Cruel World (32 page)

British infants sport special antigas suits
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(photo credit 7.1)

Working day and night, the planners had a program ready for government approval by late July 1938. But by late September, as Europe teetered on the brink of war, there had been no response from the Cabinet. Despite this, the terrified planners managed to see to it that children were issued gas masks and sent to school with packed suitcases. Chamberlain’s cioncession of the Sudetenland to the Führer postponed the crisis, but it was now clear that serious civil defense measures were crucial. Work continued, and by the early summer of 1939 things seemed to be ready. All that was needed was the transmission of the very suitable code words “Pied Piper” to set the evacuation process in motion.
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By late August 1939, the moment was close. Teachers were called back and schools opened early. On August 28, Edward R. Murrow of CBS, reporting back to the United States, described “pictures in today’s papers … of school children carrying out a test evacuation.… We saw
pictures of them tying on each other’s identification tags, and they trooped out of the school buildings as though they were going to a picnic.” Their older siblings, meanwhile, were reporting for induction into the Army. Three days later, as ultimata flew back and forth between the diplomats, Murrow reported that “all schools in evacuation and reception areas are to be closed for instruction tomorrow … until further notice.” Children were to go to school with their gas masks, bags, and food for one day and would be taken to “safer districts.” Parents would be told later where they were.
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By September 4, 600,000 mothers, teachers, and children had been evacuated from London and another 900,000 from other endangered areas. It was an amazing performance. The London evacuees, seen off by frightened and tearful parents who expected bombs to start falling at any moment, left from 168 prearranged stations. Four thousand special trains were laid on and the whole railway system schedule rearranged to facilitate the exodus. At the reception areas all across the country crowds of volunteers, Boy Scouts, and medical personnel awaited the arrival of the trains.

Once the destinations had been reached, things got complicated right away. Some people had taken the wrong train. Overeager volunteers mixed up people’s luggage. Children had to be sent to preliminary centers where they would be given medical examinations before being billeted in areas with school facilities suitable to their age groups. At one center “receiving 500 children, one or two minor operations were performed, one child was found to have scarlet fever and sent to hospital, several were incipient cases.”
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The ideal of keeping whole schools together immediately fell apart in rural areas, where children had to be billeted in several small villages, making it difficult for the accompanying teachers to keep track of them. The number of children needing shelter all at one time was so great that “compulsory measures” had to be used on foster parents in some areas, and the exhausting placement process went on late into the night. The university town of Cambridge had planned on processing 8,000 evacuees a day for three days. In the end a total of 6,700 came, but even that was a challenge to the program.

Some children going to more remote areas, such as Wales, had to be accommodated overnight en route. By the time they got to this first stop, the picnic atmosphere had often worn off and confidence was waning. Terence Nunn was in one such group, which was lodged in a spooky, deserted hospital that, with its barred windows and jagged fire escapes, looked much like a prison. The interior was no more comforting. There was no dining room, and the children were randomly served an unappetizing
supper. Bathrooms were overwhelmed, and lodging was in a vast, gloomy ward, where Terence spent a restless night in a hospital bed shared with another boy.

From this dreadful place groups of thirty or so were extracted the next day by roll calls. Nunn was not chosen until late afternoon, by which time he was sure that he had been forgotten. From the hospital his subdued group was taken on another train to a dark valley dotted with slag heaps and mining machinery. Terence was placed with a grim mining family that might have been from another world.
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He was not alone in this culture shock. Dorothy Brand, who would be put in seven different billets during the war, some a delight and some truly awful, began by being left alone in the pitch dark outside her first foster home. Once admitted, she was kindly welcomed, given hot chocolate, and shown to a sofa bed in the living room. But, close to tears throughout, she could not bring herself to ask where the bathroom was, and spent a few agonizing hours before discovering that it was in an outhouse, a new experience for her.
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Mismatching was not only a downward phenomenon. Far more often middle- and upper-class country dwellers were appalled at the verminous and ragged inner city children or slovenly mothers and babies brought to their doors, whose appearance and emotional condition had not been improved by the long trip and processing. The feeling was frequently mutual. Poor children faced with maids and butlers or ultra-proper bourgeois households were just as miserable as Terence Nunn was in Wales, and sometimes had to be rebilleted. As one organizer put it:

