Back in 1928, at the height of Germany’s revived economy, Philip Kerr and Albrecht Bernstorff, the Anglophile grandson of a diplomat, had overseen the rebirth of the Rhodes Scholarships, the educational exchange plan which would bring Adam von Trott to Balliol in 1931.
The opening speech at the resumption ceremony was given by Sir James Barrie, who – sounding a little like Cecil Rhodes himself – urged the first intake of German-born scholars to behave as if they meant ‘to eat all the elephants in Hindustan and pick your teeth with the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral’.1 Adam von Trott’s willingness to act as a tour guide in Berlin (not forgetting to show off Wilhelm II’s absurd imperial desk to new college friends like Leslie Rowse) was undertaken – if not with quite that gusto – in just the spirit of cultural exchange that had been envisaged by Bernstorff and Kerr.
Courage was a character trait that Sir James had stressed in his speech of welcome. Another early Rhodes scholar, Adolf Schleppegrell, might have won Barrie’s heart by the brave passion with which he spoke out for the opposition on that famous night in 1933 when the Oxford Union voted never again to go to war for king and country. Schleppegrell – whose immediate appointment as the Union’s first-ever foreign secretary suggests that the students had not felt entirely happy about their pacifist result – spoke out once again in 1934, when he insisted that the Oxford Union’s invited speaker, Winston Churchill, should come clean about his views on the infamous war guilt clause of the Treaty of Versailles. When Churchill, at the third questioning, endorsed the clause, Schleppegrell left the room.2
The scholarships, initially intended to promote the cause of international friendship within an academic environment, had not been designed to act as an escape route from a tyrannous regime. Rules, as the situation in Nazi Germany deteriorated, were quietly bent to allow special assistance to be provided. Philip Lothian (Kerr had succeeded to his cousin’s title of marquis of Lothian in 1930) used his influence at Rhodes House to facilitate Adam von Trott’s return to Oxford and, later, to offer support for Adam’s peace-seeking journey to America.
Other examples of how the scholarships were employed to assist the German students are less well known. Lord Lothian used the numerous American contacts available through his close friendship with the Astors to gain Fritz Schumacher (author, many years later, of the best-selling Small is Beautiful) an additional, post-scholarship year at Columbia University. In 1937, Philip Lothian stepped forward once again; Schumacher and his family had emigrated to England, but without meeting the requirement for guaranteed employment. Through Lothian’s agency, Schumacher was housed on the farm of Robert Brand’s country estate and provided with the wartime work that enabled him to escape internment in Britain.
In 1933 – the year in which a swashbuckling Hugh Greene followed a fellow Merton student, Robert Byron (vintage 1925), out of their cloistered quad life and into the world of journalism – it became apparent to the dons of Oxford that the modest bridge that the Rhodes Scholarship posts had offered to Germany needed to grow, and to evolve into a different form. William Beveridge, a former Balliol graduate who would become one of England’s most admired social reformers, made use of all his Oxford connections to found the Academic Assistance Council as a means of providing support and work to the hundreds of professors who, having lost their jobs under the new Nazi embargoes, wanted to emigrate to England. Richard Haldane’s equally pro-German brother, John, was placed on the AAC committee; at its first public meeting, Albert Einstein gave the keynote address. Speaking at the Albert Hall in October 1933 about the imperative need for AAC fundraising, Einstein was greeted by an unexpectedly large audience with enthusiasm and with commitment. England’s gain – and Germany’s considerable loss – would swiftly include the arrivals of Ernst Gombrich, Ernst Chain, Geoffrey Elton, Nikolaus Pevsner and (bringing with him the family’s Bechstein piano) Claus Moser.
The AAC was not the only body to open its doors to Germany’s newly dispossessed intellectual elite. In 1934, the Warburg, Hamburg’s leading centre for the study of art, quietly re-emerged in London as part of the newly formed Courtauld Institute, where it extended a warm invitation to recent immigrants from the great art centres of Dresden, Munich, Hamburg and Berlin. Imperial Chemicals, combining philanthropy with pragmatism, waited until 1939 to despatch Churchill’s advisor, Frederick Lindemann, out on a recruitment tour in a new Rolls Royce, from which the flamboyant Professor Lindemann offered both work and ICI’s generous financial support to Germany’s finest – and, by that time, fairly frantic – scientists.
