... And the Policeman Smiled (25 page)

Back in England, as the scandal of the
Arandora Star
, the
Ettrick
and the
Dunera
filtered through to the public, opinion shifted from ‘intern the lot' to ‘free them now'. On 31 July, the Home Office published a White Paper listing headings under which internees could be released. The first two groups covered those under sixteen and over sixty-five years of age and young persons under eighteen who had been resident with British families, or in an educational establishment prior to internment. Young people under RCM care were therefore among the first to qualify for release.

This was the case for Peter Prager:

I stayed at Lingfield for three weeks, sleeping in the racecourse stables on straw, then I was transferred to Huyton for another three weeks. Then I was told that anyone under eighteen could be released, but it had to be an outside agency which applied. I was then under the care of the Refugee Children's Movement and I was told that I was the first one for whom they had applied. They thought I was the safest because I had lived with an English family beforehand. So I was released.

Casting around for a suitable envoy to go out to Australia on behalf of a contrite British government, the choice fell on Major Julian Layton, an active promoter of the refugee cause whose experience encompassed several weeks on the Isle of Man liaising with the civil administration. He departed with authorisation to release all young internees who were willing to join the Pioneer Corps. The remainder either remained in Australia for vital war work or joined the labour units of the Australian army. Six
Youth Aliyah
boys managed to secure emigration permits for Palestine.

Although compensation was given to the deportees for possessions stolen from them during the journey, no compensation was offered to the schoolchildren who were forced by internment to leave school or job training to which, in most cases, they were unable to return.

The official view remained faithful to the spirit of a memorandum issued to the internment tribunals in 1939:

While it is desired to avoid any unnecessary hardship to individuals, nevertheless the interests of the individual cannot in present circumstances be a primary consideration; they must be subordinated to considerations of national security.

Even when the collective paranoia of the early months of 1940 subsided, this attitude prevailed.

‘A remark made at the opening of the Hostel has given
rise to the suggestion that the Hostel is a somewhat luxurious
place. It was referred to as a palace and the garden was
likened to Eden. These are figures of speech and should not
be taken literally.'

At a time when property prices were distinctly flat, the influx of refugees created a boom in one sector of the market. From 1938, enticing offers appeared in the small ads section of the Jewish press:

Upper Clapton, large freehold property containing 24 rooms, suitable for housing 50 children. Price £3250.

RCM hostels sprang up across urban Britain with the highest proportion in London, Manchester and Leeds. They housed children who could not find foster parents or who were too old to fit easily into a new family environment. Run by members of the RCM local committees or Jewish Refugees Committee, they relied on state allowances and charitable appeals to cover the costs of upkeep. It was calculated that each child needed one pound a week for food and clothing. Donations in kind were as welcome as money. A boy's hostel in London received mattresses from a shipping company, blankets from another firm and food from the Deserving Charities Organisation. London's East End traders were particularly generous.

A large part of hostel administration was in the hands of volunteers who were themselves refugees. Although they spoke German and came from the same backgrounds as their charges, they were
often young and inexperienced and unprepared for the demands of the work.

Harry Katz spent several years in a hostel in Leeds:

It could have been better but I reckon the reason was that the people in charge weren't competent. They were not trained to do the job. The children did just what they wanted.

Lottie and Freddie Freedman, a young married couple, came to England with a
Kindertransport
from Berlin via Hamburg in 1939. Freddie, who worked for the youth department of the Jewish community in Rosenstrasse, had organised and travelled with many transports, until finally he was warned: ‘You either stay in England or you've had it.'

Intending eventually to travel on to America, the Freedmans had nowhere to go and were unable to take work. Bloomsbury House sent them to help out at a hostel. Lottie was thrown in at the deep end:

After a week the cook ran away and I, who could barely boil an egg, had to take over cooking for forty children. It was a disaster but I learned. The committee decided to give me pocket money and then they paid for a little home we had, so we were quite well off…

Freddie then applied to be a hostel leader with Lottie as matron. They were interviewed by Mrs Norman Bentwich and other leading lights of the Jewish community. At 22, Lottie felt she had few qualifications for such a sensitive job, but after his time with the
Kindertransporte
Freddie was more confident. The appointment committee was impressed.

We became leaders of a hostel in the deepest slums of North Kensington. We had forty boys aged fourteen to eighteen at the Western Council Training Hostel on St Mark's Road.

At the start, Lottie was confounded by the garden:

I thought, Goodness, they have funny flowers here – because the soil was stuck with knives. The cook before had muddled up the kosher kitchen – the milk and the meat and so on.

Lottie did her best with the disorientated and often distressed inmates.

The children in the hostel came from all kinds of backgrounds and all corners of Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. As soon as they opened their bags, I could see a picture of the parents and I knew just what the background was. I was detached then – today I know so much more about development and psychology. I just had common sense then.

One boy would cry for his mother when he had tummy ache – and I would just say ‘She isn't here.' Today I would handle it differently. I think I was a mixture of a surrogate mother and a good friend and fun. I wanted to have fun too.

In the early days of the war the Freedmans lost all their boys aged over sixteen to internment. Throughout the Blitz, Lottie regularly trooped down to the Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden with the boys and her baby daughter in a Moses basket. When her husband was spotted, torch in hand, prowling the garden at night, the neighbours accused him of spying. But the Freedmans had less trouble with overconscientious citizens than with their local synagogue:

They were very concerned that we should be kosher. A terrible row blew up one day because my husband refused to buy black-market meat – he would rather have fed them not kosher. That was the end of our hostel days.

