Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
In the end, far more children were sheltered in group homes and hostels than the Movement had foreseen. These ran the gamut from impersonal group shelters to austere and Dickensian vicarages, and, more happily, included cozy converted town houses lovingly supervised by rich families, which many of the children, to this day, remember with happiness.
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They also included agricultural training centers for future kibbutz dwellers at the barely habitable Gwrych Castle in North Wales and, rather suitably, on the far better appointed Scottish estate of Lord Balfour, whose declaration had created the Jewish homeland in Palestine.
The responsibilities of those who worked in the hostels were awesome, but sometimes also a godsend to adult refugees who could otherwise only legally work as domestic servants unless they had special dispensation. Needless to say, both the experience and dedication of the overseers varied wildly. At age twenty-eight, Marianne Wolman, aided by a cook and a cleaning lady, was put in charge of a house sheltering twenty-five boys aged five to thirteen. All had lost their parents to prison or execution. Like the Spanish Civil War refugees, these boys were at first “violently aggressive.” For almost two months they fought incessantly and trusted no one. Marianne had to hide in a remote part of the house from time to time in order to get away from “the yelling.” At the local school, where they at first understood nothing, they behaved “unacceptably.” They calmed down
gradually, but Marianne found that she never had time to give “total attention to an individual child.” This changed when one of the boys got appendicitis and she visited him daily in the hospital. When he got home he clung to her, wanting the attention to continue. Soon another boy had stomach pains and went to the hospital. It was not until the third case that Marianne realized that a desperate need for individual affection was the true cause. For four months she had no days off. Finally, she went to spend a day with her future husband and was gone until evening. When she returned she found that all the boys, thinking she had abandoned them, had, despite fervent reassurances from the staff, packed up their “little bundles” of possessions and prepared to go away. “So I could see that they didn’t really trust me. How could they? Their parents were taken away from them and killed, so why would they trust that I would not also disappear?”
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The foster families came in all varieties too. Some children found themselves in upper-class and even stately homes and were sent to the best schools. Both in the hostels and in the families there were overlaps with the Spanish children. The Attenborough family, of movie fame, had set up a hostel for sixteen Basque children and now took two Jewish girls into their house.
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These were the lucky ones. Others were sent to versions of Harry Potter’s Muggle family and went to work at age fourteen. There were cases of child molestation and other problems that required moving children from one foster home to another, sometimes more than once. These cases were more than balanced by the kind, but often uncomprehending, generosity of most foster parents, who in some cases had never heard of Vienna or met a Jew before.
For everyone, the adjustments were complicated. Everything from food to lifestyle was utterly different. The boys and girls had the wrong clothes, and they had no knowledge of local lore and customs. Twelve-year-olds were humiliated by being put in classes with six-year-olds until they could speak more English, a wholly unnecessary measure, as any child placed in total immersion will learn a language within months. For these children, learning the language was paramount, not only for the basics of life, but above all to rid themselves of the stigma of being German. For, although few in Britain were very clear about what was happening to Jews in the Reich, they were all quite clear about who was Britain’s primary enemy.
Once placed in their communities, the children did not forget those who had been left behind. The effort of even very small children to try to have their families come too was remarkable:
There was a boy of three or four in our transport who continually repeated a name and an address. After we had left Germany he asked to write it down. They were people in England who might help his parents.
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History does not record if he succeeded in making contact, but others certainly did. The older children who came early on were often successful in finding sponsors for their parents. For the later arrivals, the failure to achieve this goal left lifelong feelings of grief. Egon Guttmann, only eleven when he arrived on August 2, 1939, immediately began asking ladies in his new neighborhood if they could sponsor his mother as a domestic servant and take in his little sister, who was three and a half. Miraculously, he succeeded, and the process was set in motion. But August 1939 was too late, and, despite all his loving efforts, they both would perish.