Nikolaus Pevsner was one of the first recipients of help from the Academic Assistance Council, which presented him, in 1933, with a welcome grant of £250. But Pevsner, while glad of the financial aid, would always feel that he owed his greatest debt not to Beveridge’s splendid organisation, but to the Quakers who came to his rescue at the moment he lost his Göttingen post. What Pevsner could not appreciate at the time was just how important the role of Quakers would become during those desperate pre-war years.
Vienna, the city that had helped to shape William Beveridge’s ideas about social reform and stimulated him into creating the Academic Assistance Council, was also the seeding ground for the remarkable Quaker woman at whose home in Duchess Road, Birmingham, Pevsner spent his first lonely months of exile in Britain.
Born in Newcastle in 1888 and educated at Newnham, Francesca Wilson went out to Austria in 1919 to work with Quaker Relief, while writing home for the Manchester Guardian about Vienna’s pioneering system of social aid: of its libraries, soup kitchens, hospitals and – above all – its programme of medical care for children. Vienna, as Wilson later declared, had offered the most inspiring experience of her life. From then on, she dedicated herself to philanthropy, settling in Birmingham to work as a teacher and – like her German neighbour, Johanna Selig Simmons – to provide housing for refugees.
Pevsner had not been the most grateful of Francesca’s lodgers. Besides complaining about her cigarettes, her cats and her untidy habits, he grumbled about the ubiquitous scent of sweet chocolate (Duchess Road lay close to a Cadbury’s factory); the poor condition of the city swimming-baths; the failure of the English to appreciate Hitler; and the way that the British deprived their poorer citizens of cultural experience. The German exile’s sense of loneliness, while briefly defeated by a young student, Denis Mahon, who invited the music-loving Pevsner home to listen to his German record collection, was acute. Francesca – quietly feeding pennies into the gas meter that heated her unhappy lodger’s chilly upstairs room, while striving to entertain a wistful expatriate with visits to the local cinema (where they enjoyed a Garbo film), to provide a steady supply of books (Pevsner fell in love with Prince Albert in Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria) and to find time between all this for reassuring chats – would finally receive her lodger’s vote of thanks. Leaving the cosy squalor of Duchess Road for London in 1935, a grateful Pevsner told his hostess simply that ‘I owe such a lot to you’. The fact that, four years later, this former supporter of Hitler went out of his way to urge a young Scottish friend to support the Barkas family’s valiant work among the German Jews who were trying to escape from Göttingen spoke to Francesca Wilson more eloquently still.3
In Tisa Schulenburg’s case, it was the gentle attitude and courage of a group of English Quakers that finally helped to ease the unsettled spirit of a German emigrant. ‘Compared with these kind and friendly people, who was I?’ she wrote. ‘Despair left me, peace was given, hope returned . . .’4
Tisa’s whole family – in which all the males espoused the new Nazi party from the very dawn of the Reich – had moved from Tressow to Berlin in 1932. Tisa, estranged from them by their politics and married to Fritz Hess, a Jew, had entered a different, threatened world. The first warning bell had sounded in February 1933, when the flight of their friend Emil Fuchs was swiftly followed by a visit from the Gestapo and a search of Tisa’s studio. Plainly, they were under scrutiny. Hess emigrated to Britain in the early autumn of 1933; Tisa stayed on just long enough to see her stepson, Edmund, through his final exams at the newly Nazified Salem School.* In 1934, she joined her husband in exile.
There’s something touchingly ironic about the fact that Tisa, while still brandishing her theoretical Marxism like a scarlet flag, had never experienced true poverty. Nor did she now. Fritz Hess had been forced to leave his splendid collection of paintings behind, but good banking contacts enabled him to transfer funds to England. Within two years, the couple had built themselves a cottage at what was fast becoming an exiles’ stronghold at Walberswick, on the Suffolk coast. (They changed the name of their new home to Oak Barn when friends explained that ‘the Refuge’ sounded awkwardly close to ‘refugee’.)
