Cruel World (30 page)

There were many other heroes. Refugee workers plucked 185 children out of limbo in Poland’s no-man’s-land; 124 more were brought from Danzig. Two young Englishmen, Nicholas Winton and Trevor Chadwick, did similar work in Czechoslovakia, which had lost the Sudetenland in 1938 and then most of the rest of the nation to Hitler in March 1939. Thousands of Czechs, Jewish and otherwise, were forced from their homes. Here there was no central Jewish organization to assemble and process the children, who would have to be found one by one. Chadwick, on a private first visit, “got a clear impression of the enormity of the task. We so often saw halls full of confused refugees and batches of lost children, mostly Jewish, and we saw only the fringe of it all.”
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Soon Chadwick was in the thick of things. His first rescue was of twenty children, who flew back to England on a small plane: “They were all cheerfully sick, enticed by the little paper bags … except a baby of one
who slept peacefully in my lap the whole time.” He and Winton returned again and again, trying to find the “most urgent, helpless” cases and match them to families in England. Between them they brought out 664. It was never routine. At one point, blocked by the entrance of German troops into Czechoslovakia, Chadwick tried to get in to see Goebbels for authorization to pass. The little propaganda chief was not available, but Chadwick managed to persuade lower-echelon officials to let him through, noting that Nazi officials reacted well to “groveling.” He too found that adherence to bureaucratic niceties could be fatal, and at one juncture printed up false British passes for the children when the real ones did not arrive in time.
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As the children’s rescue trains started rolling toward England, there were many in the United States who wished to join the effort. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins had already been considering legislation to that effect. In New York a group that would eventually evolve into the nonsectarian Committee for German Refugees met to plan and promote the rescue. The response was immediate. By early February, 5,000 people had offered homes, and support was expressed by the AFL-CIO, an array of church and welfare groups, and a number of lawmakers.
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Members of Congress had, for years, been receiving letters from constituents pleading for help in bringing in endangered relatives and friends. Senator Robert Wagner of New York was no exception. His “Alien Files” for 1938 and 1939 alone fill ten archival boxes. The applicants run the gamut of nationalities. There are Czechs stuck in Warsaw; people in Canada; Poles, Germans, and desperate families in what has suddenly become “Vienna, Germany.” Wagner’s office did indeed write to the consulates on behalf of many of these constituents. The detailed replies describe a myriad of problems, deceptions, lost documents, and, above all, the huge backlog of applications. Over and over again Wagner is forced to reply that “he cannot advance people on the lists.” The senator was no more willing than anyone else to attempt to change the basic immigration quotas for adults, but by 1938 he did feel that an exception could be made for children.
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In February 1939, Wagner and Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers (R.-Mass.) introduced bills that would, in the following two years only, allow the entrance of 20,000 refugee children under fourteen outside the quotas. There would be no cost to the taxpayer. Transportation and support were to be privately funded. Although Jewish support was hesitant, there was overwhelming enthusiasm in many other quarters for this project.
Protestant and Catholic clergymen, Governor Herbert Lehman of New York, presidents of colleges, Chicago department-store mogul Marshall Field, Helen Hayes, and Henry Fonda backed the idea. The Federal Children’s Bureau approved, as did the YWCA, Herbert Hoover, Fiorello La Guardia, and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge, who said she would personally take twenty-five children.
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This sort of across-the-board endorsement would seem to be enough to pass most any legislation, but it would not withstand the dedicated fanaticism of the anti-immigration and nativist groups. These included, as before, the American Legion, various coalitions of “patriotic” societies, the DAR, and the obscure but numerous Junior Order of United American Mechanics. To these groups the 20,000 children constituted a “foreign invasion,” a flood of aliens who would take support from the millions “of neglected boys and girls, descendants of pioneers, undernourished and ill,” who also needed help. The facts that the available number of adopt-able children in the United States was far below the demand and that the 20,000 would not get state support were ignored by the “charity begins at home” faction. The old argument against separation of families was rehashed. At joint hearings in April 1939, both sides were heard, with the restrictionists dwelling ominously on the fact that admission of the 20,000 children would soon lead to the total closure of quotas. Anti-Semitism was ever in the background, and the specters of a foreign conspiracy to dump refugees and “Communistic and internationalistic plots” were evoked.

Despite all the invective, the bills were reported favorably but were immediately subjected to a second round of hearings before the far less sympathetic House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, whose members were apparently unswayed by the pathetic presence off the Atlantic coast of the refugee-laden SS
St. Louis
, which was getting major press coverage. In the end, two unacceptable bills were proposed. One would have used available quota numbers for the children and deprived 20,000 adults already in the pipeline of their chance to escape. The other, far more cynical, would have allowed the children in, but would have banned all other quota immigration for five years. Wagner, seeing that the cause was hopeless, withdrew the bill in July 1939.
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The threatened children and their parents were not privy to all the machinations of officialdom, and thought only of finding help. By the time of the Kindertransports to England, hundreds and perhaps thousands
of children no longer had parents who could confront the bureaucracies for them. In the very early morning of June 13, 1938, in Berlin, Gideon Behrendt’s father was taken away by the Gestapo. His mother had died some years before. Not knowing what to do, Gideon and his brother went off to school. Four weeks later he received a postcard from his father, who had been taken to Buchenwald. The brothers, now without funds or food, managed to get themselves into a Jewish orphanage, and from there were chosen for a Kindertransport.
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When two other boys were thrown out of a Vienna orphanage, the elder, aged fourteen, put his little brother, nine, into another institution and went to live with a relation. Soon he was arrested, but released due to a bureaucratic error. After that he wandered the streets, sleeping in the hallway of a sympathetic lady. The boy did know enough to go to the U.S. consulate and the Austrian Jewish Community offices. On one such visit he happened to see someone who had been in his orphanage who was in touch with the Kindertransport organizers:

By such small coincidences did children survive.

