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- Herausgeber: Honno Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Insightful, first-hand accounts of refugees fleeing Nazism. These are stories of child refugees, artists and doctors. Their testimonies are harrowing and sad, but also at times funny and hopeful.Finding Refuge will resonate with those who have personal experience of similar situations, those looking to understand the refugee experience, young people investigating Welsh and European history and the stories of their ancestors, as well as the general history reader.
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FINDING REFUGE
Stories of the men, women and children who fled to Wales to escape the Nazis
Andrea Hammel
HONNO PRESS
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To Winifred V. Davies and all my Welsh friends
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Why write this book?
I came to live in Wales in 2010 and I have lived in Aberystwyth ever since and, all things being equal, I have no intention of leaving again for any length of time. Coming to a new place, where I did not know anyone besides one academic colleague I had briefly encountered at a conference, makes you see a society and a place with new eyes. A lot of what I thought I knew about Wales was probably wrong.
I was born in West Germany in 1968. Looking at my birthdate in 2021 it looks much closer to the Nazi regime, the Second World War and the Holocaust than it felt like during my childhood and youth. My parents were only in their early 20s when I was born and had both been born just after 1945. While other Germans of my generation report an eerie silence in their families about the crimes of National Socialist Germany and its people, I had had long searching discussions with mine. My family were Protestants and my family history includes women and men who both opposed and supported the National Socialist Party and the Nazi regime. One of my great-grandfathers was a miner and an active member of the Social Democratic Party. (While clearing out my parents’ house, I found the letter of congratulations for being a member of the SPD for 40 years issued in 1950.) Early on during the Nazi period, he was sent to prison for five weeks by the local magistrates’ court for making anti-Nazi speeches and lost his job as a result. Another great-grandfather worked as a porter at the local university and was given the choice of either becoming a member of the Nazi party or losing his job. He decided to join. My grandmother, the daughter of the Social Democratic miner, once told me a story where she described carrying the suitcase of a local elderly Jewish woman, 2whose family had left (fled?) Germany, to the station. I was too young or too stupid to ask my grandmother where she thought this woman was going. From a young age the historical responsibility of being German after the Holocaust weighed heavily on me.
I came to Britain in 1988. West Germany felt small and parochial and I was looking for something new. I was looking for an adventure. I was looking for somewhere with a different history. Britain felt exciting and cosmopolitan because of its multiculturalism. I liked the English language and I lived in London for a year but then decided to stay on to go to university which at the time was possible as Britain was in the EU and tuition fees did not need to be paid by the individual student.
After completing undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Essex and Sussex Universities, I was interested in writing a PhD thesis. Some academics claim that you always write a little bit about yourself. I am not sure about this theory, but I was interested in the points where German and British culture met and interacted. At the same time, I wanted to rehabilitate those who had to flee Germany and resettle in the UK. I wrote about five women novelists who had to flee from Nazi Germany and Austria and eventually settled in the UK. I have researched refugees from National Socialism ever since, and the subject has proven more relevant to contemporary life than I initially thought.
So, given my long residence in the country and the focus of my working life, it seemed a natural development to write about refugees from National Socialism in Wales. But there are further urgent reasons that have led me to write this book and write it now. Since the Mediterranean refugee crisis came to attention of the Northern European media, in 2015, and refugees from the Ukraine arriving in 2022, comparisons are often made between refugees fleeing to the UK now and those that fled to the UK in the past. This link is important, and complicated at the same time. Researching the history of refugees has certainly had an impact on me personally: for a number of years now, I have been part of a 3charity called Aberaid that helps refugees (from Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine for example) locally and internationally. I feel that we need to learn from history for the future, but to do so we need to know more about the stories of the past.
I want to tell the stories of the men, women and children who fled to Wales over 80 years ago to escape the Nazis, to show the challenges they faced as well as highlight their achievements. I also want to explore the fact that Wales has been a nation providing sanctuary for refugees for a long time. Wales is a nation that is far less homogenous than some think, because of migration and as a result of previous welcomes to refugee peoples. There has been research on the multicultural communities of Tiger Bay in Cardiff and on the Belgian First World War refugees in Rhyl. This book will tell another set of stories about refugees from Nazism.