Tisa would never feel that she belonged among those forlorn newcomers to London who clustered around the German book-shops in Charlotte Street and wistfully queued up on Sunday afternoons to watch the latest German film on show at Elsie Cohen’s Academy Cinema on Oxford Street. Tisa had arrived with a keen sense of relief and joy: she was at last connected to that beloved England in which her parents had spent their happiest years. As a good-looking, well-born and relatively well-off extrovert (and one who spoke English with complete ease), she suffered from none of the feelings of isolation or despair that had so beset Nikolaus Pevsner. England was ‘our home to be loved henceforth’, she had told herself in advance. Happily, England provided a warm welcome. ‘I don’t know if there is in any other country such a capacity for friendship!’ Tisa exclaimed, although she later qualified the remark, recognising that she had been fortunate to arrive ‘in those early years after Hitler’s rise to power [when] immigrants were received with remarkable kindness and helpfulness’.5
Kindness did not, however, mean contentment. By 1936, although still fond of her attractive and life-embracing husband, Tisa was living a separate life and filling its emptiness with love affairs. Searching for the sense of a purpose that seemed always to elude her, she rediscovered her talent as an artist. Working at one of the row of studios in Parkhill Road that were being used by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth’s first husband, John Skeaping, she began to sculpt. It was Moore who suggested that Tisa should try her hand at carving in wood, a craft in which Germany has famously excelled. When a social services worker from the north of England suggested that the young Countess should give a talk on art to a group of unemployed Yorkshire miners, the impulsive Tisa accepted at once.
She was due for a brusque awakening.
In 1936, north-east England had gone on strike, with 200 unemployed workers marching 300 miles from the shipbuilding community of Jarrow to lobby Parliament for work. Given a pound each, to take them back home and out of sight, they did not give up the struggle. ‘I had never really met a worker,’ Tisa later confessed.6 Confronted by the sight of a row of burly men queuing patiently in rainy, soot-grimed streets for their brief quota of sleep on a single all-purpose blanket, she was horrified.
Tisa’s first venture north was not a success. She had arrived with a sheaf of drawings of emaciated working men and their desolate wives, gleaned from the same magazines in which Hubert Herkomer’s first works had appeared as a revelation to the young van Gogh. An audience of thirty men, muffled in frayed scarves and threadbare coats against the freezing cold of their communal hut (grandly known as the Social Club), examined the drawings in silence, and then handed them back. Someone, finally, observed that nothing much had changed for the working poor. The silence was resumed. Tisa, mortified and upset, resolved to persist – and to do better.
In 1937, she was given a chance to try again. Her post, this time, was more secure, working as a tutor to the tiny community of Spennymoor, near Durham. Here, having learned from her previous mistakes, Tisa stopped showing grim prints and began, instead, to teach her newly acquired skill in carving wood. It was a breakthrough. Slowly, the Spennymoor men began to regard their German art teacher with cautious pride: they spoke of her as some sort of strange but exotic pet who appeared in pearls and furs to lecture them about the inalienable rights of the individual. Tisa’s lessons in political theory bored them, however, and Tisa herself never understood why, when offered work in the south, the miners told her that they weren’t taking it: ‘they said they’d rather stay at home and bear poverty’.
By 1939, Tisa began to believe that she had found what she was meant to do in life. That summer, she was offered the task of supervising workers’ art for the entire area around Durham. Was this – she wondered – where her future might lie?7
Tisa had arrived in England during the period in which Hitler began courting those members of the English press who seemed most likely to endorse Nazi Germany. In December 1934, Lord Rothermere, owner of the conservative Daily Mail, was welcomed to Hitler’s first formal dinner party for eminent foreign guests. On 28 December, Rothermere’s European correspondent, George Ward-Price, returned the favour with a glowing tribute to Hitler’s success: ‘What magic has restored hope to German hearts . . . magnetised this mighty nation until one feels in its midst as if one were in a gigantic power-house? Hitler. That is the whole answer.’ Referring to the accounts of Jewish persecution that kept appearing in the Manchester Guardian, the authoritative pages of the Daily Mail dismissed them as ‘pure moonshine’.