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When parents did arrive, things were not always better. The instant loss of status, home, and income was a shock, no matter the country in which one landed, and in England there were few remedies. Men were not allowed to work, and women, like Marianne Wolman, were limited to menial or domestic jobs. Overnight, proud families became dependent on loans, gifts, and the tiny stipend the Jewish organizations could provide. They were forced to live in squalid rooms and often could not afford to have their children with them. In such circumstances it did not take long for some family structures to fall apart. In their efforts to adapt to new homes, new schools, and a new nation, the children, desperate to belong, were ashamed of their parents’ recent poverty and their “foreign” ways. One child of six
found it impossible to love two people as my mother. At first, my mother’s visits, and especially her departures, were an agony. Gradually as my foster mother took over my affection—and I welcomed this—my own mother’s visits were still an agony, but now because of the guilt feelings they aroused in me.
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Children sent to hostels and boarding schools that, trying to be kind, also employed their mothers were often miserable as well, all too aware that being children of the help lowered their standing in the eyes of their peers. This sort of thing might have been remedied by more sensitive organizers, but by September 1939 there was little time for such niceties, as it had now become important not only to evacuate endangered child
refugees from the Continent, but also to save all the children in the countries threatened by war with the Reich.
The governments of Germany’s western neighbors had been preparing civil defense and evacuation plans for their citizens with varying degrees of seriousness for some time. The Netherlands, though counting heavily on its neutrality, by March 1935 had made contingency plans that included its traditional defense of flooding strategic areas, and holding out in a central “Fortress Holland.” The plan would, of course, require the evacuation of large numbers of people to predetermined communities. But as war clouds gathered in the summer of 1939, it appeared that little had actually been done to implement these plans. This led to the hasty creation of a Bureau of Civil Evacuation, which went to work only after the outbreak of war, and only days before the first orders for flooding were issued. Soon arrangements were made to evacuate some 300,000 people from flood areas, 2,000 of whom had left by November 1939. Hundreds of other residents, feeling nervous, moved on their own. For town and city dwellers, plus 440,000 others in border areas, an elaborate scenario, based on presumed German military moves, was prepared. Three days after the threat of an invasion was confirmed people would be moved to the Fortress in carefully prepared groups.
Towns and cities were divided into sections with a hierarchy of leaders. The signal to leave would be the continuous blowing of police car horns or the beating of drums (sirens and church bells being reserved for aerial attacks). Families should pack up no more than thirty kilograms of possessions per person, lock up their houses, turn the keys in to a central authority, and proceed to a designated meeting place. Pets were allowed, and 130,000 cows were to be rounded up and driven cowboy-style to safety. The human groups would be taken by boat and train to large buildings in staging areas (200,000 beds were ordered) and from there would be placed with local families. Special trains were planned for the German Jewish refugees at the Westerbork camp, so near the Reich border: they were to be moved clear across Holland to Terneuzen, a small town in the southwest near the Belgian border. But in their haste, the Dutch authorities never precisely solved the problems of what to do with such special cases as tuberculosis patients, prisoners, and the mentally disturbed.
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In France, householders had long since been advised to build air-raid shelters in their gardens or take refuge in the Paris Métro. Wardens were
appointed, and gas masks, taken everywhere, became the subject of many cartoons and fashion satires. They were supposed to be donned when repeated single blasts of police car horns were heard—a measure that led to frequent false alarms in traffic-ridden Paris. Evacuation planning, started well before 1938, was briefly put to the test at the time of the Munich crisis, making clear that much more had to be done. As was the case in Holland, the idea was to send the “useless” population of the twenty-five
départements
closest to Germany and the major cities such as Paris, Lyon, and Marseilles to areas away from presumed military operations. This would be done almost entirely by rail, with three to four times the normal number of trains laid on.
On August 31, 1939, with war clearly inevitable, 16,313 Parisian schoolchildren were evacuated in twenty-seven trains. This first operation was not entirely smooth: the children of eighteen school districts ended up in Chartres, where two had been expected, causing a wild scramble to take care of them.
