... And the Policeman Smiled (4 page)

From 1933 to 1936 some 80,000 German refugees of all ages were successfully resettled (though many who stayed too close to home in Austria, Poland or Czechoslovakia were soon to relive the Nazi nightmare). In the next two years alone, 60,000 German refugees found new homes, at least a third of them in Palestine. Of those under the age of eighteen, by 1937, Palestine was taking in upwards of 1000 a month. Impressive though it is, this achievement fell a long way short of the CBF target. Finance was undoubtedly a problem. Education and training, travel, accommodation in Palestine, not to mention the weary process of documentation, were all a heavy draw on funds. Optimistic expectations of somehow tapping into Jewish capital in Germany were consistently disappointed, but while hope of gaining this obvious source of income remained it was bound to inhibit other efforts to raise funds.

On the administrative side the main problems centred on Jerusalem, where the British authorities were made nervous by the influx of young idealistic workers eager to make the Jewish National Home an early reality. A sharp brake was put on the further release of immigration papers. Nonetheless, violence against Jewish settlers increased, leading to fears of an Arab uprising which the administration would be unable to contain.

As ever in these situations, the British government responded by setting up a royal commission to inquire into the causes of the
unrest and to suggest remedies. Earl Peel, who was given the unenviable task of leading the team of inquiry, reported back in July 1937, having concluded that ‘the policy of conciliation, carried to its furthest limits, has failed'. His solution was to partition the country.

The principle was welcome to Zionists but they were less keen on the practicality as envisaged by Peel, allowing them a tiny area albeit with the most fertile land, but already occupied by a hostile Arab population. Nor was there much enthusiasm for the proposed limitation on immigration to 12,000 a year for five years – an arbitrary attempt to keep some sort of ethnic balance.

The government blew hot and cold on the proposals which encouraged Arab nationalists to further acts of terrorism and increased Jewish distrust of the mandatory power. The only firm decision was to clamp down on immigration – a self-defeating policy which simply led to a sharp increase in the number of illegal immigrants.

Then in March 1938, the Nazis marched into Vienna. They brought with them the full panoply of anti-Jewish laws and a practised bureaucracy to enforce them. The environment was conducive to their work. In comparison with Germany, anti-Semitism in Austria had a head start. From the days of the Empire, the clash of nationalist minorities – Czechs, Poles, Croats, Slovenes and Serbs – had left the Jews isolated; distrusted on all sides. It was in Vienna that the young Hitler had learned to engage in the oratory of hate.

For 200,000 Austrian Jews and other non-Aryans, every semblance of ordinary life disappeared as if by some appalling wizardry.

‘It is impossible for you to imagine,' wrote G. E. R. Gedge, the Central European correspondent of
The Times
, ‘what it means for one-sixth of the population of Vienna to be made pariahs overnight, deprived of all civil rights, including the right to retain property large or small, the right to be employed or to give employment, to exercise a profession, to enter restaurants, cafes, bathing beaches, baths or public parks, to be faced daily and hourly, without hope of relief, with the foulest insults which ingenious and vicious minds can devise, to be liable always to be turned overnight out of house and home, and at any hour of every day and every night to arrest without the pretence of a charge or hope of a definite sentence,
however heavy – and with all this to find every country in the world selfishly closing its frontiers to you when, after being plundered of your last farthing, you seek to escape.'

Norman Bentwich was one of the first into Vienna after the Nazi takeover. Reporting home on a ‘position more catastrophic even than we had judged', he calculated:

The number of persons who have to be fed in the communal soup kitchens has risen to about 25,000 a day. It should be larger, because 40,000 are in great need; but they have not the money to feed more.