Hitler had indicated in Mein Kampf that he would seek an alliance with England. Conversations with George Ward-Price – and with Wardie’s friends, Unity and Diana Mitford – encouraged him to believe that his plans for getting rid of Germany’s Jews would not impede progress towards the coalition with Britain that he desired. In May 1935, shortly after conscription had been introduced in Germany and – far more disturbingly to nervous foreign powers – soon after it had been announced that the German airforce had reached parity with that of Britain, Hitler issued the first of his overtures. A nine-page letter was despatched to Lord Rothermere, for circulation among British people of influence. Here, with flattering hints of his hopes for union between ‘two great Germanic peoples’, Hitler more directly demanded England’s support for the creation in Europe of ‘a force for peace and reason of 120 million people of the highest type’.8
In England, in 1935, there was a strong desire for peace; a desire which included regular proposals for disarmament or, at least, for a drastic cut in spending on defence. A few people, however, were growing uneasy about what was already happening to the Jews in Germany. Lady Londonderry, on 18 May 1935, alerted the outgoing Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, that Dr Melchior (that same Jewish banker who had so impressed Maynard Keynes during their negotiations over the Treaty of Versailles) had given her ‘dreadful’ news.* Robert Brand, among others, had been steadily reporting to his friends that terrible things were being done in Germany. In the event, Hitler’s overture of 1935 was rejected, not because of the vicious policy at which that deadly phrase ‘people of the highest type’ so clearly pointed, but, rather, because England was worried by Germany’s militarisation and afraid that her own connection to France would be undermined by any hint of a new alliance with their former common enemy.
Hitler’s arrangements for the creation of a subject race of Jews came into force in Germany in September 1935 (just four months after his appeal for Britain’s support), with the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws. But, with the eager assistance of England’s ingenuous and unofficial army of young ambassadors, the information that reached England remained unclear. Were families expected to disbelieve the fresh-faced and well-treated young people who assured them that – while having a lovely time, and with everybody being so friendly and kind – they had seen no sign of persecution? Were they to disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes, in 1936, when thousands of them visited Berlin (on free tickets) for the Olympic Games and saw no ugly signs, no excluding boards, no corner kiosks selling Der Stürmer? What was all the fuss about? The Jews, it was clear, were in no danger from this splendid country. The country’s ethnic minority had only to follow the legitimate orders of the Nazi authorities and all would be well.
In 1936, Wilfrid Israel paid a visit to the British Embassy in Berlin. Speaking in his role as an employer of some 600 Jews, Israel advised Nevile Henderson that the need of help for the country’s Jewish population had reached a critical point: assistance must be provided in getting people out of Germany. Ambassador Henderson, rapturous in his admiration of all that Hitler was achieving, was both uninterested and unhelpful. Britain, deep in the throes of unemployment and unrest, felt no need to increase her personal burden of woe.
In May 1938, two months after the Anschluss, the Jewish journalist Bella Fromm noted that the ‘Jew baiting’ in Vienna had reached an intolerable level. Until 1938, Bella had considered herself invulnerable. Her life, so she was warned, was now at risk. On 9 September, outward-bound for a new life in New York, Bella gazed out from the upper deck of the Normandie for a last glimpse of St Nicholas’s church and the (English-designed) tallest spire in Hamburg, before it sank from her view into the waves. That night, in her diary, Fromm chose one thankful word to describe her feelings: ‘safe’.9
On 7 November 1938, three months after Bella Fromm left Germany in search of a new world, a young Jew whose entire family had been deported from Hanover to a camp in Poland walked into the German Embassy in Paris. In an act of premeditated protest, Herschel Grynszpan shot a junior official, Ernst vom Rath, twice in the stomach. The victim took two days to die. On the day of his death, as the culmination of a carefully laid and coolly orchestrated campaign by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi regime responded.
Kristallnacht operated against the Jews with a ferocity and on a scale that nobody (except the Nazi leaders and the perpetrators, the SA and the SS) could have anticipated. Throughout Austria and Germany, beautiful old synagogues were set on fire, shop windows were smashed, homes were plundered and people were savagely attacked. The police, standing aside from the vandalism and offering no help to the victims, devoted their attentions solely to the protection of non-targeted buildings. The following day, it appeared that nobody had been responsible and that, therefore, nobody would be charged. When Jewish victims claimed insurance for their ruined homes and stores, the Reich stepped in with a counter-claim: for the damages caused by the riots, they demanded reparations of one billion marks.
Mercy had vanished and on the horizon loomed a future of absolute darkness for those who refused to leave the Germany that so many of them still loved. The most that a patriotic Jewish family could hope for now was to sell their home in foreign currency to a wealthy and well-disposed couple like the Bielenbergs. (Peter Bielenberg had been persuaded by his friend Adam von Trott to stay in Germany and to join the burgeoning German resistance; crucially, for the way that he himself would later be perceived, Bielenberg did not become a Nazi.)
Money comprised a large part of the problem for the Jewish families who now recognised the imperative of departure. The rich and influential could always bend the law, but the rule of the Third Reich – one that was intended to boost the Nazi economy – was that no private citizen could take more than ten marks out of the country. How, armed with such a pitiful sum, could any refugee expect to be welcomed into a country suffering from a decade of economic depression, and filled with people who were desperate for employment?
This was only one of the difficulties that the Quakers in England and in Germany – working hand in glove with an intrepid group of Jewish supporters – now set out to overcome.
In 1938, Wilfrid Israel’s family department store was seized and put under Aryan ownership. Its 600 Jewish employees were deported to Sachsenhausen. Offered a plane flight to England, with a guarantee of his personal safety, Israel refused; instead, after rescuing his imprisoned former employees, he joined forces with Frank Foley, the British passport control officer in Berlin whose position had been assigned to mask his undercover work for MI6. Working together with Foley’s colleague Hubert Pollack, the three men began to operate in league with a dedicated network of Quakers. Pollack identified families in need; Israel produced the necessary funding (and frequently much else); Foley stamped the visas (and often harboured the refugee families in his home).
The Quakers, meanwhile, operating out of a headquarters in the pretty old spa town of Bad Pyrmont, began working alongside Pollack at the painful task of identifying the most urgent cases for emigration. Using their English contacts, they were also attempting to enlarge a complicated network of British recipients willing to produce evidence of guaranteed employment and shelter. Both conditions remained necessary requirements for entry into England.*
Even before the horrors of Kristallnacht, a brutal truth had begun to emerge. A Jewish family could escape from Nazi Germany more effectively if it consented to divide itself up. Once children were removed from the equation, relatives stood a better chance of being hidden (if they fled), or of being employed (if they took the official route). And so, out of such despair, the idea of the Kindertransport was born. The childless Wilfrid Israel was one of its chief promoters and facilitators in Germany. In England, the heroes of the hour were a tiny and indomitable little group of Jews and Quakers.
Time, after Kristallnacht had revealed what lay in store, could not be lost. On 15 November 1938, Britain’s Home Secretary, Samuel Hoare (who was himself a Quaker), received an urgent appeal from Viscount Samuel for new legislation that would allow 10,000 Jewish children to be brought to England. Hoare turned the request down.
On 21 November, a second delegation arrived at Hoare’s door. This time, Lord Samuel had brought along Hugh Greene’s pacifist cousin, Ben, a young man who had worked with Quaker groups in Germany and who offered first-hand accounts of the fields of frozen and starving refugees whom he had found patiently waiting – for the transit permits that were not being given out – up on the borders of Holland. Standing beside Ben was Bertha Bracey, a forceful and articulate Birmingham-born Quaker who had worked alongside Francesca Wilson in Vienna before running, in 1933, the German Emergency Committee out of Berlin. More recently, Bracey had started to organise refugee aid from the crowded, jostling, kindly chaos of Friends’ House in London. There, the target was to locate safe English homes for immigrants who were willing – whatever their qualifications – to work as farmhands, drivers, cooks, maids, stable workers, builders, or as any other kind of worker, in exchange for sponsorship and shelter. But now, standing in front of the Home Secretary, Bertha Bracey threw all of her considerable powers of persuasion into the cause of the children.
The children, Bracey pleaded, must be saved.
The cause was won. Already softened by the appeals of Philip Noel-Baker, his fellow Quaker politician, Hoare gave his word that action would be immediate. The Bill was heard – and was passed – on that very same night. By the following morning, word had reached the major cities of departure; preparations were hastily made for Quaker volunteers to travel out of Germany as escorts on the Kindertransport trains. The reason (protecting both the children and their modest possessions – one small suitcase apiece – from the ravages of Nazi guards) proved to have sound justification. It was one against which the gentle Quakers could not always prevail.
The arrival of the children began on 2 December. A few media-conscious society ladies were on hand to welcome the young refugees and to display their own pretty faces to the gentlemen of the press. It all made – if the children would only learn to smile more readily at the cameras – for a most attractive scene.
The children did their best to look appealing. Many had been coached in advance to say a few words of English. In the most frequently published photograph from that first week in December, they are seen waving to the camera from the deck of the boat as it chugs into Harwich. They look pinched, despite the warm wool coats intended to protect them from England’s notorious lack of heated homes. Several of the children are holding a musical instrument; others clutch a book. All, on this occasion, wear bright smiles. None of them know what to expect, or when – if ever – they will see their parents again. For the present, however, they must remember to look cheerful.
