to Jesus.”⁴ For them, rescue ultimately came in the form of a local Jewish woman who took the Jewish girls in the boarding school to her home for the holidays. For others, fear and loneliness and the desire to belong ultimately led Jewish children to convert to Christianity. It was the fear of this process that brought Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld of the Chief Rabbi’s Religious Emergency Council to set up kosher canteens for observant evacuee children, including young Orthodox refugees, several hundred of whom had come to Britain under his auspices, and begin to supervise what was happening to the young refugee evacuees.

Meanwhile a group of the older refugee children faced a different form of displacement, having been interned by the British government as “Enemy Aliens” because of their German or Austrian origin. Groups of these refugee boys were even deported to Canada and Australia, where they lived in detention camps, for a time alongside true Nazi sympathizers. Ultimately the Jewish refugee teens were released from internment, in most cases in order to join the Pioneer Corps, the only branch of the armed forces in which refugees were initially permitted to enlist. As the war progressed, older refugee girls also attempted to enlist in the Services to aid the war effort, an experience that young Steffi and Reenie missed as they were both underage.

Toward the latter half of the war, it became clear to the organizers and activists of Refugee Children’s Movement (RCM), the organization responsible for most of the refugee children in Britain, that many of the children’s parents were no longer alive. Consequently, it was necessary to appoint a legal guardian for the children. Although the Chief Rabbi’s Religious Emergency Council (CRREC) lobbied for the British Chief Rabbi, Dr. Joseph Herman Hertz (1872–1946), to be appointed to this position, the choice fell on Lord Gorell (Ronald Gorell Barnes, 1884–1963), chairman of the Refugee Children’s Movement. At the time, Steffi was already sixteen and had left school to return to London where she lived in a refugee youth hostel in Belsize Park. News from the war zone was sparse, but what was reaching Britain was dismal. As Steffi recalled, “We were all unhappy there as we knew already what was happening in Europe.”⁵ Reenie remained in school in Cornwall until she was sixteen and joined her sister in London where she began to train as a nurse under Dr. Schlesinger at the Great Ormond Street Hospital.

In May 1945, the Second World War ended and for the first time in close to seven years the children could theoretically return to their families. Theoretically, because in many, if not most cases, there were no longer families for them to return to. Having lost their parents in the Holocaust, the majority of the Kinder (singular: Kind), as they called themselves, remained in Britain after the war, as did young Reenie and Steffi, eventually becoming fully acculturated citizens. But the means by which this came about was at times complex and difficult and there was a world of experiences, not all good or easy, behind the five succinct words—”eventually becoming fully acculturated citizens.” The process by which a Jewish refugee child became a productive British citizen was often fraught with tension, discrimination, misunderstandings, and occasionally even religious coercion. Some siblings even chose different paths from each other, such as Reenie and Steffi who will accompany us throughout this book. Yet in view of the xenophobia that punctuated British society, particularly during the war years, most children were willing to do almost anything in order to cease being a refugee, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction, Rationale, and Sources
• Part 1: January 1933–August 1939: The Prewar Hitler Era
• Part 2: The War Years
• Timeline
• Glossary
• Discussion Questions
• Bibliography
• Index