Generally, children from orthodox homes were placed in hostels controlled or strongly influenced by the Chief Rabbi's Religious Emergency Council led by Solomon Schonfeld. Among those he approached to help with finding accommodation for the orthodox children he was bringing from Germany and Austria was Mrs Annie Wolfson. She and her husband bought a house in Victoria Park Road in Hackney to convert into a hostel for twenty girls. Intended as a clearing house for girls who could not immediately find other homes, the hostel was managed by the Hackney Aid Committee for Refugee Children, who recruited a matron and staff from the ranks of the unemployed refugees. Judging by the loud protests when the girls had to be evacuated to Norfolk, the enterprise lived up to the best expectations. It reopened in 1941 and was active until the end of the war.

Circumstances were less favourable for the Home for Jewish Refugee Children at 5 The Avenue, London NW6. This orthodox hostel was opened in December 1938 to receive children from Dovercourt. One of the early arrivals was Zita Hirschhorn (Sonia Schmitzer):

We had open house every Sunday, when families came to pick children to stay with them, in order to make room for additional children to be brought over from Europe. I myself went to two different families but always asked to be returned. Although I was treated very well I was very lonely for my friends in the hostel. After the evacuation, in 1940, we were allowed to return to the hostel for
Pesach
, at our own risk.

We were all billeted with non-Jewish families in Stotfold, Bedfordshire, and wanted to celebrate
Pesach
in our own home, in a kosher way. We were all orthodox kids. Then the bombing of London started and soon we were hit by a landmine and had to leave the house. We ended up in another hostel in Hackney.

There, too, we were heavily bombed out. It was a miracle we were not killed. Half the house went with a direct hit. We were in the basement sleeping on mattresses on the other side of the building.

Zita Hirschhorn stayed with the hostel until it closed in 1948.

Low down in the popularity stakes was Cazenove Road in London's East End. Even after experiencing the spartan life of a training farm, Käthe Fischel found conditions at this orthodox hostel hard to take.

It was an old, dark Edwardian house. I was horrified. Most of the girls were from poor Jewish families, including English Jewish girls from the East End, and all they did was sew buttons on garments in factories. There was a lot of praying but the girls had no education. I presume the idea was to find them husbands. My friend and I both remember, each girl had a little personal pot of jam but no one ever offered us any.

Claire Barrington also remembers Cazenove Road:

The other, English Jewish, girls had jobs and prided themselves on their hair and clothes, while we refugees had straight hair. Because we didn't look well groomed, there was a feeling against us, they
resented us. They were very religious and they thought themselves a little bit superior. I was unhappy there. I had been given sixpence a week pocket money at the Hachsharah Training Centre and of course I didn't spend it. I had just managed to save one pound when I left my purse in one of the dormitories at the hostel. Of course, when I came back, it was gone. I needed that pound, it was a lot of money. I always felt that because I was alone, everything was twice as bad. I was so vulnerable.

Hard conditions were not necessarily a bar to enjoying hostel life as Martha Levy discovered:

I was just eighteen when I went to the hostel – there were about 30 or 35 other girls there, all the same age. I was very happy and made a lot of friends.

I got a job sewing on buttons. My English was still not very good and one day I went to the foreman, who was on the phone, and asked him if I could ‘destroy' him rather than ‘disturb' him. For weeks after he would say, ‘Well, Martha – do you still want to destroy me?' Then I bettered myself and went to be a machinist in a factory in the East End. The manager was Viennese and terribly, terribly strict. All the people who worked there were English. They were all very interested in my background and sympathetic, but I didn't socialise with them because living in a girls' hostel with a boys' hostel opposite there was no need.

We had regular duties such as washing-up. We had to get up at 5.30 so that we could get a workman's train ticket. If I didn't do this, by Friday I didn't have the money for a bar of soap. I had to be at work at 8 o‘clock. The food at the hostel was not too exciting, because one day my manager came home with me and complained bitterly: ‘These girls should have something more substantial than sandwiches of beetroot or watercress. How can they work on this?'

An English couple ran the hostel. The wife liked me very much and was in tears when I left. I went with two other girls and we took two private rooms. I had met my husband-to-be by then and we left the hostel because we had to be in by ten and we wanted more freedom.

Hostel food was a regular subject of complaint for RCM visitors:

… Heinz was rather nervy and fidgety and says he has been suffering from headaches recently and also from occasional nose-bleeding.
It transpires that he has no regular dinners at school and just manages on a few sandwiches provided by the hostel which, of course, are not substantial. He says he cannot afford
sd
every day for the school dinner. He only has 2/- a week pocket money.

A contributor to Karen Gershon's book
We Came As Children
remembers two very different hostels:

I was fortunate to be sent to Ramsgate Hostel, a place with a family atmosphere, one that was designed to minimise any problems of homelessness and homesickness. It housed about fifteen boys from Germany and Austria. There were the usual petty rivalries and fights amongst the boys, as well as minor division along nationality lines. Apart from eating well and enjoying our environment by taking long walks, we did little but study English, read, write letters, listen to the radio and, last but definitely not least, clean the house …

After the beginning of the war, we were transferred to the Chiltern Emigrants Training Colony at Benson, near Reading, which was operated by the Christian Service Union for mentally retarded British boys. We took our meals (and very bad ones they were too) in a common dining hall and occasionally played soccer and cricket with the British boys, but otherwise had little contact with them. They seemed harmless and pleasant enough. About sixty of us refugee boys were housed in three rather primitive, heatless barracks. Some worked in pigsties and cowsheds; others trimmed hedges and built fences or roads. I was put in a sort of unskilled labour battalion which worked in a gravel pit. The contrast between Ramsgate and Benson could hardly have been greater. The warmth and security of family life were replaced by the impersonal coldness of army-style living, and at sixteen I was not ready for this.

Walter Friedmann describes the difficulties experienced by young people struggling to educate or better themselves, while coping with hostel life and trying to make a living: