... And the Policeman Smiled (15 page)

Real fear came on those who thought they were abandoned. Barely able to speak English, adrift in a strange country, Nina
Liebermann could find no trace of Mrs Landers, from the West London Synagogue, who was supposed to be at the station.

None of the women I approached answered to that name. My sister could not walk any more. Looking back, I saw her fall asleep on top of the luggage. All the other children had, by then, been met and spirited away. Desperately, I made another sweep of the now almost empty platform. I spotted a comfortable-looking woman, who seemed also to be on a search operation. I went up to her. ‘Yes, I'm Mrs Landers. Where have you been? I've been looking for you for at least two hours. You should have arrived at 9 o'clock.'

A full session at Liverpool Street gymnasium took from two to three hours. At the end of it there were always some children left over – those who had come on the wrong day or, more frequently, whose sponsors had muddled the date.

At half past three, all but four of the children had been sorted out. They sat quite stoically, glancing up when anyone came in, but their eyes were a little anxious. Presently, they were rounded up by a brisk young woman who took them to a hostel for the night.

This left the adults without children (‘possibly they had been taken off at the Dutch border; the SS guards liked to give a lasting impression of their authority') and a few veterans of earlier
Kindertransporte
who returned to Liverpool Street – sometimes, like Martha Levy, three or four times a week, on the off chance of spotting friends from home. It was invariably a wasted journey, though in her loneliness Martha always found some comfort in the sight of Jewish taxi drivers. In Germany, they were not allowed access to the main stations.

In late October 1938, some 15,000 Jews of Polish extraction were taken from their homes in Germany and dumped across the Polish border. Among them was ten-year-old Harry Katz.

The Poles didn't want us in and we couldn't go back, so we had to wait. In the end they let us go through. We had to walk and walk and walk until we got to a deserted army camp and they told us we could stay in the old barracks. Each family was given a mattress cover and we had to fill it up with straw. Five people to one
mattress. The next morning, lorries came and gave each person half a loaf of bread and a boiled egg. We managed until they organised a communal kitchen and we then got better food. They told us later that the Polish Jews donated it to help us. We were in the barracks for several weeks but because my mother had a baby girl we were allowed a tiny room. I don't know who paid for it; we didn't because we had no money. My parents, my little sister and I all slept there. My brother went to a hostel for boys because he was thirteen. It was not comfortable but it was better than the barracks of course.

Later, I too went to the children's camp. There were no lessons; we just mucked around. After a few months my mother told me that my brother and I were going to England. My little sister couldn't come as she was only three years old, but my parents wanted my brother and me to go. I was in one of the later groups; it was four weeks before the war. My brother came about one week before the war so he was really lucky. We were taken by train to Gdynia (Danzig), where we had all our hair shaved off. Then they put us in a shower that was boiling hot and you couldn't leave it because the doors were locked. It was a terrible experience but they were probably right because we were very dirty and goodness knows what vermin we were carrying. When we were cleaned up we were put on the boat for London. What I remember about the boat is that we had boiled eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

We docked just by Tower Bridge. We must have looked pretty weird: children about ten years old, with no hair and in tattered clothes. I remember British dockers chucking us pennies. They probably realised who we were.

This was one of the last
Kindertransporte
from Poland. The first, carrying thirty-four boys and twenty girls, docked on 15 February. It had started in Zbonszyn, a small town on the Polish border where 7000 deported Jews found refuge in stables and barns. Marga Goren-Gothelf was one of the survivors.

We left Zbonszyn on 15 January 1939 on our way to Warsaw where we spent about a week resting (Zbonszyn was no picnic!). From there on to Gdynia to board the Polish ‘Flagship'
Warszawa
and through the Kiel Canal to London. Both the Baltic and the North Sea were as rough as only they know how to be and most of us were so seasick that we found it difficult to believe we'd ever stand on solid ground again. When the German officials boarded the ship at the entrance of the Kiel Canal we were scared stiff as we thought
this was the end. Nobody had told us that this would happen and that it was normal procedure. I was thirteen years old at the time and the whole situation was frightening. We arrived at the London docks on 15 February 1939. When we saw the Tower Bridge, which we recognised from pictures in our schoolbooks, we felt relieved and knew that we were out of danger.

The money for three
Kindertransporte
from Zbonszyn (154 children in all) came from the Polish Refugee Fund in Britain which raised £5000. The RCM was not involved either as sponsor or as provider of accommodation. Nearly all the children went to orthodox hostels run independently of the Movement. The last group of Zbonszyn children arrived on 29 August, three days before the outbreak of war.

Apart from the Society of Friends, there was no established organisation ready to come to the help of children under threat in Czechoslovakia. The RCM held aloof for the same reason that it kept out of Poland – the resources did not stretch to additional responsibilities, or so it was argued. Those who rejected the conventional view and took up the cause of Czechoslovakian children were largely outside the mainstream of refugee aid. One such was Nicholas Winton, a young stockbroker set apart from his colleagues by his radical views.

I went to Prague because my great friend Martin Blake, who was a master at Westminster School, rang me up one Friday and asked me to cancel my holiday. He said he was on to something he knew I would be interested in.

Abandoning winter sports for the refugee camps, Nicholas Winton was quickly convinced that a German invasion of Czechoslovakia was imminent. This made the plight of the refugees more desperate than anyone in London could imagine. Winton duly threw himself into the muddled affairs of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, a group of diverse personalities whose good intentions far outstretched their capacity to offer constructive help. He soon discovered that the Czechs were no better organised.

