... And the Policeman Smiled (17 page)

‘Mrs Wijsmüller had not only hired four buses,' wrote Gertrud van Tijn, ‘but had also asked for and received a sort of written permit from the Chief of Police of the aliens department for the buses to proceed to Yjmuiden… I then told Mrs Wijsmüller to fill the buses as far as possible with refugee children and then with families who did not have private cars …

When I wanted to leave the hotel, there was passport control. The Dutch police kept me forty minutes because they thought my [Dutch] passport made out in Johannesburg – renewed in Mombasa with Palestine, Egyptian, many English, German and French visas – suspicious. I was so frantic because every minute was valuable, but there was nothing to be done about it.

While I waited the radio announced that the Queen and the government had left Holland. The large restaurant was crowded. There was no sound and no comment. The shock was indescribable. People realised the war was lost. When I finally left the hotel it was nearly a quarter to three o'clock.

I went to the Lijnbaansgracht first to see how things were proceeding there. The scene was indescribable. The buses were there and there was practically a free fight to get in. We arranged as much as possible to take people with children and those who had special Jewish' claims on us.

When the buses were well on their way, Gertrude van Tijn followed in her car.

The road was thronged with cars and bicycles – most of them coming back; many called out to me that it was no use to proceed as the police did not allow any but military authorities to get through to Yjmuiden. I proceeded and every time I was stopped by
the police I somehow hypnotised them to let me pass. They had allowed the buses to pass because of the special permit they held. I told them that I had the nurse in the car who was to look after the children on the boat. Somehow I got through to Yjmuiden. About a quarter of an hour's drive from the quay where the large boat was anchored there were hundreds of cars with Dutch and German Jews who were not allowed to proceed. I knew many of them; some returned, discouraged; some waited and eventually got away – I do not yet know how. There was plenty of room on the boat; up to this day I do not know how it was possible that the Dutch civil authorities who had informed us of the chance to leave had not also seen to it that the military authorities were informed and the road was given free for the people to pass.

One of Mrs Wijsmüller's passengers was Use Wertheimer. She related her experiences to a BBC radio reporter in September 1940.

On the first day of the German invasion, at about five o'clock in the morning, we heard dull explosions and from then onwards we had continual air raids. As we had no shelters, we just had to He flat on the ground. On the fourth day, just as the sirens started to howl at midday, we were told to put on our best dresses quickly and go to the waiting bus and we were then driven to the port. There, in front of us, we saw a sinking ship with many screaming people on it and behind it a big cloud of smoke.

We then went on board another ship (the SS
Bodegraven
) that was in the harbour and sailed at 8.30 p.m. When it got dark we heard the sound of aeroplanes overhead, everyone thought our last hour had come. We threw ourselves on the decks and after a few minutes the planes flew away again, without having done any damage.

The SS
Bodegraven
was an elderly steam freighter, serviceable for short hauls but not built for military action. Fortunately for the young refugees, there was much to divert them from the risk they were taking. Ya'acov Friedler recalls the scene:

As we walked towards the vessel we noticed the arrival of two small warships – they must have been torpedo boats – from which soldiers wearing dark blue uniforms and British-style steel helmets were disembarking. The dozen or so men, Royal Marines I guess they must have been, were staggering under the weight of their
kitbags and the heavy machine-guns they were bringing ashore. We crossed paths as they walked off the pier and we walked on to it. They smiled and gave us the thumbs-up sign, shouting words of encouragement at us. We did not understand their language, but there was no mistaking the tone.

By now the two Gertrudes, Wijsmüller and van Tijn, were on their way back to Amsterdam.