I feel that only by accepting this complexity can Wales move forward. I am a migrant, I came to Wales and made it my home; many refugees came to Wales under much more challenging circumstances and made it their home. We do not exactly know how many refugees from Nazism settled in Wales. It might have been as many as 2,000 individuals, all with their unique stories. I have chosen to write about individuals with different experiences such as child refugees who arrived on their own, those who arrived in family groups, artists and industrialists.
Fleeing National Socialism
Following the National Socialist Party’s assumption of power in January 1933, and Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of Germany, life became very difficult for German citizens and residents who were not considered ‘Aryan’ or who could be identified as political opponents of the new regime. The Nazis managed to eradicate all democratic processes very quickly and took over most institutions, which had a devastating effect on the lives of Jews and political opponents. Members of the political opposition, even Members of Parliament, as well as journalists and 4writers who had previously spoken out against National Socialist doctrine, immediately found themselves in a dangerous position. Other persecuted groups included Sinti and Romani travellers, homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Many were imprisoned, some violently attacked and even killed, and many sought to escape.
The pace of emigration after 1933 was essentially driven by National Socialist government policy. Jewish professionals were no longer allowed to practise law or medicine – or at best allowed only to work with Jewish clients or patients – and were excluded from the civil service. The threat toward the Jewish population became even more acute after the passing of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, in which citizens were classified according to ‘racial’ ancestry. Categorisation as Jewish or ‘non-Aryan’ had little to do with religious conviction or self-identification. According to National Socialist ideology, a person was considered Jewish if they had one Jewish grandparent. This meant that some Germans, who had not even known that they had Jewish antecedents and had grown up in the Christian faith, were considered Jewish and excluded from public and professional life in Germany. Those considered Jewish were also given an inferior legal status in society. Such policies meant that many were excluded from schools and universities, and adults and children of Jewish descent were excluded from many public places such as parks, cinemas and swimming pools. Jewish shop and business owners first lost their customers or clients, and ultimately their shops and businesses. The Nazi authorities encouraged the takeover of Jewish shops and businesses by ‘Aryan’ Germans and many former competitors and employees quickly exploited the situation and ousted their former colleagues, bosses and neighbours, effectively stealing their livelihoods from them. The ‘non-Aryan’ shop and business owners were not compensated.
The Nazis wanted to remove all political opponents and ‘non-Aryan’ people from Germany. During the 1930s, the Nazi authorities had nothing against such people leaving Germany, and even facilitated their emigration to a certain extent. However, as 5much as they wanted ‘non-Aryan’ people to leave, they did not want them to take any assets or money with them. This made it extremely difficult for many families to find refuge as most countries placed financial qualifications on who was considered worthy of admittance at that time. Jewish people without money or assets often found themselves at the bottom of the list of desirable immigrants. Therefore, Jewish families in Germany became increasingly desperate as they queued at embassies and consulates, contacted relatives, friends and acquaintances who lived abroad, and searched for possible routes and destinations. Some got lucky and discovered someone they knew who would vouch for them or put up the required sum of money to allow them to obtain a visa. Of course, not all Jewish families wanted to emigrate. There was still a sizable proportion, even after 1935, who assumed that it would all ‘blow over’: either the Nazis would be forced out of power, or their antisemitic stance would somehow soften. After all, the Jews of Europe were used to discrimination and persecution ranging from religious antisemitism in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, including the banishing of all Jews from England in 1290, to the frequent pogroms in the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.
Of those that did manage to leave 1930s Germany, many moved to neighbouring countries such as the Netherlands (which is what Anne Frank’s family did) or France, or even Austria. However, Nazi persecution policies caught up with those who had tried to escape to Austria on 12 March 1938, when the German Reich annexed Austria and Hitler drove triumphantly through Vienna, cheered by the thousands of Austrians who supported his policies. After Germany invaded, the Netherlands and France would also later turn out to be far from safe for Jews.