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For the rest of the populace, the evacuation plan was initiated on the morning of September 1. Notices were posted in affected towns informing the French that they too could take only thirty kilos per person, which had to include bedding, a cooking pot, and food for three days. Children under seven were to have labels with identifying information sewn onto their clothes. Some owners of food stores simply gave everything away before going to their assembly points. Many people from small villages had to walk to these meeting places carrying all their impedimenta and children, who were in varying stages of excitement and exhaustion. Along with them went others on peasant carts pulled by oxen, tractors, and bicycles. There were endless waits at stations for the packed trains, which, when the finally departed, left behind station squares full of carts, excess baggage, and bicycles. They were haunted by abandoned French cats and dogs, less fortunate than their Dutch cousins, as they were absolutely forbidden on the evacuation trains.
Most of the 250,000 residents of Strasbourg were evacuated in this manner to the Dordogne, just east of Bordeaux, since become a tourist mecca, but then a very primitive area. Things were immediately difficult as multiple batches of 10,000 or so Strasbourgeois, speaking their Germanic Alsatian dialect, descended on Perigueux and the charming but utility-free villages of the region. Local children rudely referred to their new neighbors as
boches
. What lodgings there were not only lacked electricity and plumbing, but often had no beds or stoves. The evacuees were expected to cook, as the locals did, on tripods over open fires and to use hanging stew pots, both of which had been thoughtfully provided by
provincial officials who were appalled at the thought that they would have to supply real stoves with ovens. Food was a problem too: distribution was spotty and, this not being an area blessed with cows on the Dutch scale, both butter and milk were hard to come by. While all these hardships could be tolerated while war threatened, the fact that no invasion was forthcoming led to discontent, as did the absence of job opportunities, a situation not appreciated by the permanent residents, who resented the fact that the government-subsidized Alsatians spent their days sitting around in cafés. It was not all bad. Children soon grew to love the freedom of the country, and at Christmas a volunteer group set up 500 Christmas trees and distributed some 58,000 presents to local and evacuee children alike.
Farther north the Parisian evacuees were not much better off in their bucolic refuges. But for them it was easy to go home when sleeping in a damp barn and hauling firewood palled. Nevertheless, some 520,000, once moved out of town, did not go back. In the city itself, despite sporadic air-raid scares, the war spirit soon evaporated. The blackout was spotty, and restaurants began to serve chic “safe” suppers in their
caves
. Schools reopened. Rationing, tentatively instituted, was rather a joke: one Cabinet minister, on a “meatless” day, made do with oysters and grilled sole. By November, although large stadium events were forbidden for fear of air attacks, horse racing and dancing were once more permitted, ski resorts were opening, and Riviera hotels were hoping for the usual influx of British tourists in the spring.
To the British, who had lost some 1,400 souls to bombing raids in World War I, the now far greater danger of air attack was the first concern, especially in London and the industrial cities of the North. Since 1924 civil defense planning had been going on sporadically and secretly under the auspices of the Committee of Imperial Defense. By 1935, an Air Raid Precaution Department was at work, which began testing gas masks and tried to interest local governments in preparing evacuation plans. Reaction to this was mixed. Lack of funding from the central government did not help. Some pacifist local officials did not want to create a “war psychology,” and one mayor even suggested unilateral disarmament. By May 1938 it was clear that the complexities of transporting, billeting, and feeding thousands of people were far too difficult for any local authority, and planning was taken over by a Special Committee in London. Priority was to be given to mothers with children up to five years of age, unaccompanied older children, and the infirm. Other children would be moved in school groups with their teachers, and once in the safety of the countryside would be placed in foster families. Evacuation was voluntary for the needy and arrangements did not extend to middle- and upper-class families and schools, which were thought to have both the intellectual and the financial resources to take care of themselves.