We had to deal with at least five committees looking after special groups such as the Jews, the Communists, the writers and so on. I
met a lot of people and I had to keep explaining that I wasn't empowered by my government or anything like that; it was just me. In the end I got together a list of children and then went back to London to raise help.

By this time, the British Committee had a boxroom office in Prague run by Quaker ladies and other volunteers from the British community. As the queue of would-be emigrants handed in their names, Nicholas Winton spent every spare hour collecting guarantors and publicising his cause. His principal allies were the Society of Friends, the Unitarian Church and
Picture Post
, the popular weekly magazine which published a series of articles on the Czech crisis.

Thank God I was in a business which closed for the day at 3.30. It took me half an hour to get home, then I ran the refugee office until ten at night. To some it must all have seemed very strange. In fact, the police came round and asked me why I had this enormous correspondence with Czechoslovakia.

When all that was lacking was someone to chaperone the
Kindertransporte
, Trevor Chadwick, a Latin teacher from Swanage, made a timely appearance.

I was teaching at [Forres] our family prep school. Rumours of the many distressed children in Central Europe reached us and it was decided to adopt two … Another master at the school and I set off to Prague to select our pair … We got a clear impression of the enormity of the task. We so often saw halls of confused refugees and batches of lost children, mostly Jewish, and we saw only the fringe of it all.

Before his return to England, Chadwick made contact with Nicholas Winton. He then went back to Prague to recruit the first
Kindertransport
to take to the air. Twenty children were flown to Croydon, and ‘They were all cheerfully sick, enticed by the little paper bags, except a baby of one who slept peacefully in my lap the whole time.'

In March 1939, the German army marched into Prague. Air lifts were now out of the question, but trains were still a practical proposition – as Chadwick discovered when he came to deal with the Nazi official in charge of emigration.

Kriminalrat
Boemmelburg was an elderly, smiling gentleman, far from sinister, who eventually proved to be a great help, sometimes unwittingly. He was really interested in my project and his only Nazi-ish remark was a polite query why England wanted so many Jewish children.

He happily gave his stamp to the first train transport, even though I had included half a dozen adult leaders' on it. I went to the station accompanied by a Gestapo clerk and all the children were there, with labels tied round their necks.

There was trouble over the adults and Chadwick had to grovel to earn approval for his second train transport. Shulamith Amir was one of the passengers.

The scene at the railway station in Prague before our departure will forever remain in my memory. Most of the children were crying at the prospect of being parted from their parents, who themselves were trying to put on a brave face. My mother assured me that our parting would only be temporary and that she would follow me very soon to London, which I tried very hard to believe. Presumably most of these parents were fated, as was my mother, never to see their children again.

Our group consisted of over 120 children, accompanied by perhaps half a dozen adults. I was just twelve and among the oldest. I was entrusted with two toddlers of less than two years of age, for whom I was totally responsible throughout the three-day trip. Our train stopped frequently, sometimes for hours, at small stations where we were given food. At times, when the train travelled at a slow pace, German peasants would throw us sweets. Those of us with small charges used the overhead luggage racks to bed down these babies during the long nights whilst we ourselves sat up and tried to keep warm.

Finally our train arrived at the Hook of Holland where we were transferred to a Channel ferry. The crossing was rough and we were all very sick. A very miserable and bedraggled group arrived in London, to spend most of the night in an enormous bleak room lined with benches.

I was among the lucky few who had a parent waiting. My father collected me, and he and I spent the next eight years together in London.

The arrival of this transport took refugee workers by surprise since none of the children had proper documentation. When essential
papers had failed to come through to Prague, Chadwick had decided to cut corners by manufacturing a few of his own. Convincing enough to persuade the Germans that London had kept to the bureaucratic niceties, the stamp of approval was secured and away went the train. Chadwick anticipated a row but the Home Office telegram, threatening to send the children back, he refused to take seriously. ‘I figured the mob of legally accepted guarantors would stop that one.'

The British Committee was divided on the issue of cooperating with the Gestapo. There were those who felt that Chadwick was too friendly with
Kriminalrat
Boemmelburg and his cohorts but, as Nicholas Winton points out, there were no advantages in antagonising the Germans.

The one thing the Germans didn't want at that time, I am absolutely certain, was a row with the British. So, in a curious way, they cooperated with us. But there was always the risk of being caught up in their propaganda.

Trevor Chadwick's unauthorised transport from Prague was not the only one to catch reception workers on the hop. With weeks, sometimes months between the issue of travel documents and their actual use, frequent changes in timetabling and the inevitable delays on overworked railways and sea routes, predicting when and where a transport would arrive was about as reliable as betting on a roulette wheel.

In the spring of 1939 clashes between Germans and Poles in the so-called ‘Tree city' of Danzig added another starting point to the already confused map of
Kindertransporte
routes. Four transports carrying a total of 124 children came from Danzig, travelling by train via Berlin to the Hook where they joined up with other groups waiting to be ferried across to Harwich. The muddle was such that the welcoming committee threw away their lists of expected arrivals and started from scratch.

There was less of a problem when individual benefactors like Lord Sainsbury, Jean Hoare (a cousin of Sir Samuel Hoare) and the Reverend Alan Bateman, provost of Coventry Cathedral, set up their own lines of communication, dealing directly with families who wanted to send their children over to Britain, as well as arranging travel and acting as guarantors. Jean Hoare virtually
handed over her Bloomsbury flat to young refugees. When Czechoslovakia was in terminal crisis she raised money from the Royal Institute of British Architects to bring back a planeload of children from Prague.