... And the Policeman Smiled (32 page)

On the lower end of the job market, the most popular employer,
certainly for girls, was Lyons. The smart Corner Houses had an undeniable glamour in those dull days. As Peter Morgan remembers: ‘Waitresses at the Corner Houses were called Nippies – all in black with a frilled apron and a frilly hat. You couldn't get a job as a Nippy if you had anything more than an eighteen-inch waist.'

Bloomsbury House tried to dampen down the enthusiasm for Lyons – the uniforms were very expensive to provide – but many ended up working there. Peter Morgan himself went on to be a waiter in London's foremost hotels.

As ever, the saddest cases were those where no amount of educational funding could improve their life's chances. Margot was slow at her school work, and, with little chance of improving, it was hoped that she would eventually emigrate to Palestine with her sister. But in 1944, at the age of fifteen, she was judged to have the mental age of a child four years younger. There was still some hope.

Her doctor states that there will be a change in her glands between the ages of sixteen and seventeen and her health will improve.

It was not to be. In 1947:

The headmistress reports that Margot is progressing but has a mental age of a girl of twelve. Is in an old-fashioned private school but no doubt this suits the special case. She has a speech impediment but understands English well.

Later in the year, a report from St George's Hospital was quoted:

Margot's mental age is 10 years 6 months, so she is at the bottom of the borderline class. Her performance tests indicate that her practical abilities are a little higher. As she seems happy and well looked after at her present school, the doctor advises that she should remain where she is. Margot herself has no realization of her limitations and will always need a secure and sheltered background.

When the 1945 Education Act broadened the entry to secondary and higher education, it became much easier for Bloomsbury House to deal with the more able children. Susanne was one of these. She gained the best School Certificate results at her school in
Norfolk and went on to take science subjects for Higher Certificate. Now eligible for a county scholarship, it was no problem to encourage Susanne to think about a university course.

At present she wants to be a schoolmistress after a four-year training course, but she will very likely have other views when she realises the potentialities which university training will give her.

But for most, persistence and endurance were still the prerequisites of educational advance. And even then, there was no guarantee. Eva Maria, born in Berlin 1927, had a long and difficult struggle to get her higher education. Described as ‘weak and difficult to deal with', she was nonetheless accepted for Oldham Grammar School while living in one room with her mother – a ‘mentally weak person' who worked night shifts. Eva Maria wanted to be a teacher and was offered a place, after a couple of years, at St Katherine's Training College. She struggled to get finance together and qualified in 1947. In 1951, she received an LCC grant and was able to study full-time at London University. For Eva Maria, persistence and endurance paid off. She was one of the few.

More than a thousand
Kindertransporte
refugees served
in the armed forces, among them some three hundred girls.
Thirty lost their lives
.

When Peter Prager left his family on 23 December 1938, he had only one thing on his mind:

I was convinced there was going to be a war and I was convinced Britain, America and France would fight Germany and would win and I wanted to be in the occupation army …

He was aged fifteen at the time; seven years later his dream came true. In 1945 he joined the army as a civilian in the censorship division and worked in Berlin.

His teenage resolution was shared by many young refugees, though when it came to offering their services they found that joining up was not as simple as the recruiting posters had led them to believe.

Gert called with his form for the RAF. I took him to Captain Davidson to act as witness. The Captain reinforced my statement to the boy that, though he has got as far as his medical, he won't get into the Force. Gert still wants to try … Captain Davidson told him to come along and offer for the Pioneers as soon as he gets a refusal.

Captain Bernard Davidson had been one of Otto Schiff's adjutants on the Refugee Committee before his appointment by the War Office as recruiting officer for the aliens and refugees. At first,
there was not much to do. It took some time for the War Office to be persuaded that fugitives from the enemy could usefully serve their adopted country. In 1940, any refugee of military age was less likely to be called up than to be sent down, to an internment camp. But as the fear of invasion receded and the public outrage at the scandals of the
Arandora Star
and the
Dunera
made itself known, refugees moved up in the War Office estimation. It was not far, it has to be said, but far enough for enrolment with the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps, later known as the Royal Pioneer Corps, to secure release from internment.

The Pioneer Corps was non-combatant, though volunteers had to accept the risks ‘of being employed in any theatre of war'. It was the least glamorous sector of the army, undertaking labour of all kinds: construction work, handling of stores behind the lines, digging latrines. British subjects who were too old or otherwise unsuitable for active service found their way to the Pioneer Corps. From 1940 they were joined by thousands of refugees who were keen to serve in some capacity, however lowly, and equally keen to escape internment.

The first training centre for refugee recruits to the Pioneer Corps was the Kitchener Camp at Richborough in Kent. From there, five companies, each of 300 men, went to France in the early months of 1940. When the British Expeditionary Force was ordered to retreat, the Pioneers were issued with rifles, machine-guns and anti-tank weapons to help fight the rearguard action on the withdrawal to Dunkirk. All five companies returned safely and, with the prospect of invasion looming nearer, the training centre was moved from Richborough to the West Country. Alien soldiers, who might be treated as traitors by invading Germans, were too much at risk so near the south coast.

The fear of invasion was a powerful factor in many refugees' lives. Kurt Weinburg, evacuated to Cornwall with his school, was active in the Boy Scouts, spending much of his spare time on salvage collection. Naturally, he was on the lookout for more exciting activity.

When the Home Guard was formed, I joined, but Mr Crombie (my headmaster) was told by the police that under no circumstances was I to have anything to do with the Home Guard as I was an enemy alien. So I had to leave.

Mr Crombie made me one of the Boy Scout spotters and we took it in turns to sleep at the local vicarage because there was a telephone there. Once there was an invasion alarm over the whole western part of England. I shall never forget it. It was during the holidays and the headmaster was away in London and I was one of the few older boys left at the school.