The November Pogrom on 9 and 10 November 1938, also sometimes called ‘Kristallnacht’ on account of the broken glass visible in the streets of Germany and the annexed Austrian territory, was the turning point for many Jewish citizens. During these days 6of state-sponsored violence, it must have become clear to everyone that Jews would not be able to continue living in the Reich at all, and many feared for their lives. Many Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. A large number of Jewish people lost their lives, although not on the scale of the genocidal mass murder that would be perpetrated after 1941 in the Holocaust, also known as the Shoah.
Seeking sanctuary
The UK government’s immigration policy underwent dramatic changes during the first 40 years of the 20th century. The Aliens Act of 1905 was designed to address what was seen at time as ‘the influx’ of Eastern European Jews having to flee the pogroms in Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire. Large-scale immigration of impoverished Jews was seen as a threat to the finances and the religious harmony of the UK. The 1905 Aliens Act may be considered as the first step on the path to a modern immigration control system. The Aliens Restriction Acts of 1914 and 1919, which bookended the First World War, further limited the rights of immigrants to enter the UK. From that point onwards, until Britain signed up to the 1951 Refugee Convention, refugees lost specific legal protection and were treated like any other immigrants, admitted only on a case-by-case basis. The main consideration taken into account by immigration officials was whether the person seeking entry was considered to be of benefit to the British state. There seems to have been some room for leniency and individual officials did make decisions on humanitarian grounds after 1919, and even after 1933. This bending of the rules ranged from border officials at Dover overlooking incomplete paperwork to the large-scale granting of visas to Jewish applicants in Berlin by the British Secret Intelligence Officer at the UK embassy in Berlin, Major Frank Foley. Those rescued in this way include the family of Michael Mamelok, father-in-law of the late Tory MP James Brokenshire.7
However, as a rule the UK government embraced the policy of trying as much as possible to place the financial and organisational burden of refugees on non-governmental agencies, religious communities and charities. After 1933, the Jewish organisations of the UK financially underwrote the admittance of Jewish refugees from the German Reich and administered their care and support. This was obviously a great responsibility and a monumental task.
Research in this field is not always able to provide reliable numbers as the record keeping of the UK government is patchy. We believe that between 1933 and March 1938 the numbers of those seeking refuge were not as large as later, which made the ad hoc arrangements that evolved just about workable. It is estimated that about 4,500 refugees fled to the UK between 1933 and 1935, and a further 5,500 by March 1938, when the German Reich annexed Austria. From this point of time onwards, especially after the November Pogrom of 1938, the number of those trying to escape increased manyfold. An additional 80,000 refugees had entered the UK by the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939. Not all, but a very large majority of the refugees were Jewish. In comparison, in 2015 the UK government agreed to resettle 20,000 refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria via the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme in the UK within five years.
Of the roughly 90,000 refugees who reached UK, around 12,000 individuals then migrated further and settled in other countries. However, this still meant that about 78,000 refugees from National Socialism were living in the UK by September 1939 (of whom around 30,000 had come from Austria). This is probably an underestimation as children who entered with their parents were put on the same visa and not counted separately. Needless to say, we know very little about the number and the nature of those who were unsuccessful in their applications to escape and find refuge in the UK. What we can say with certainty is that a very large number of people were unsuccessful in their attempt to flee, and many of them were later murdered in the Holocaust.8
Because of the rapid increase in applications after March 1938, when thousands of Austrian Jews sought to escape in a short space of time, the UK government introduced even more restrictive policies. With the tacit consent of the Anglo-Jewish community, who clearly feared that they would not be able to support more refugees, the government introduced new visa requirements making finding refuge in Britain more difficult. Fears regarding the state of the labour market and rising antisemitism played a part in this implementation of ever more stringent restrictions. The negative attitude towards Continental refugees was fuelled by xenophobic newspapers, certain sections of the government and far right groups. There was, however, also a sizable number of UK citizens who were very sympathetic towards the plight of those persecuted by National Socialism and who continued to campaign for the rescue of more refugees. The details and consequences of the November Pogrom of 1938 were widely reported in British press and raised awareness and sympathy with the wider British public.
There were four main categories under which one could apply for a visa to Britain. First, the UK government was willing to admit world-famous artists, scientists or academics. Amongst these renowned arrivals was the Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who arrived in London on 6 June 1938, with eleven members of his family – and his dog.