Felix Gottlieb had just turned sixteen on 18 December 1938 when his parents – they had already despatched their daughter, Lilly, to British-mandated Palestine – put him on the midnight train at Vienna. At two in the morning, the train, crowded with silent children, finally creaked out and off on its journey towards the Hook of Holland. Here, the children were put onto the ferry for Harwich. The more fortunate ones would be greeted here by families who had consented to take them in.
Felix, a quiet, home-loving boy, came from a family who had no connections in England. The only contact provided to Felix was for a London hostel that had just been acquired by a west London synagogue. But events had moved with great rapidity in the autumn of 1938. The hostel was not yet ready. Felix was to spend the first two months of his life in England at a place called Dovercourt.
Built as a Warner’s east-coast seaside summer camp for workers’ families, Dovercourt had been caught unawares by the sudden need for refugee housing. The retired naval captain who ran the place had hastily recalled his summertime employees to act as hosts and cooks. Heaters had been placed in the dormitory huts and cork lining glued to the thin walls; nevertheless, the path to the communal showers was often deep in snow and no preparations had been made for what, exactly, the children should do. There were no teachers in those first months, and, since the camp had no library, the only reading materials were the books that the children had brought in with them from Germany. (Felix Gottlieb remains uncertain of the exact moment at which, reading The Pickwick Papers, he instinctively chose to make its world his model for the England he had not yet encountered.)
So what did they do, these children who had no homes to go to? They sang songs – community songs, led by their summer-camp hosts – and they played ball games. And they ate: strange dishes like tripe and onions and – until a rabbi issued a protest – bacon and eggs. Felix had enjoyed the bacon and eggs. Like everything else in England, it had the charm of novelty.
And if it was lonely, and if he missed his family (Felix’s parents were sheltered by French farmers throughout the war, under the orders of a local priest), it mattered no more and no less than the knowledge that he had been welcomed in. It was comforting to know that he would not be travelling alone to the new hostel and that when he arrived at Ladbroke Grove, work was going to be found for him. (Felix, together with one of his Dovercourt friends, was offered work in a reputable jeweller’s shop.)
Felix’s England was a good place, filled with kind people who offered him safety when his life was at risk, and who enabled him to be reunited with his sister and parents after the war, when their family would all settle in England. Felix’s sister married Jim Laker, an English cricketing hero, and went to live in view of Salisbury’s great cathedral. Felix himself continued to look upon his adopted land as a beacon of decency, a bright light in that world over which Hitler had attempted to cast a mantle of darkness. Entering his nineties, Felix Gottlieb is – in everything but his scrupulous attention to detail, a lingering attachment to Bismarck herrings, and the strong trace of a Viennese accent – a very English man.10
Etta (born Etka) Weiner’s family lived in Dresden. Her father owned two department stores and a house that he deliberately built in a part of Dresden where they would have no Jewish neighbours. The Weiners lived on the first floor; the tenant above them was a Catholic lady, not well off, who paid a reduced rent. Etta’s father was well liked for the fact that, during hard times, he gave out free milk to all the local schools. It didn’t feel comfortable for Etta when copies of Der Stürmer were sold on the corner of her street, but – even though she was the only schoolgirl who didn’t wear the uniform of the Hitler Girls’ Youth – nobody treated her in a different way. ‘My friends came from families who didn’t think about things like that.’11
Differences, however, would become increasingly apparent. When Etta took up singing, her teacher objected to having a Jewish girl in the choir. The lessons that she was given in private (her mother paid) confirmed that Etta had a voice worth training, ‘but the teacher couldn’t admit she was teaching me because I was Jewish. And every day, the Gestapo came and stood outside the doors of my father’s shops, to keep people away.’ The customers, as Etta explains, came in just the same – ‘but through the trades-men’s door at the back’.
After the Nuremburg Laws of 1935, the Weiners were only allowed to keep one (Christian) servant, Emma. They were ordered to hand in their family treasures. Etta still displays her few precious relics of a Dresden childhood: a ruby and gold china dish; a white angel; two sets of dancing Meissen figures. These mementoes survived, she explains, because the Nazis had no use for them. ‘They only wanted what could be melted down.’