I wasn't on duty that night at the vicarage, but at about two o'clock in the morning the boy in charge of the telephone burst into my room, crying: ‘Kurt, invasion, invasion!' He then dashed off to warn the others and I got up. I had a 2.2 gun (I wasn't allowed the 303 which the Home Guard had) and we barricaded the front door. We expected the parachutists to land at any moment and we waited and waited. Eventually we went out, but it was two days before we heard that it had been a false alarm. I took a boy over to a nearby farm in the morning – he was carrying a jug to collect milk – and I walked with him with my loaded 2.2. At night we patrolled the cliffs watching for any boats that were trying to land.

Kurt was able to sign up without first enduring the humiliation of internment. Older boys, who had a spell on the Isle of Man or in one of the other internment camps, had first to be interviewed by Captain Davidson. With only one medical officer on hand, their release took some time. Passed fit, they were encouraged to anglicise their names before filling out identity cards and soldiers' books. The warning was clear. If they kept to German names and were captured they would be treated as traitors.

One of the funniest incidents was the pay parade following our change of names, because no one could remember his new name. Myer became Montgomery, Stuertzel became Stephens, and so on and to top it all, the last man on the Pay Parade every week, Zell, changed his name to Avent so that he could be first to collect his pay.

Many members of the alien companies of the Pioneers chafed against the restrictions of their service. They wanted to join one of the fighting services and be eligible for promotion like British soldiers. But, in the early days of the war, even the most gifted were spurned.

Here is Fritz Braunthal who, judging by his letters, was a highly intelligent eighteen-year-old. He was, he told Greta Burkill, intent
on persuading the Cambridge University recruiting board to offer him a place on an officer training course.

That would be, as you know, the fulfilment of my most daring dreams. I do hope it comes off.

Two months later he got his answer from Colonel Murray of the Cambridge University Senior Training Corps.

I regret to say that we have been unsuccessful in arranging for your posting to an OCTU [Officer Cadet Training Unit]. The War Office say that the only opening for you at present is enlistment into the Pioneer Corps.

Fritz turned again to Greta Burkill:

This was rather a blow to me, particularly as everything had gone so very well up to the last moment … Do you think that there would be any point in either myself or you (if you would be so kind) urging the matter with Colonel Murray again, or do you think I should just join the Pioneer Corps straight away?

As always, Greta was prepared to take up the challenge (‘We might put pressure on the War Office at this end'), but was forestalled by an offer from another direction.

‘I have not yet joined the Pioneers,' wrote Fritz on 15 November, ‘but I have got myself a job as a radio reporter with the United Press of America. It is tremendously interesting and suited to my qualifications as a knowledge of languages is essential to the job.' He added, ‘But I would chuck it immediately if I could get into the army.'

On his behalf, Great Burkill made one more assault on the establishment, only to receive from the university the final brush off.

I can sympathise, as you do, with refugee students' wish to undertake work more directly connected with their special training and interests. However, there is, in fact, nothing more for them to do than to join the Pioneer Corps. After all, our own young men, whatever their intellectual and other qualifications, have to go into the army, and it is little hardship that the Pioneer Corps is the only opening for young men from other countries.

Those who could not take the Pioneers at any price had the option of training for essential civilian work. This is why Victor, with his higher school certificate in physics, chemistry, maths and German, ended up on a mining course at Chesterfield Technical College. He spent his war at the Bolsover Colliery in Derbyshire. Others became farm labourers.

Towards the tail end of 1942, the military embargo on refugees was beginning to weaken. The prospect of a long war with the inevitable increase in demand for service manpower was a critical factor. But the realisation that the refugee community was not riddled with spies and fifth columnists helped to soften official attitudes. Volunteers with technical qualifications were accepted for the Engineers, Ordnance and the Service Corps. The first fighting unit thrown open to refugees was the International Commando Unit. Those who joined knew full well that they were liable to be dropped behind enemy lines. As Lord Mountbatten said of them:

They were a group of Germans who believed in democracy and liberty in their own country and were fine soldiers. None of them let us down and half of them lost their lives.

With the refugees giving such good account of themselves, the case for the surviving restrictions was fatally weakened. By 1943, they were free to offer their services to any part of the military except the Signals; 800 Pioneers went into technical units, 650 to combatant units of the infantry and armoured corps, 450 to the Intelligence Corps and specialist formations, 300 to the Commandos, the Airborne troops and the special forces, and over 100 to the Navy and the Royal Air Force.

Leslie Brent, who was young enough to have avoided internment but was nonetheless classified as an enemy alien, joined the forces in 1944:

I joined the infantry, the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, because of my association with Birmingham. I was sent to Glasgow for my general service training for five weeks, and for the first time I was exposed to the rough and tumble of life; working-class lads whose every third word was a four-letter word. I had not experienced this before. It was traumatic, but quite educational! I was thought to be a rather strange fish – I still had my German name and a bit of a
German accent. I didn't smoke and when we fell out for a smoke I tended to pull out my book of
Anna Karenina
, so I was rather an odd man.

At the end of the training I wanted to join the Royal Ambulance Corps, which is probably indicative of my not wanting necessarily to kill Germans though wanting to do my bit towards the war effort. I was told I could not – ‘You are too intelligent and too fit. We would like you to go into the infantry and would like you eventually to become an officer.' I continued with my training in Warwickshire and became a lance corporal. In the autumn of 1944, I finished up at an officers' training camp in Hey sham, Lancaster for three or four months. I was then sent to Ireland to a training camp in County Down and spent some time there training soldiers. I was well liked by the men because I had some empathy for them and I did my best to safeguard their welfare.