... And the Policeman Smiled (43 page)

Herr Burrose was tried and sentenced to one and a half years' hard labour. When he came out of prison he became a communist.

This shows his character. Once the head of the Nazis, then he turned completely the other way. I think he is a pitiful character. If it had not been for the Nazis, he would have been nobody. That was the only way he could get somewhere. Like a lot of the others.

A few children who were involved with the Free German and Free Austrian left-wing movements were keen to go back and to start rebuilding their shattered countries. Miriam married a Turkish musician from Vienna and, as a member of the Free German movement, was listed in 1946 to return to Berlin with the first group of 300 people. She left in the October of that year. But elsewhere in the ranks of the RCM, nationalism was frail.

Marta and Inge called. Both girls seem adamant in wanting to return to Austria and are very peeved at the obstructions they feel we are putting in their way … We suggested that it was their attitude that might be at the root of these obstructions, and in any case I did not feel the Movement had any wish to stop their eventual re-emigration. It was merely a question of appropriate time.

Four months later, in March 1947:

Marta called. Said that she and Inge had now seriously reconsidered the question of repatriation. They had heard from friends in Austria of the difficulties experienced in finding work and of the conditions prevailing there … she now realises we were right in impeding their return.

Then there were those, like Max Hutton, who returned but lived to regret it.

I wanted to stay in England originally; I could never imagine going back to Germany. My sister had been to visit my mother and she suggested that I should see her too. It was not so easy at that time to visit Germany – you had to get a military permit. I arrived in Germany in 1949 and you can't imagine how things looked. It was simply dreadful. Everything was flat. No paint on the buildings and everyone in drab, worn clothing. It was really awful. But seeing my mother was quite an event for me and it touched me more than I had expected. Time passed by quickly and I decided to stay a little longer. I wound up staying for many years. I started working (my job in London was not very remunerative) and after a couple of years I built up my own business and I did very well.

I had difficulties at first. You looked at people and wondered what he had done during the war and, even now, I often have doubts about people. Germans are curious people. They don't want to think or hear about what happened. They push it aside as if it never happened. They have no way of thinking clearly about things.

I stayed with my mother; she had married again to a man who before the war had been a wholesaler. So I started working for him. I sold shoes to the retail trade, acting as an agent. He was an old man and needed help. In the end, I took over the firm and changed it completely.

After a while, I realised my mother was inventing things, telling me lies. I could not take anything she told me at face value. She told me things that put me apart from other people and afterwards I found out they weren't true. She told me things about my father which couldn't have been true.

I sometimes have a bad conscience for having come back; I think morally I should not have come back. I did it for selfish reasons because I saw a better chance to make a better living. If my mother hadn't been here, I wouldn't have thought about it.

The typical reaction of those who lost their family links with their first home was to try to block out the memories. One technique was to go all out for a new identity, to become more British than the British. As one young man responded to an inquiry about his nationality: ‘I am as British as you are. In fact, I am more so because I chose it. I am double British.'

But however hard they tried, the shadow of earlier times remained
– and remains to this day. Sometimes it shows in little things, like Claire Barrington's dread of journeys:

I have felt this anxiety all through my life; I never prepare for holidays, I don't like holidays, I don't like suitcases or railway stations or booking tickets. I am always frightened of missing trains. I am always hours early when I am going somewhere …

Or Angela Carpos's dislike of card games:

When I was staying with my grandmother in Germany, there was a very old Jewish man of eighty-two who taught me to play cards. He was dragged away one day. I still can't play cards today. My friends can't understand why I won't join in a game.

Margaret Olmer has always been a collector.

My daughter, when she was eight, said: ‘You have all these bits of china, aren't you greedy?' But I told myself I was trying to replace all these things that people have taken from me. Also, I had four children. I had a drive to give back to myself, to society and to my people. I never felt any desire for violent revenge – just a tremendous desire to succeed here. I see it in so many people. They have replaced tenfold what was taken from them. They came from such shortages and came with nothing.

And there are those, like Harry Katz, who have shut themselves off from a world that can no longer be trusted.

After the war, I tried through the Red Cross to trace our parents and our sister. Maybe through a miracle they might be alive somewhere. But of course, being in the Warsaw ghetto, none of them were. There was just my brother and myself. When he was demobbed, the war started in Palestine and so he went there to volunteer. I took it for granted that when he came out of the army we would do something together; maybe get a place together or maybe start a little workshop. But he went straight to Palestine, so I hardly had any contact with him. I was practically alone for most of my life. I have difficulty making contact with people – perhaps because of my childhood – and it has kept on to the present day. I am still a bachelor and most of my friends are those I knew as a child fifty years ago. I keep myself to myself, partly because I have trouble talking – a speech impediment – and it has kept me away
from social gatherings. It has been a handicap all my life, but perhaps I have been using it as an excuse.

Over the years, the line on Germany has softened. Returning to Berlin, Peter Prager found himself thinking of his own experiences in a wider context.

I didn't feel any hatred … as a young boy I often felt it was a pity I was a Jew and that I couldn't be like the others. Perhaps if I had not been a Jew I would have done exactly like the others – I would have been like my classmates. Those who hate the Germans have to consider what they would have done in their place. It doesn't excuse the Germans, but it does mean that you have to examine how the Nazis came to power. The Allies are not entirely blameless, the way they treated Germany after the First World War.

Whenever he visits Germany or Austria, Leslie Brent tends to treat everyone over the age of sixty with a certain suspicion.

It's impossible to know what a person's thoughts and actions were during the Nazi era. But I have learnt to draw a distinction between Germans of that age group and the younger Germans I have met … Clearly the young German generation has quite a hard time of it, their problem being to come to grips with what their parents did or did not do, and I have a great deal of sympathy for them because it must be a very hard cross to bear.