A second route to gaining a visa was to be able to convince the UK authorities that you had the assets and the expertise to set up a viable business. Those with expertise in manufacturing were preferred, but they had to be able to convince the authorities that their UK business would be able to create jobs for UK workers. If the refugee industrialists were willing to set up businesses in the so-called Special Areas – deprived areas such as South Wales, Tyneside, Cumberland and Lanarkshire, with a high unemployment rate and ear-marked for extra investment – this counted further in their favour.
For the less well known or the less wealthy, it was not easy to gain 9admittance: the applications of many well-qualified professionals such as physicians or lawyers were rejected. Professional organisations in these fields lobbied the government against a generous admissions policy as they feared competition from professional Continental refugees. If a qualified doctor managed to flee to the UK via a different route, he or she would not normally be allowed to practise for some time and would be made to retake their qualifications.
If the refugee was willing to work in a field where there was a labour shortage it was also possible that they would be granted a visa. Domestic service was one such field. In the late 1930s. the UK was said to be suffering from a ‘servant crisis’ as fewer and fewer young women wanted to take on such work. The pay was very low and the conditions and hours even worse; domestic servants often were expected to be available all day and were allowed very little time off. They were usually required to live in the households of their employer and were not allowed to have their dependants live with them. As there was a serious shortage of UK applicants for these jobs, the government therefore issued so-called ‘Domestic Permits’ to any Continental refugee who was able to show that they had found employment as a domestic in the UK. Around 20,000 mainly female refugees managed to flee to the UK via this scheme. Psychiatric care and certain agricultural jobs were also considered under a similar but much more limited scheme.
Finally, there were also different rules for refugees under the age of 18. Around 10,000 unaccompanied minors fled to the UK on the so-called ‘Kindertransport’. This functioned as a visa waiver scheme and was in place between December 1938 and September 1939. Today the Kindertransport is one of the better-known policies enabling refugees to flee to the UK in the 1930s. The scheme is often celebrated, but there are a number of myths that should be debunked in relation to the Kindertransport. To start with, it was mainly individuals and charities that assisted with the organisation and the financial support of the scheme, and not the 10British government. Most Kindertransportees were not orphans as is sometimes assumed; they left their parents and families behind, not because they didn’t want to leave too, but because the UK government would only admit the children. Chaotic organisation and lack of preparation and support caused many of the young refugees harm, even after they arrived in the relative safety of the UK. Kindertransportees were placed in foster families all over the UK, including in Wales. Some of the teenage refugees were accommodated in communal settings. These were sometimes organised by Zionist organisations whose aim was to prepare the young people for eventual emigration to Palestine. Llandough Castle in the Vale of Glamorgan and Gwrych Castle near Abergele were two of the locations for such training centres – or hachsharot – and, with up to 180 residents, Gwrych Castle was the largest in the UK.
Fleeing on a Kindertransport
The events of 9 November 1938 meant that both Jewish families on the Continent and the UK government were pushed to consider measures they had not been able to bring themselves to agree to before. Until then, most families had not been willing to consider parting from their children, but after the November Pogrom parents felt that if they could not escape and find refuge together, they should at least try to find an escape route for their children.
For the UK government, it was public pressure after 9 November 1938 – from its citizens horrified to read about the violent attacks on the Continental Jews – that pushed them into action. The violence perpetrated against the Jewish population had been reported extensively in British papers and on the radio. Many British people were outraged and demanded that their government ought to help Continental Jews. At a Cabinet Committee Meeting discussion on 14 November 1938, various possible reactions to the events were discussed and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stated that ‘something effective should be done to alleviate the 11terrible fate of the Jews in Germany.’ He alluded to the public mood and acknowledged that there was a certain pressure on the government to be seen to be doing something. However, although various suggestions for helping the German Jews leave Germany were discussed, none was decided on during this particular meeting. The next day, a group of Anglo-Jewish leaders met with Prime Minister Chamberlain and the idea of temporarily admitting a number of unaccompanied children for the purpose of training and education was discussed. Just a week later, the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, announced the government’s new refugee policy, which included the directive that all children whose maintenance could be guaranteed by private individuals or charitable organisations were allowed to be admitted to Britain without going through the arduous process of applying for a visa. This was the official go-ahead for the Kindertransport. (The term Kindertransport in the singular is normally used for the scheme that brought around 10,000 children to the UK. Used in the plural Kindertransports can refer to individual trains that brought over a certain number at any one time, though some groups were brought to the UK by ship or plane.)