For those whose families were intact, the preparations and departures were often more difficult. Only a few beloved toys or pictures could be included in the single small suitcase allowed: “I remember my main worry being that I might not be allowed to take my love tokens—a collection of small cloth animals. My mother, with the insight of selfless love, knew that these objects must be packed at all costs.… I was twelve years old.”
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Parents—or more often mothers in the absence of arrested fathers—agonized over which of their children to send. As had been the case with the Spanish children, older siblings were entrusted with little sisters and brothers. The lucky ones had a relative waiting for them in England. Hardest for the parents was sending a very small child into the unknown, but many were sustained by the hope that the separation might only be temporary, and that at least the children would meanwhile be housed and safe from violence and starvation. From small towns and cities they converged on the stations. Sometimes parents were not allowed on the platforms. There were devastating scenes in the waiting rooms. Boys and girls
who had never seen their parents cry were astounded. Small children were bewildered and scared. Teenagers, looking forward to the adventure of it all, were sometimes ashamed of the overly demonstrative farewells. A few parents with cars chased the trains from station to station waving to their children until they could no more.

Though the Nazis were happy to release children, their escorts had to pledge that they would return, and only a few were allowed to accompany the small refugees. Adult supervision and comfort were therefore meager on the trains as they crossed Germany. At the Dutch frontier Nazi border guards searched each car. One eleven-year-old remembered that there was “one Nazi per compartment … the one in our compartment pulled down the blind, made us stand in the gangway, pulled down all the suitcases from the racks, opening them and throwing everything on the floor.” He stole things from the bags, and took money from the children’s pockets. “Fear was in all of us until the moment the whistle blew, the Nazis left and the train passed over the frontier. At this moment we opened the windows, shouting abuse and spitting at them.… It was terrible that we children should have learned such hatred.”
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The change in atmosphere, once out of Germany, was total. As had been done for the Spanish children, the rescue committees had gathered at the Dutch stations groups of people who cheered and waved as the trains came in, and lavished drinks and treats on the new arrivals.

Later, on the Channel ferry, a roomful of fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys stayed awake all night telling forbidden political jokes about Hitler, Goebbels, and Göring: “The jokes … were not memorable, but the occasion was. We did not need to look over our shoulders or lower our voices and the realization that we could say what we liked with impunity engendered an atmosphere of enormous gaiety.”
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The euphoria, as before, was short-lived. Charitable organizations, no matter how well meaning, are no substitute for family life. In the movement of hundreds of people, the personal touch is soon lost. In a sense, those who deplored the separation of families were right. The children felt the difference right away. Siblings were often separated from the beginning,
as the social workers liked to put particular age groups together for ease of handling:

The children’s first impressions of England were of dark and cold and confusion. They could understand nothing of what the kind porters and English helpers were saying. The groups who went to London went first to a large hall in the Liverpool Street station to be matched with their new families. Most were taken away immediately, but there were, of course, mix-ups and failed meetings. At Dovercourt, the camp where the unplaced were taken, the improvised nature of the evacuations was immediately evident. Food was plentiful and the children were happy being with one another. But the camp consisted of unheated summer cabins and a huge “central hall something like a hangar at an aerodrome” with loudspeakers broadcasting incomprehensible messages in English. Here “the many children wandered about or crowded around the stoves.… The beds were awfully cold and there were not enough of them.” Children used to feather beds struggled with inadequate blankets and went to bed fully dressed. While this spartan regime was good training for the incomprehensible British lack of central heating in private houses, it was very uncomfortable. It snowed and water froze in the jugs. There was no running water in the huts, and the counselors had to devise all sorts of strenuous exercises to keep the children warm during the day. To make things worse, a terrible winter storm flooded much of the camp—a blessing in disguise for the children, who were evacuated to institutions with heating, and who later had blissful memories of these warm interludes. Horrified local observers soon took groups of children to better quarters while they awaited placement.
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The organizations did their best, but, despite a successful nationwide funding campaign, their money and personnel were not adequate. As the numbers arriving at the reception centers increased, the social workers charged with finding and vetting suitable foster families could not keep up. In the matching process, once again, children were often subjected to the “cattle market” method: they were lined up so that foster parents
could choose. One cross-eyed girl, after months of being passed over, finally refused to come to the choosing area. Such agonies prompted social workers to stop the lineups in favor of other methods.
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It was particularly hard to find Orthodox Jewish families willing to take children, and many of these were eventually placed in Christian homes; at one point the Central Jewish Organization in Germany, which was responsible for making up the transports, was told to hold back Orthodox children. Teenaged boys were a problem too. By midsummer of 1939, the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany was so overextended that it had to inform the Home Office that it could not take in any more children for the time being. Despite this, the continental organizers continued to work, and several more groups, including one from the Jewish School for Deaf and Dumb Children in Berlin-Weisensee, got out before the declaration of war. The total number of children brought to England in nine months by the Movement was 9,354.
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In December 1939, when the organizations were almost completely out of money, the British government, having little choice, finally authorized a subsidy of eight shillings a week for each refugee, a sum that still had to be matched by the Movement.
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