The boat left at eight o'clock exactly. We had to run hard because the English warned us that before leaving they would blow up the pier. We heard the detonation immediately behind us. We drove back to Amsterdam, passing the burning oil tanks of the
Royal Dutch
. The road was deserted. The Dutch military authorities who had stopped us every few hundred yards on our way to Yjmuiden had left. The Germans had not yet arrived. Then we neared Amsterdam and saw the town blazing with lights. We knew then that Holland had capitulated. There was a terrible irony in the fact that this one night – at the blackest hour of its history – Amsterdam was ablaze with lights. (The next day the Germans re-enforced the blackout regulations.) We went to the houses of several of our friends who had all come back from Yjmuiden discouraged. We told them that the road was now free and that we believed they still had a chance to get away. They were all too disheartened. That night many Jews (particularly Dutch Jews) tried to commit suicide.

Meanwhile, the
Bodegraven
was having a hard time trying to clear Dutch waters.

We sat watching the shore recede when two German planes appeared in the sky and started bombing the harbour. We could see them making their run and diving to release their bombs, which dropped slowly to explode below. It was like watching some spectacular fireworks. Then, suddenly the two bombers turned towards the sea and made straight for our ship. They swooped low as they approached and we could see their Luftwaffe markings. The planes started sweeping the ship with machine-gun fire and we instinctively threw ourselves face down. The captain issued rifles to the crew who took ineffective pot shots at the planes.

This continued for a few moments. Then the captain announced that Holland had surrendered and ordered his crew to cease fire. The men lowered their rifles and pressed against the side of the superstructure for cover – a bizarre scene.

All this time the children were crowded on deck. It had been assumed that, because the journey would only take a few hours, it was better to be in the open air than in the dark and unventilated cargo holds. But when at last the planes turned away and headed for land, the order was given for all passengers to get below.

There were no ladders on board the freighter so the crew put planks down into the holds for us to descend. We found it quite difficult to negotiate the steep planks in the gathering darkness, but the sailors gathered us up in their arms and slid down the planks with us, depositing us safely at the bottom. We simply lay down on the hard floor and went to sleep.

There was one more attack to come, not from German planes but from British gunners. Thrown off course in dense fog, the
Bodegraven
drifted south towards the Kent coast, where it was spotted by a local defence unit. At the sound of gunfire the refugee ship turned away and made off round the southern counties and up towards Liverpool, where it was finally recognised as a friendly vessel. The
Bodegraven
docked to a hero's welcome. When asked how they had managed to escape, the younger children chanted ‘Mrs Wijsmüller, Mrs Wijsmüller'. There was not much else they could say that was understandable in English. Immigration formalities were waived and the passengers from the very last
Kindertransport
were taken in by the Manchester branch of the RCM. Two hostels were opened for the group henceforth known as the ‘Amsterdam children'.

Between December 1938 and September 1939, the RCM brought over 9354 refugee children. Of these 7482 were Jewish. Adding to these the 431 children sponsored by Inter-Aid in the months before
Kristallnacht
, the 700 or so who came to Britain under the auspices of
Youth Aliyah
, the 100 orthodox children rescued by Rabbi Schonfeld and the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations, and the Polish and Czech refugees saved by Nicholas Winton and his friends, brings the total to well over 10,000. By the end of 1939 only 331 of these children had re-emigrated, either to join their parents or relatives mostly in Palestine or the United States. More would have gone if there had been money to pay for their fares. But the RCM could barely cover its existing commitments while American refugee groups, though
ready in principle to advance funds, were prevented by immigration law from subsidising transportation costs. The best that was on offer from the National Refugee Service in New York was cooperation to ‘get in touch with American relatives and affiants and attempting to secure the steamship fare, or as much of it as possible, from them'. So small was the number of beneficiaries, they were outnumbered in the war years by those children who joined the RCM ranks having turned up in Britain by long and roundabout escape routes.

In 1943, there were several arrivals from Scandinavia including Wilhelm Flehner, born in Vienna, who had escaped from Norway over into neutral Sweden. His parents had sent him to Oslo immediately after Hitler's annexation of Austria, when he was only nine. Soon afterwards his mother and sister came to Britain. Five years on, with the Nazis extending their anti-Semitic reach, Willi's guardian, a Russian Jewess who looked after several refugee children, decided it was time for a mountain trek to more hospitable territory. They did it in winter through deep snow. A few weeks later, when the link had been made between Willi and his mother, who lived in Rochdale, the Movement collected money for the rest of his journey.