Public pressure was instrumental in pushing a formerly reluctant government to make this decision. However, it is clear that the British government was only willing to support such a change of policy if it did not have to commit financial resources to the initiative. In this respect, the government only partially backed the scheme, enabling but not funding it. The decision to admit children without their families was a momentous one. The exact reasons are disputed but we know that the government was worried about the high unemployment rate at the time, and some argued that letting large numbers of adult refugees into the UK would increase the number of unemployed workers. This would not be the case when admitting child refugees as in most cases it would be many years before they would need a job.
Those who worried that some of the Continental refugees might 12be spies or might agitate against the UK would also be less concerned if the UK just admitted minors. Children would also be less visible in the community, especially if they were accommodated in foster families, and thus there would be less occasion for antisemitic sentiments to arise. Again, we do not have exact numbers, but it is estimated that at least three quarters of those who fled on a Kindertransport left their parents behind on the Continent.
Many children understood the reasons why their parents wanted them to leave their home and family without them, as they had experienced increasing persecution and often even violence first hand. Some nevertheless could not help feelings of abandonment or guilt as if their separation from their parents had somehow been their fault.
Most of us cannot even imagine how the parents of the Kindertransportees must have felt when parting from their children. Some child refugees were told by their parents that the parents would follow them to Britain or emigrate themselves and send for the children after a period of a few months’ separation. Although it is possible that in some cases this was told to the children to alleviate their anxiety about being separated from their families, letters from the parents show that this was often their intention even if the end they were unable to achieve it. The parents of twelve-year-old Eva Mosbacher from Thuringia in Germany include precise descriptions of their emigration attempts and the efforts to get visas but also record the challenge: ‘I know that no one is really keen to have us neither here nor there, but we have no choice but to try everything to emigrate anywhere possible.’
In other cases, parents tried to put their children on a Kindertransport because they had managed to obtain a visa for themselves and intended to keep the family together. As discussed previously, one way of gaining a visa and work permit to the UK was to find employment as a domestic servant. The Jewish community in Vienna had pre-printed application forms on which 13parents could state that they had obtained a domestic permit to enter the UK and thus wished their child to be considered for a Kindertransport. Clearly parents wanted their children to be in the same country as them, possibly hoping for a speedy reunion. This worked out for some families but in the case of those who did work as domestic staff, their employers saw them as employees first and foremost and were often not sensitive to their situation. Most were not allowed to have their children live with them in the household of their employers. In other cases, the economically difficult circumstances and limited accommodation dictated that child refugees could not live with their parents, even if they had all resettled in Britain. This was the case with the Dienemann family: the children escaped on a Kindertransport in January 1939 and the parents in summer of the same year but the children were not able to join their parents in Oxford because of money and accommodation worries and continued to stay in their foster families.
As discussed, the eruption of violence towards the Jewish population in Germany during the November Pogroms of 1938 was not only a turning point for German Jewish organisations and individuals, it also showed the international community that the German Jews were in an absolutely desperate situation. The speed at which it was put in place and the scale of the Kindertransport are two of the key reasons why it is often mentioned with admiration, but this admiration needs qualification. Neither rapid emigration of large numbers of people nor child immigration to Britain were without precedent. During the First World War, a large number of Belgian refugees were admitted and during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9, about 4,000 unaccompanied Basque children found refuge in the UK.
The speed with which the Kindertransport was set up meant that no or hardly any vetting or preparation of the children’s eventual placements were possible, which had dire consequences for some Kindertransportees who either had to change placements often or 14found themselves living in damaging situations. Nevertheless, the fact that it was less than two weeks between the decision to admit unaccompanied child refugees in late November 1938 and the arrival of a ferry on 2 December 1938 at Harwich with around 200 child refugees on board shows the determination and rapidly effective organisational skills of all involved.