And then came Kristallnacht. Etta remembers the shock she felt when she realised that nobody else in their street had been touched, while their windows, one after the other, were all smashed. ‘We were the only Jews there, you see. But they knew. They knew which house it was safe to damage.’
Walking to school the following morning, Etta saw the smouldering remains of the old Italian synagogue. The women standing nearby screamed out when they saw Etta and her mother: ‘Burn the Jews! Throw them in the fire!’ The women, in Etta’s opinion, were far more violent than the men. ‘And then, after that day, we were all of us afraid. Even to hear a knock on the door . . .’ She shakes her head. ‘We didn’t know who would be there.’
Etta’s parents told her she must give up her dream of a singing career. A rabbi in England had promised to take her in; she was to travel out on the next Kindertransport. The Catholic lady asked her forgiveness for all that was happening to the Jews. She gave Etta a card with an angel on it, and said that she must think of the angel, protecting her, always.
Etta doesn’t remember much about the Kindertransport, except that a guard asked to look in her case and that some things had been taken out when he gave it back. The rabbi was kind. He helped her parents to escape, but they had to come with empty hands. Her mother cried when she realised that she couldn’t even buy a cup of coffee on the journey to a foreign land. Etta found work. Her father was getting old to start again, but he bought cheap furniture and made it look nice. He rented rooms in a house and furnished them himself. He worked all the time and so did her mother. Etta sighs. ‘I can only remember how they were always tired.’
Terrible stories reached them from Germany. It never made Etta hate the Germans. ‘There were always good Germans,’ she says. ‘We knew so many. But they were hypnotised. I can’t hate them for that.’
Etta describes how much she enjoyed going back to Dresden, long after the war, and resuming a few of her old friendships. She even met a niece of the singer who had once been going to help her make a career – so Etta had dreamed – on the concert platform.
And England?
Etta’s answer is not so far from the one given by Felix Gottlieb. She thinks of England as if it were a cherished member of her family. ‘If I speak against England, I speak as I would against my parents or my child. But if I hear somebody else speak badly of England – I won’t allow it to happen! England saved us. And I never forget.’
Eva Steinicke grew up in Berlin in the thirties. Eva’s mother was Jewish, her father was not. By 1936, when Eva was eight, Jews were forbidden to enter places of entertainment. ‘But my father, Otto, could go where he liked, even though he was a communist. He took me to the circus and to Shirley Temple films. We went to the Olympics in 1936. My Jewish friends couldn’t do any of those things.’12
Eva’s happiest memories are of the flat in Berlin where her grandparents lived. Felix Opfer was a respected paediatrician with an excellent practice and a gently cultured home. There was a piano in the corner with an embroidered cloth cover; cupboards of neatly folded linen; a drawer of children’s games; shelves of books. Eva was especially fond of Dr Doolittle and – she still has her copy, printed in the old gothic script – of Alice in Wonderland: ‘“Ach wie lang-weilig”, sagte Alice, die neben ihrer Schwester im Grase sass . . .’
Eva’s parents lived apart. In 1937, while Eva and her mother visited – such places were hard to find by then – a Thuringian pension that took Jewish clients, her father accepted a holiday for war veterans that was being offered at the beautifully old-fashioned spa town of Bad Pyrmont. While there, he made friends with the people at the Quaker centre. The couple who ran it, Leonard and Mary Friedrich, had strong connections to England. Mary had been born there; Leonard had married her after his internment (as a German in England) on the Isle of Man, in 1914. In 1933, worried about what was happening in Germany, the Friedrichs came to Bad Pyrmont to do everything they could to fight the persecution of the Jews.
‘My father told them about us and they introduced him to a Quaker lady called Anne Lyall. She offered to provide the guarantees and housing if my mother and I needed to leave Germany. But of course, just then . . .’
In 1937, the Steinecke family had no intention of leaving Berlin, a city they still loved. In January 1938, everything changed. Eva’s grandparents were moved into a small flat in an area that was reserved for Jewish use only. They had to hand over all their possessions and keep just enough tableware for their daily meals. Felix Opfer was instructed henceforth to treat only Jewish patients.
‘And then,’ Eva says, ‘came Kristallnacht.’
