... And the Policeman Smiled (16 page)

Towards the end, as the German hold on Prague tightened, the
Kindertransporte
were beset by bureaucratic delays. Nicholas Winton identified the state travel agency as the source of the trouble.

They made more and more difficulties as time went on. One girl was asked why she hadn't brought her dog licence and she said it was because she didn't have a dog. They told her to go away and come back with proof that she didn't have a dog.

On the outbreak of war, a transport of 180 children was left stranded in Prague. They were commemorated by a note in the RCM annual report:

What these children must feel like, having packed all their clothes, having sold everything that could not be removed, having said goodbye to their friends, can readily be understood.

Cast in the unenviable role of responding to the ever more frequent appeals for help from Vienna, Norman Bentwich decided to see for himself what needed to be done. He travelled in the second week of August 1939. His report offered not a vestige of comfort.

The poverty and destitution of the remnant of a great community are heartrending. Well over half of the 67,000 are fed daily through the communal soup kitchens, most of them collecting for their families their one square meal of the day … They have no meat; and a large number are glaringly undernourished … Every single Jewish shop or business has been aryanised, destroyed or shut.

The only hope was emigration. But the quotas imposed by the United States and Britain – a thousand to each country – fell a long way short of Eichmann's target of clearing another 45,000 Jews from Vienna, at least a third of them children, within six
months. The interview with Eichmann, which the Jewish community had struggled to arrange, failed to yield results. Bentwich was told to go home and persuade his own government to do more.

On the Vienna and Berlin routes every transport had its smattering of adult supervisors, who had to sign a pledge to return immediately they had handed over their charges to the RCM. Failure to do so would have put at risk all future
Kindertransporte
and, though in the last weeks of the peace the temptation to stay on in Britain must have been great, the escorts always did their best to get back. They were mostly recruited from one of the youth movements, or were teachers or social workers with a readiness to handle any problem thrown at them. A common experience was suffering the unwelcome attention of Gestapo guards who were inclined to lift items of value (sentimental as much as practical) or to vandalise luggage. When the intimidation became unbearable, as at Bentheim on the German-Dutch border, the route was abandoned in favour of a Belgian crossing at Herbesthal, but usually there was little that could be done except to comfort the children and to urge calm.

Lotte Freedman's husband Freddie accompanied several
Transport
.

He went back and forth. He took hundreds of children. I used to help him. I'll never forget a little boy with a label round his neck, standing at the carriage window. As the train pulled out his mother ran down the platform, ran with the train crying, ‘My child, my child'. It was awful.

Newly married, the Freedmans were able to obtain exit visas for themselves. They spent much of the war running a hostel in North Kensington. ‘We had forty boys aged fourteen to eighteen. I could barely boil an egg. But I learned.'

The principle of learning by doing was familiar to all supervisors, not least Käthe Fischel from Prague, one of the youngsters who was sufficiently self-possessed to be recruited for nursery chores.

We left from Prague by train. I don't remember the date – but it was spring, a few months before war broke out. The journey was unpleasant. There were very few people to look after the children and they gave me four or six little ones to take care of. I had never
looked after small children and these were very distressed. They kept wetting themselves and being sick and I had absolutely no idea what to do with them. Now with a daughter and grandchildren I can understand what it must have meant to a five-year-old to be stuck on that train – no wonder many of the children had breakdowns later on.

Another young helper holds a particular memory of a little girl with brown eyes.

I had to put her to bed in my cabin. We said prayers and she went to sleep. I wanted to go upstairs to join the other helpers but I had a little trouble because they said I was too young.

Twenty-two years on, a social worker was on duty with a new colleague. ‘There was something vaguely familiar about her; she had lovely brown eyes …'

The adult supervisors really came into their own in negotiations with British customs. Everyone knew that the rules were being stretched, but it took a skilled operator to persuade an official to ignore evidence that was blatantly paraded before him. Norbert Wollheim was a master of the craft.

I was questioned about a boy who was carrying a valuable violin. Why had he brought it? I knew that his parents had given it to him as security, something to sell if the money ran short. But I couldn't say this. So I bluffed. ‘The boy is a gifted musician; he must practise on his violin.' The customs officer was not convinced. ‘If he's so clever, let me hear him play.' I turned to the boy and said in German, ‘Can you play anything?' He nodded, took up his violin and started playing ‘God Save the King'. After three stanzas the customs officer had had enough. ‘All right. I believe you', he said, which was fortunate for us because, as I found out afterwards, the boy only knew three tunes and ‘God Save the King' happened to be one of them.

On another flying visit, Norbert Wollheim found that one of his charges was over the age limit.

He had just been released from Dachau and his head was shaven. I asked him when he was born and sure enough he was over eighteen. He looked it; he was tall and broad. There was no way he could
have been much younger. But I told him that whatever happened he had to say that he was born in 1924, three years on from his real birthday. At Harwich the immigration officer called me over. The boy was standing there, shaking. ‘Ask him how old he is', said the immigration officer. The boy was word perfect. ‘He says he was born in 1924', I translated. The officer looked at me, he looked at the boy. There was a long silence. Then he said to me, ‘If there is an error, do you take responsibility?' Of course, I agreed. We were in.

On rare occasions a parent would act as chaperone. Ruth Michaelis and her brother were taken by their mother ‘all the way to our first foster family, a rector and his wife in Kent, and then she went back to Germany'. There was some jewellery in their luggage and, to put the Gestapo off the scent, Ruth aged four years one month, was urged to carry a large, overdressed doll.