During the ten months between December 1938 and September 1939, transports arrived from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. On the German side, a Department for Child Emigration had already been established by the Reich’s Deputation of the German Jews in 1933. Until then, only individual children or small groups of children had emigrated, for example to France. But the existence of an organisational structure meant that there were people with experience available, who could step up to deal with the formalities and organisation of a large group of Jewish children to be sent to the UK. In Austria, the situation was different, as there had been no communal initiative to send unaccompanied children abroad before the Annexation of Austria in March 1938, which made the helpers less experienced. The fact that the Jewish population in Austria was concentrated mainly in Vienna made their challenge a little easier. In Germany, the Department for Child Emigration, which had its offices in Berlin, collected all the applications from Berlin itself and from provincial Jewish organisations and community offices located all over Germany. The Department pre-selected the applications and sent them on to London, where the Refugee Children’s Movement (RCM) had its headquarters in Bloomsbury House in London. Here the children who were deemed to be suitable for emigration were chosen and this was then communicated back to the organisations on the Continent. The children and their parents were subsequently informed of the decision and were notified of their likely departure date. They were allowed to take two small pieces of luggage, which had to be labelled and had to be light enough to be able to be carried by the children themselves. No valuables and only a small amount 15of money was allowed to be taken out of Germany. The age of the children ranged from two to seventeen, though there were some reports of even younger children travelling.
Trains left from larger cities such as Berlin or Frankfurt am Main and the children were either asked to board the trains there or picked up at stations on route. A small number of adults acted as guardians to the children on the train and supervised them. These adults were required to return to Germany or Austria after completing their task and there are no reports that any individual did not do so. The most likely route from Germany to the UK was via Bentheim and the Dutch Hoek of Holland, where the parties boarded the ferry to Harwich. There were also transports that took the train route to Hamburg or Bremen and from there a boat to Southampton. Upon arrival in the UK, the children were either put in holding camps ‒ a number of empty holiday camps in East Anglia had been put at the RCM’s disposal, the largest being Dovercourt ‒ or transferred straight onto trains to London, either arriving at London Liverpool Street Station or Victoria Station. Eventually children were either accommodated in hostels, in boarding schools or with foster families. On 25 November 1938, the BBC broadcast the first call for foster parents in Britain and this elicited 500 immediate responses from those willing to accommodate children. There is little evidence that the number of Kindertransportees was ever limited by a lack of foster parents during the ten-month duration of the scheme, which is astonishing. However, as discussed before there was little or no vetting of these volunteers.
The decision by the British government to admit only unaccompanied child refugees on the Kindertransport has been scrutinised by many. There was clearly pressure from the public and the media to select refugees that would not immediately seek employment and thus potentially disadvantage unemployed British citizens. This can also be seen as a reason behind the decision to only give work permits to those who were willing to work in jobs that were not attracting British applicants such as domestic work 16or nursing. Furthermore, it is clear that British society and British politics suffered from its fair share of antisemitism. In the conclusion to her book, Whitehall and the Jews, Louise London quotes the antisemitic opinions of politicians, officials and ordinary citizens and comments that ‘moderate indulgence in social anti-Jewish prejudice was so widespread as to be unremarkable.’ Adult refugees, especially adult males, were seen as threatening. Child refugees, however, did not have the same negative connotations and could also be imagined as readily assimilating to the British way of life. The pictures of child refugees that were published in newspapers of the time reflect an image of the children as sweet and innocent. However, it might be argued that portraying child refugees as innocent, suggests that adult refugees are somehow guilty and deserving of persecution. Placing the child refugees with foster parents also had the advantage that they were dispersed around the country and not likely to be visible in large numbers to those who were critical of Jewish refugees coming to the UK.