Otto Steinecke wrote to Anne Lyall. She told him that work as a housemaid had been found for his wife (a trained physiotherapist). Eva herself would be cared for by the Quakers. It would – so Eva’s father promised her – only be for a short while, just until life returned to normal.
At school, meanwhile, Eva’s fellow pupils were getting ready for more adventurous journeys. Her safe world was dissolving.
‘But we’re going to America!’ someone shouted.
‘Chile!’
‘Shanghai!’
‘Australia!’
And so the classrooms thinned out.13
Eva didn’t come to England on the Kindertransport. Her grandfather had used the last of his savings to buy Eva and her mother their passages aboard the Manhattan, a splendid liner that was leaving Hamburg for New York, and stopping at Southampton along the way.
‘They came with us to the station in Berlin. Everyone was doing their best not to cry. My grandfather took me aside. He bade God protect me and then suddenly said: “Dear child, we will not see each other again” and blew his nose.’14
Eva still owns a little raffia sweep, stiff-legged and stiff-armed, like a scarecrow. It was the last gift that her father pressed into her hand.
Placed in an English country house with three elderly Quaker ladies whom she learned to call her aunts, Eva went to the local school and worked hard to settle in, while her mother worked as a ‘nippy’, a Lyon’s waitress, and (less happily, from a social viewpoint) as the hard-pressed housemaid to a family of Orthodox Jews in Stamford Hill.
Eva’s mother took refuge in boyfriends, smart gifts and bold ventures towards a glamorous new life. Eva, longing for acceptance, still remembers the guide book that was issued to all refugees: ‘Don’t dress conspicuously . . .’ Collecting second-hand clothing from the refugee centre, she was dismayed to be buttoned into a heavily stained coat and to be told that it was good enough for an immigrant child. ‘All I wanted was to look like English children, to be one of them.’15
In 1942, Eva and her mother heard that Doris and Felix Opfer had been sent away from Berlin. Doris’s last letter was full of optimism. She was sure that Felix would be allowed to resume his practice when they reached their new and as yet unknown home.
Felix Opfer died of pneumonia at Theresienstadt, in November 1943. Doris Opfer died at Auschwitz in 1944. Otto Steinecke, Eva’s English father, was killed during the last British bombing raid over Berlin.
The Quakers exerted an enduring influence on Eva’s life. A Quaker convert, she ran an Interfaith Group in London for ten years. In 2006, she returned to Berlin, to speak at an event that honoured the city’s Jewish doctors. Today, living in north London, Eva’s faith in the goodness of the English remains invincible. Like Etta Weiner, and like Felix Gottlieb, she defends with quiet passion the country that, when Germany turned its back, offered her a second home.
Nicholas Winton’s contribution to the Kindertransport effort remained unknown until 1988. An Englishman of exceptional modesty, he had hidden away all evidence of his work until his wife found a scrapbook in the attic of their Hampstead home and asked him about its significance.
Born in 1909 to German Jewish parents who changed their name from Wertheim to Winton when they reached England in 1907, Winton abandoned plans for a Swiss holiday in December 1938. Instead, he travelled to Prague to help a friend with getting children onto the Kindertransport trains. Setting up office in his hotel in Wenceslas Square, and aided by his mother at the English end of this independent operation, Winton, remarkably, succeeded in bringing 669 children to safety. The final group of 250 left Prague too late. Departing on 1 September 1939, they were unable to make the crossing as Poland had already been invaded.
Statues to Nicholas Winton have been erected both in England and the Czech Republic, where he was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 2010.
Footnotes
* Salem was founded (with the support of Prince Max von Baden) by the Jewish educator Kurt Hahn. Released from his German prison in 1933 through the intervention of Ramsay MacDonald, Hahn moved to Scotland, where he continued to teach Prince Philip (a former Salem pupil) at Gordonstoun.
* Lady Londonderry’s warning was unluckily timed. MacDonald was about to be replaced by Stanley Baldwin, with whom she had no influence, and Baldwin was about to sack her husband as minister of air for defending bomber planes and a strong air force at a time when pacts for disarmament were being discussed. (Ian Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain’s Road to War (2004), p. 122.)
* The employment pages of The Lady told their own sad story in the 1930s, as an increasing number of applicants repeatedly applied for any work whatsoever, in exchange for the required guarantee of a £50 sponsorship (roughly, £2,500 today) for a passage to England. ‘Still in Germany’ was a phrase that appeared with poignant frequency.