As my mother expected, the doll got all the attention. They insisted in taking off every bit of its clothing. I protested and made an enormous fuss, which frightened my mother, especially when I demanded that the guards should dress the doll again. But they just walked off. I'm sure my screaming drove them away.

The only complete family to come over on a
Kindertransport
was the Alperns – Leo and Adele and their children Heinrich, Anita, Sonja and Irena. They came from Freiburg, where Leo was a credit draper. Like other Polish Jews, he was arrested in October 1938, but Adele and the four children ended up at Zbonszyn. Three months later the three older children were told they could go to Britain. A week after they left to join a transport at Warsaw, permission came through for their parents to follow them ‘for domestic service'. By sheer coincidence the family was reunited on the boat train and sailed together, on the
Warszawa
, which docked at Cotton Wharf near London Bridge on 15 February 1939. Having made it, that family was split up for more than a year, but was reunited after the Blitz and eventually settled in Torquay.

In the last month before war was declared, families who were still on the waiting list for places on the
Kindertransporte
, but knew they had little chance of moving up the queue, took to waiting at the main rail stations, watching and hoping.

Seven-year-old Sonia Altman had a guarantor in Middlesbrough
but, having missed one transport date because she had to have her tonsils out, there seemed little prospect of an early escape from Vienna.

My mother was getting desperate. So every day, she packed my case and we haunted the station. I was getting quite used to these trips, me in my best clothes with a little label saying who I was and where I was going. Then, on 13 June, we were standing by a crowded train when we saw a mother who was in a dreadful state. She just couldn't bear to part with her child and at the last moment held her back. My mother took her chance and literally threw me on to the train. The doors were slammed and off I went. I remember holding my doll and crying all the time. I wanted my mother but of course she wasn't there any more.

At Leipzig, Betty Israel saw a baby handed up through a carriage window. ‘The thoughts and feelings of that poor mother, giving over that tiny tot to a complete stranger, still haunt me today.'

The responsibility every
Kindertransporte
worker wanted to avoid was a last-minute decision on numbers. With the demand for places on the
Kindertransporte
shooting far ahead of the capacity of the RCM to provide guarantors, disappointments were inevitable. But that did not make it any easier to break the news. Philip Urbach was on a transport that was supposed to leave in mid-August.

But then there was a message from England to say that instead of 180, only sixty could come. Rudolf Melitz, a fund raiser for
Youth Aliyah
who organised several transports, was given the job of reducing the list. It was a dreadful thing to have to do, as you can imagine. He worked on the principle that those who were isolated in the small towns and villages were in more urgent need than those in the cities where Jews had each other for support.

It was the second last transport to leave Berlin. Rudolf Melitz was on board. When they walked off the boat at Harwich, they saw a news hoarding with ‘ultimatum' in large letters. Philip Urbach was encouraged by a German-sounding word ('Maybe English wasn't so difficult after all'), without realising that it meant war over Poland.

In London, Melitz left us. He was booked to fly back to Berlin, but when he went to the Lufthansa office in Bond Street they told him
all planes had been cancelled because of the emergency. He said ‘I must go. I have my mother there', but all they could offer was to hire him a private aircraft. Of course, he hadn't the money so he had to stay, which was his good luck though he didn't think so at the time.

The last of the pre-war
Kindertransporte
left Berlin on 31 August. It was a close-run thing. Just hours before the train was scheduled to depart a call came through to the
Youth Aliyah
office in London, warning that the transport was about to be cancelled. The imminence of war had compelled the Dutch to close the border, which meant that the train would be stuck in Germany. It was pointless even to start the journey.

Intense lobbying of the Dutch authorities forced a concession. The train would be allowed to cross the border if there was an absolute assurance that the children would be taken on to Britain. The promise was delivered and the train left on time, though with fewer children than expected. There were places for sixty-six passengers, thirty-one with
Youth Aliyah
and thirty-five with the RCM, but as the train was boarding the total was cut to sixty. The youngest were left behind.

Waiting at the border was the irrepressible Gertrude Wijsmüller with a bus she had managed to commandeer. She had been less fortunate with the driver, who was not at all sure of the route to the Hook and had to rely on friendly passers-by to give directions. But they made it to the boat, which sailed in the early hours of 1 September, two days before war was declared.

Any lingering hopes of bringing more children out of Germany were finally stifled by a Home Office ruling that refugees from enemy territories would no longer be allowed entry under any circumstances. This left open the possibility of further
Kindertransporte
from countries threatened by Germany, but in the first months of the war no one was willing to engage in such defeatist speculation. In fact, it was not until the German army invaded Holland on 10 May 1940, that any action was taken on behalf of the 26,000 non-Dutch Jews who were sheltering in and around Amsterdam. On 11 May, an order went out for German refugees to remain in their houses. Three days later, the head of the Jewish community was told that a boat was docked at Yjmuiden, ready to take any Jews who wanted to go to England. It was a case of
first come, first served. The office of the Jewish Refugee Committee was soon overflowing with eager claimants for places on the boat. One of the more persuasive was Gertrude Wijsmüller, not on her own behalf, but for the Burger-Weeshuis, a hostel which accommodated some seventy-five children. She promised to make all the arrangements, including the hiring of as many buses as she could find. One o'clock was agreed as the deadline when Mrs Wijsmüller and another refugee worker, Gertrud van Tijn, were to meet at the American Hotel to decide on their next move. When the time came there was not much doubt as to what they should do.