Many more families wished to put their children forward for inclusion on a Kindertransport to the UK than there was capacity for. In the beginning of the Kindertransport movement a sizeable number of children were selected according to the urgency of them having to escape Nazi persecution, i.e. boys between fifteen and seventeen years old were seen as particularly urgent cases as they were at danger of arrest. Also, children who were living in Jewish children’s homes were perceived to be priority cases as this sort of group accommodation was easily identifiable by those wishing to carry out violent acts. Other urgent cases were those living without one or both of their parents and those in particularly straitened circumstances. The decision-making process was made more difficult by the preference of some British foster parents who asked for girls aged between six and ten. Not finding evidence of overt bias does not mean that it was not more difficult for children from certain backgrounds to emigrate. First, the parents had to have the initiative to seek a place on a Kindertransport. Secondly, as most 17British foster families were not Jewish, many of the parents were asked to sign a permission form to allow their children to be placed in non-Jewish families. Children from families who were not willing to allow this and did not sign the form clearly had diminished chances of finding a placement. Furthermore, the RCM did try and select children who would make a good impression on their British hosts and would thus convince others in Britain to continue taking on foster children and hence enlarge the reach of the scheme. Thus children who had disabilities or whose behavioural problems, such as bed-wetting, were detected by those issuing health certificates, were far less likely to be picked for a transport to Britain.
As discussed, the British government did not commit public funds towards the costs of the Kindertransport. On the contrary, it pushed the financial burden on to private individuals and charities by demanding that every child refugee to be admitted under this scheme should be ‘guaranteed’, i.e. the sum of £50 had to be put up to indemnify the British government against any cost arising from admitting the child to the UK. Additionally, funds were needed for the actual journey and the upkeep of the children. Some of their German and Austrian birth parents were in a position to pay for travel costs, but many were not. Eleanor Rathbone, an Independent MP who championed the cause of refugees from the Continent, argued in a pamphlet published in 1939, that private charitable appeals would not be sufficient to raise the necessary funds. She argued several million pounds were required and should be provided by the government. The government of the time did not agree to this.
One major source of funds was the Jewish community’s preexisting Jewish Refugees Committee. During the 1930s, the committee raised over £5 million. Another source of funding was the Lord Baldwin Fund for Refugees. Philip Voss, a Jewish barrister and Labour Party activist, was a prime mover in the foundation of this charity. He persuaded Lord Baldwin, the former British prime minister, to lend his name to the fund. Despite being a supporter 18of appeasement, Lord Baldwin was also keen to support refugees in the UK and in early December 1938 he launched a BBC radio appeal in aid of this new charity. He argued that Jewish children and those of Jewish descent in Germany and Austria faced an existential threat and proclaimed: ‘Shall they live? Before it is too late, get them out!’ a headline that was also used for the newspaper advertising for the Baldwin Fund. Other prominent individuals such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Cosmo Lang, and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Arthur Hinsley, gave their support to the charity. The Post Office Savings Bank issued special savings stamp books in support of the appeal. Many newspapers, even those like the Daily Mail that had a long history of hostility towards refugees, supported the Baldwin Fund which raised over £500,000.
Half of this money was used to finance the immigration of Jewish child refugees. Other guarantors were private individuals who were either the child’s prospective foster carers or people prepared to guarantee the upkeep of a child refugee while they were placed elsewhere. Initially, an unspecified number of children sent to Britain did not have an individual guarantor but were supported by a pool of guarantees to be distributed by the RCM as it saw fit. Due to financial constraints, by spring 1939 this pool of guarantees from general funds was restricted to 200 cases, which meant that only if one of the 200 individuals already in the UK was no longer in need of a guarantee, could another child refugee come to Britain funded by that pool. In practice, this meant that from March 1939 onwards, in the majority of cases, only children who had an individual guarantor could enter Britain. This was a significant change in procedure and led to a complicated relationship between the Continental organisations and the RCM. As we have seen, potential guarantors and foster parents in the UK were most keen to foster girls aged between six and ten, which was not the largest or most needy group of child refugees waiting to leave Germany. The RCM forcefully rejected the German and Austrian child refugee 19departments’ requests for further children without individual guarantees to be allowed entry into the UK. In the face of these demands, they responded, ‘The Movement for the Transport of Children [sic], again, cannot bring over more unguaranteed children, until those already here have been placed. I regret that it is no use to continue to ask for more help than we are giving, because it is not in our power to grant it.’