Also from Sweden, but after a more convoluted adventure, was Rudi Neumark. He and a friend had fled from Vienna over the border into Czechoslovakia. When the German army followed them, they kept on the move, taking on odd jobs along the way, until they ended up in Warsaw. There they split up, Rudi going by train to Gdynia where he managed to work his passage on a Polish boat to Stockholm. This brief experience as a merchant seaman qualified him for another voyage, this time on an American cargo vessel bound for London. This was when his troubles really started. Having been on the run for nearly four years, Rudi had grown from an early teenager into a young adult. So instead of a hero's welcome, he was put in charge as an enemy alien to spend his eighteenth year in an internment camp.

‘
Our first day in Birmingham was hell. It suddenly hit me
that we were in a foreign country without knowing the
language, without relatives or friends, and I was trying
desperately to be brave as a thirteen-year-old boy was expected
to behave. I spent most of that day in and out of the toilet
so that no one could see the tears rolling down my cheeks.'

To qualify as a model foster parent you had to be at the wealthier level of the middle class, with an already established family; it helped if you lived in the country (away from urban enticements), spoke a little German, and could tolerate moody children who suffered bouts of depression and were inclined to long silences. And you had to be Jewish.

The typical foster parent was not at all like this. Recruited from the lower-middle or working class, the representative benefactor lived in a small house in a town or city, had no children or had children who were grown up, spoke not a word of German, knew nothing of Germany beyond the front-page news of the
Express
or
Mirror
, and did not begin to understand the trauma of being a young refugee. And the typical foster parent was not Jewish.

This last discrepancy between the ideal and the typical foster parent was the cause of much anguish within the Jewish community and much criticism from without. Why were there no more Jewish families willing to take in refugee children? The Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations (ADATH) suspected a dastardly plot by the RCM to subvert orthodox Judaism by favouring Christian hospitality. The ADATH policy of rejecting
all non-Jewish offers to help assumed that if the RCM took an equally hard line, the faithful would rise to the challenge.

But the argument did not stand up.

The Jews of Britain were a tiny minority, less than one per cent of the population. For six years up to the war, they had raised millions to help their German cousins and had absorbed over 60,000 refugees, not all of them living off charity by any means, but with the great majority owing thanks to Jewish organisations for giving them a new start.

The dismissive view – ‘They can afford it' – derived from the anti-Semitic assumption that all Jews were well off. It was propagated by otherwise intelligent people like the eminent bishop who greeted a party of refugee children, kitted out in their ill-fitting hand-me-downs, with the cheerful observation: ‘I didn't know there were any poor Jews.'

Anyone who was familiar with the less fashionable districts of London, Manchester and Leeds knew otherwise. The average Jew was the average Englishman, living off a weekly pay packet of four pounds a week or less at a time when, in the worst-hit areas for unemployment, up to twenty per cent of the population was below the poverty line. Allowing for those who were too selfish to want to help even when they were well qualified to do so, and those who were manifestly unsuitable to act as foster parents, because they were too young, too old or too inexperienced – a third, say, of the total, it was unrealistic to expect the Jewish community to absorb 10,000 refugee children.

In fact, the community was near the end of its financial tether. The warnings had been clear for some time. In early 1939, Lord Hailey had voiced fears that ‘the problem would frankly become unmanageable', but his appeals to the government to support the refugee cause with public funds had met with blank refusal. The risks of establishing an expensive precedent were considered too great to countenance.

As the pressure of numbers built up, Sir Samuel Hoare, the Quaker Home Secretary, began taking his lead from Hailey, telling the cabinet that the funds of the refugee organisations ‘have been strained to the utmost'. By July, Hoare was forecasting that before long refugees will ‘have to be supported from British public funds if scandal is to be avoided'.