Children were bewildered and frightened though many, like Richard Grunberger, then just turned fourteen, had seen the warning signs:

In 1937, the third year, we had a history master by the name of Prochasker. He was a monarchist and yearned for the days of the Austo-Hungarian empire. He was very embittered by what the allies had done to Austria and Germany after the First World War which put him in agreement with the illegal Hitler Youth leader in my class. I could tell by the way in which the Hitler Youth character was asking certain questions and making certain points, which the history teacher was not really courageous enough to refute, that something was really going on under the surface. For example, I remember one lesson about the setting-up of the United States, where the history teacher merely told us how the Declaration of Independence was drawn up and so on, and this Hitler Youth character said: ‘Isn't it a fact that among the founding fathers of the United States there was only a majority of one who voted in favour of making English the language of the new country rather than German?' and I was rather amazed at this but the history teacher said: ‘Yes, this is so.'

For Jews, Vienna became a city of fear and destitution. The risks of offending what was ludicrously described as the law were endless. ‘No Jews Here' signs were everywhere. Cafes and cinemas carried warnings: ‘Gypsies and Jews Keep Out'; children were told to stay away from public parks; a little girl who was brave enough to attend school found ‘Cursed be the Jew' scrawled across her desk. Magda Chadwick recalls her mother having to stand in front of her shop with a placard: ‘Jews must not buy or come in here'.

One obvious target was Judenstrasse – Jews' Street – where Rosina Domingo lived. On the night they wrecked her local synagogue:

It had two galleries. At the top one was a huge tablet of the ten commandments with the sun rays coming from it. The Nazis threw everything down, but probably because the tablet was too heavy they couldn't move it and it was left. It was so symbolic when you went in there. Everything was destroyed but the tablet still stood.

The demands on youngsters was not easily understood. For Angela Carpos, who is half-Jewish, the pain of not knowing who she was or how she was supposed to behave started with the order for her to attend Jewish school in the morning and state school in the afternoon. It was not long before she encountered Nazi rule head on.

When I was still living with my mother the Nazis were burning books and they came and snatched out of my hand my one and only lovely teddy bear and burnt it in front of me. They didn't hit us – but what really terrified me were the scrubbings that went on. I saw neighbours and friends being humiliated, scrubbing windows and scrubbing streets. Absolute fear ran through everybody. You cannot understand it unless you have experienced it. The fear of walking the streets, the fear of every door. You are not aware of it. When I was in one of my foster homes in Scotland I lived in a bungalow with some very nice people. They had a gravel driveway with a little gate. Apparently, they told me years later, every time someone came along the gravel, I took a kitchen knife and sat under the table. I don't remember – which is interesting. What must have gone into us children is beyond belief.

And over all there was the feeling of utter loneliness, of having no one to turn to. In the tenement block where Richard Grunberger lived:

… everybody was asked to put out swastika flags. Across the landing from us was a veteran social democrat. In the weeks preceding the
Anschluss
, when the political climate had got ever more intense, he had come over and spent a few evenings chatting to my mother and proclaiming his social democrat convictions and reminiscing about the old days. Well – I thought a man with those
convictions would refuse to put out swastika flags. But on that Saturday morning we found ourselves the only flat on the block that was totally denuded of flags.

In charge of the Jewish emigration office in Vienna was a thirty-two-year-old SS
Obersturmbannführer
. Described as ‘a painstaking bureaucrat', Adolf Eichmann was soon to prove his value to the Reich as the unrivalled expert in handling what were known as ‘technical and organisational problems' connected with the treatment of Jews. His declared aim was to make Austria
judenrein
, ‘free of Jews'.

His victims were only too happy to comply. Thousands besieged the
Kultusgemeinde
, the central Jewish organisation, begging for visas. An emigration bureau set up by a Dutch philanthropist collected 20,000 names in a matter of days. Outside the United States embassy, the queue stretched for a quarter of a mile, day and night. In London, the Jewish Refugees Committee received up to 1000 calls a day.

But the supply of visas was a long way short of demand. Embassy officials of all nationalities had to reconcile orders from their governments to examine every application for an excuse to reject with the threat of annihilation hanging over the entire community.