Not all children who came to Britain on a Kindertransport were Jewish. About 20 per cent of the Kindertransport child refugees would not have been considered part of the Jewish community before 1933 but were defined as Jewish by the National Socialist regime. At the time, these people were referred to as ‘non-Aryan Christians’ by both British and German organisations and included children with a combination of Christian and Jewish parents, or grandparents who either had no religious affiliation or were in fact Christians. The Quakers, also known as the Society of Friends, with offices in Berlin and Vienna, and other specific organisations connected to the Protestant and Catholic Churches, assisted this group of children on the Continent. The RCM in Britain was an interdenominational organisation and took care of all the different groups of children. A certain amount of wrangling is reported between the representatives of the different categories of children about the numbers of places allocated to each group.
Because of time pressure, very little effort was made to match up the potential foster families with particular children. This led to many unsuitable situations which ranged from a mismatch of cultural and religious backgrounds between foster families and children, to situations in which the children suffered physical and sexual abuse. Also, as nobody could have predicted the outbreak and course of the Second World War, many foster parents had not realised the length of time they would be required to look after their charges. As the children got older and entered adolescence, their relationship with their foster parents often became more difficult. 20In many cases, those who arrived as adolescents were accommodated in hostels with other young refugees. Overall, this seems to have been a preferable option for older Kindertransportees as they felt more comfortable in the company of other young people with a similar background. Some of the older Kindertransportees were very disappointed when they were not allowed to follow the educational path they had originally anticipated. They encountered the prejudiced assumption that a basic education should be ‘good enough’ for a refugee and the view that they should become financially independent as soon as possible in order to support themselves outside of the Kindertransport initiative. After the outbreak of war, many older Kindertransportees played their part in the British war effort, either joining the army or working in a variety of jobs that were considered useful. There are as many Kindertransport stories as there are Kindertransportees and it seems that it depends on a wide variety of factors how individual Kindertransportees remember the war years and narrate them in the story of their lives.
Although the British government can only be described as a rather reluctant partner in the Kindertransport rescue effort, after 1945 it offered naturalisation to almost all those refugees that had spent the duration of the war in the UK and many of the Kindertransportees who had reached the age of maturity chose to become naturalised.
Finding new homes in Wales
Initially, many adult refugees to the UK wanted to settle near large urban centres in England, close to the larger, more vibrant established Jewish communities. Many had little knowledge of the nations of the United Kingdom, including Wales, before they arrived. But some government schemes urged refugees to settle in specific areas. As mentioned, previously, refugee entrepreneurs were encouraged, or in some cases forced, to establish their factories in the so-called Special Areas, of which there was one in South Wales. 21Some resented this and some even initially avoided moving to Wales. Joachim Koppel, for example, commuted for some time from London to the factory he established on the industrial estate at Treforest near Pontypridd, but copies of his alien registration certificate show that he was certainly registered as living in Wales for a period, and probably did so for at least some of that time. Refugee domestics had to live in the household of their employer, and thus had no choice as to the area of their resettlement. Others were allocated to an area where there was a labour shortage affecting certain jobs, such as in the timber industry in the area around Llangollen.
A number of refugees came to Wales almost by accident and stayed because they liked Wales for its beautiful landscape and due to the fact that it was not part of the English mainstream. Certainly, artists and writers such as the painter Josef Herman and Kate Bosse-Griffiths, who became a Welsh speaker, Welsh-language author and Welsh-language campaigner, seem to have been influenced by such sentiments.
Some refugees arrived in Wales because they were evacuated from other areas of the UK. Bea Green was a student at University College London when its Education Department was moved to Aberystwyth. Empty manor houses or even a castle provided the space for whole schools to move to Wales or for new residential hostels for young people to be established. Children who arrived in the UK via the Kindertransport scheme were resettled all over the UK, in England, Scotland, Northern Island and Wales, wherever a placement in a foster family or a residential setting could be found.
We have no reliable answers as to the total number of refugees from National Socialism who resettled in Wales. However, in some cases, we can identify specific groups who came to Wales. For example, it seems that a sizeable number of the particular group of Kindertransportees who fled from Prague in summer 1939 found homes in Wales, such as Renate Collins, Harry Weinberger and Lia Lesser. This might be because they arrived towards the end of the 22Kindertransport scheme and other possible placements had already been ‘filled’, or because the Czech Refugee Committee looked to Wales more than other parts of the UK for foster parents.