Rediscovering their origins has not been the easiest experience for any of the child refugees. When, after the war, one girl met relatives from Berlin, she found she could not bring herself to speak a single word of German.

It took me some time to sort myself out. But then I realised it was a very good thing that I did the journey. My sister had to do all the translations. The language did return when I went back to Germany in 1951, but this caused a lot of confusion in me.

Kurt Weinburg returned to the village of Werther and to his father's cigar-making business in 1950, but never quite relearned the art of socialising.

I could not go into a crowd of Germans. I could not go into a restaurant or a hotel. When I went to buy tobacco in south-west Germany and had to stay overnight, I put up in the smallest hotel I could find to avoid company. But then I had to listen to a party of Germans singing their hearts out. I had nightmares. I was eager to get back to my private room in our former home, or back in England. I just couldn't face it. I did visit certain people who I knew had been active trade unionists or really genuine friends of the Jewish families, but all the other German people I met, the first thing they said was how much they had suffered during the war and how courageous they had been. But you could count on one hand the numbers of families who took food to my relatives. That was real courage.

Until recently, a busy and absorbing professional life afforded Professor Leslie Brent the luxury of not thinking too deeply on the question ‘Why me?' He felt ‘quite irrationally', as he explains, an element of guilt at being the only one of his immediate family to survive.

But I didn't find or make the time for pondering, or perhaps I simply wasn't ready for it.

The opportunity for reflection came when he was invited to lecture to the Polish Academy of Sciences. On a drive from Krakow to Wrozlaw, his host turned to him:

‘Oh, by the way, we will be travelling within twenty kilometres of Auschwitz. It is now a memorial which we Poles keep as a terrible reminder. Perhaps you would like to visit.' I was very much taken aback as I have always regarded it as the camp in which my family died. I said I didn't want to go back and explained to him why. Then, as we were drawing nearer I felt a strange compulsion to go…

In Auschwitz there is enough left to give one a pretty realistic idea of what it must have been like – the perimeter fence is there with the watchtowers and the gate, over which is written, incredibly,
Arbeit macht frei
(Work makes you free). None of the huts are left but the brick foundations and the chimney stack of each hut remain. So there are rows and rows of chimney stacks. I left some flowers. It was the first time I had wept uncontrollably in mourning for my family.

Leslie Brent has come to terms with his past, in so far as that is possible. Accompanied by his wife and son he has recently visited the town of his birth, now in Poland.

There are moments when I think about all this when I become overwhelmed with sorrow. But time has made it easier. I can now look back with a little more serenity.

Others, not so fortunate, are still puzzling on the nature of their true selves. At the
Kindertransporte
reunion in June 1989, the predicament was shared but not resolved.

I came over at the age of three and a half. I still don't know where I belong. I was brought up in the Midlands. I went to a Christian school. I was no longer considered German, I was not considered English. I certainly wasn't Jewish – my Jewish background was not nurtured. I am neither German nor English. I am neither Gentile nor Jew. I would like to know what is my identity?

By late 1947, the RCM was running short of money, voluntary workers and the will to go on. The Movement was still responsible for nearly 7000 youngsters, but less than a third were under eighteen and, of these, none were dependent on Bloomsbury House for any function that could not equally well be carried out by another charity.

The obvious choice for a friendly takeover was the Central British Fund whose finances had kept the RCM going when government funding was at its tightest. Talks began in the summer of 1948 with Otto Schiff, the begetter of all the wartime refugee organisations, heading the negotiations for the CBF. There was little to discuss. The RCM cash assets, some £4000, were just enough to cover the outstanding CBF debt. Office space was soon reallocated; so too were the staff who wanted to stay on. Dorothy Hardisty was ready to retire, Elaine Blond had already resigned and Lola Hahn-Warburg stayed only to see through the merger, though the last two remained active in the CBF's Jewish refugee work to the ends of their lives.

The RCM closed its files in December 1948. But, as we have seen, it was not the end of the story. Even today, fifty years on,
there is still a long way to go before the final chapter is written.

Let Herta Stanton, from Vienna, speak for the ten thousand:

I go back for holidays. My husband loves it, but I never say who I am or what I am. I am British, I have come from England on holiday, finish. But I still want to go to Vienna; there is something about it I can't explain. I have a funny feeling about it. When we go back to Austria and the mountains start to appear, I feel choked. But I am afraid to go for fear of what may be said to me and what I would have to answer. I couldn't keep quiet.

A friend went to Vienna last year. His family had a big toy shop in the middle of the city – I knew it well – and next door was a leather shop. The leather shop was still there and my friend recognised the owner. He said, ‘Don't you know me? I'm Gustav.' The man stared at him. ‘What, you are alive? They should have killed all of them.' That was his reception. He says he'll never go back to Vienna again.

Another year, my eldest brother was in Vienna and he went to a cafe where my father used to go. As he sat down, an old waiter came to the table and said, ‘Black coffee and whipped cream?' My brother said, yes, but how did he know? ‘Oh, you're not Herr Pollak?' My brother said he was Herr Pollak's son. It was the same waiter who used to serve my father every day. The old man cried. Vienna is a funny place, lots of black and white, such contrasts, and I think I am still influenced by it. I am a product of it.

Seldom has one writer owed so much to so many. Where to start? Pride of place must go to the veterans of the
Kindertransporte
who allowed themselves to be interviewed, often for hours on end. Their memories together with the records of the Refugee Children's Movement held by the Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief are the main source material for this book. Where I have used first names only, it is to protect anonymity, either because interviewees have requested it or because I have been unable to trace certain individuals mentioned in the records.