Demand for places on the Palestinian immigration quota intensified, the very opposite of what the British intended. Meanwhile, German shipping companies discovered a profitable sideline in charging high prices for berths in clapped-out steamers which sailed the Mediterranean, crowded with Jewish families hoping to be smuggled ashore in Palestine or to be accepted by the authorities because there was nowhere else for them to go.

Those who still had some faith in Europe took any chance of refuge, even if it meant splitting up families to allow for children to escape ahead of their elders. In Britain there were several groups of well-wishers ready to care for young people, though the numbers sponsored by charitable enterprise were pitifully small.

Concerned for Jewish and non-Aryan Christian children alike, the Children's Inter-Aid Committee brought in some 150 children up to the beginning of 1938 and another 300 by the end of the year. Founded in 1936 by two unsung heroines – Mrs Skelton and Mrs Francis Bendit – of whom little is known except their
sympathy for young people in need, the Inter-Aid Committee was supported by the CBF and the Save the Children Fund. A link across to the CBF was provided by Sir Wyndham Deedes, who was chairman of the Committee. Another valuable link was with
B'nai B'rith
, a Jewish fraternal society which maintained several hostels in the London area.

From Inter-Aid it was but a short step to The Society of Friends (their headquarters were in a neighbouring street). The Quakers numbered less than 23,000 in Britain and only 160,000 world wide, yet, of all the non-Jewish bodies who might have been expected to take an active interest in the refugee problem, they were alone in having a network of contacts in the European capitals.

Their German Emergency Committee was active from 1933. In its first two years, 600 families and individuals were helped to escape. Among them were numerous political dissidents – socialists, communists and pacifists – who were even worse off than the Jews, since they had few friends at home and even fewer abroad.

As early as 1934, Bertha Bracey and two other members of the German Emergency Committee gathered support for a school at Stoatley Rough near Haslemere in Surrey, primarily for German children. But the work by Quakers on behalf of young people only really took off after the
Anschluss
. By November 1938, the Vienna centre had arranged for over 300 children to go to other countries.

Stoatley Rough was not unique. Another was at Bunce Court, a manor house in Kent. The head teacher of Bunce Court was a remarkable woman called Anna Essinger. In 1925 she founded Herrlingen School near Ulm, but when the Nazis came to power she decided that ‘Germany was no longer a place where children could grow up in honesty and freedom'. Taking advantage of a loophole in the immigration laws which allowed for children to be admitted for educational purposes, she removed herself, several of her staff and some of her pupils to Britain. Predictably, the loophole was closed in 1936, preventing others from following her example.

Herrlingen was handed over to Hugo Rosenthal, a teacher who had returned from Palestine, and who ran the school on progressive lines until it was shut down in 1939. The house was eventually transformed into a luxury home for Field Marshal Rommel, a reward for military success that he was unable to sustain. It was
in the woods close by the house that he committed suicide.

The history of Bunce Court followed a different if hardly less eventful route, but in the pre-war years, when Anna Essinger was allowed to pursue her ideals, the school was a children's refuge that came closest to a real home. Bunce Court was progressive in that it stressed the virtues of self-discipline and self-help; but Anna Essinger was not a Zionist, nor was she particularly interested in the formalities of religion.

On quite another level was Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, director of the Chief Rabbi's Religious Emergency Council and, not insignificantly, the Chief Rabbi's son-in-law. Courageous and single-minded to the point of fanaticism, Schonfeld made several trips to Germany and Austria to bring back refugee children for his two hostels – Avigdor House in Bedford Row for boys and Northfield on Stamford Hill for girls. The life they led was orthodox in every particular; there was to be no compromise with liberalism or free thinking. This devotion to a single cause was soon to put Schonfeld at odds with the mainstream refugee movement.

Finally, there were local groups of individuals who operated outside the refugee organisations. In Cambridgeshire, for example, 55 Hills Road was made available by Jesus College to house seventy German teenagers. The job of organising their education (mostly at private schools on reduced fees) went to Greta Burkill, who gathered about her a committee of sympathisers ready ‘to deal with a great amount of heartbreak and difficulties of adjustment'.