Problems in Britain were also exacerbated by the fact that after the outbreak of war in September 1939, the expected bombings did not take place. The lack of a crisis atmosphere led both to a decline in altruistic feelings on the part of foster families and of fear on the part of the evacuees. Mothers with small children went back home in large numbers and many parents, for whom the obligatory charge of about ten dollars a week for each evacuated child was a hardship, brought their offspring back.
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But for every mismatch and each upset foster family there were a hundred success stories. The generosity of the foster families cannot be exaggerated.
Some took in six or eight children. Whole houses were converted to suit the evacuees. Many children quickly became attached to their new “Aunties” and “Uncles” and maintain contact to this day. The evacuation agencies learned fast. Outings and communal teas were arranged, and special “cheap days” were instituted by the railroads so that parents could visit their children. Above all, when the bombing began in earnest, British determination to survive soon swept away worrying about petty problems.

Those dealing with evacuation did not only have to cope with British social differences. They also had to move the recently settled Kindertransport children and other foreigners to safer areas. For some, this displacement would be nasty.

In November 1939, the British authorities ordered all Axis citizens sixteen and over to register with the police and present themselves to Aliens Tribunals, set up all over England, which would decide if they would be put in detention, remain at liberty in a restricted area, or be freed as “refugees from Nazi oppression.” To young people recently rescued from similar scenes on the Continent, this was a frightening process. No lawyers were allowed at the tribunals, but the aliens could bring one person with them, often a representative of the refugee organizations. By March 1940, 73,800 persons had been examined and the overwhelming majority allowed to go about their business. Some 6,109 were helped financially so that they could complete ongoing emigration, mostly to the United States. Things would change dramatically in May 1940, when Hitler’s forces swept across Northern Europe to the shores of the English Channel. At this time, all Axis nationals over the age of sixteen, male and female, were taken into custody and put into various kinds of camps.
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Among them were hundreds of the recently rescued Kindertransport children. Whole hostels were removed at one time, while individual teenagers were picked up at their new homes: “It was a pretty awful moment for me when I, a girl of 17, was fetched by two (kind) policemen and shipped off to an unknown destination.”
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The “unknown destination” for most was the Isle of Man, safely located in the middle of the Irish Sea. Once there, many internees were relegated to empty houses in a cordoned-off section of the very charming seaside town of Ramsey. Here they were provided with mattresses and food and little else, but were not uncomfortable. The route to the Isle of Man, however, could be harrowing. Though the arresting officers were usually pleasant, the internees, often separated from friends and family, were not given any information about what was happening, and the constant presence of much less pleasant armed guards and barbed wire in the processing
camps, where real Nazis and Jewish refugees were mixed, was terrifying. Luggage was searched and much stolen by camp personnel. In the detention areas there was the by now familiar overcrowding and lack of sanitation. Letters to the outside world were censored and restricted in number.
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Many boys, eager to get out of the camps, asked to be included in the transports of aliens being sent to Canada and Australia, for many a tragic choice. One ship was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland and half its passengers lost. Another, the hideously overcrowded
Dunera
, made it to Australia despite submarine attacks, but en route the internees, who were treated like criminals and had to sleep on tables or the floor for the eight-week journey, were terrorized by a sadistic guard force made up of ex-convicts. The plight of the interned refugees soon caused objections in Parliament, and the
Dunera
crew was duly punished.
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By 1942, most of the young internees had been released and were taken into the wartime workforce and the armed services. Here they were appreciated, but nothing could quite erase their loneliness or their aching desire for home.

On the European continent, the troubles of children would soon be far worse. In the early dawn of May 10, 1940, German forces invaded neutral Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, heading for France. The long-planned offensive took place not at the heavily defended Maginot Line, pride of the French high command, but on a front reaching from the north of Holland down to the hilly and theoretically impassible Ardennes in southeast Belgium. Here three massive columns of Panzer forces extended “back for a hundred miles far behind the Rhine,”
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waiting to roll across Belgium and the north of France. In glorious summer weather thousands of the bronzed young men so carefully nurtured by the Nazis poured into Western Europe, their glowing health and conditioning contrasting markedly with the pale, unathletic draftees of the Allies.
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Despite repeated warnings of impending attack and the blitzkrieg tactics demonstrated in Poland, the neutral countries and France had done little to prepare for a confrontation with the Germans’ brilliant new style of warfare, a fact that would render the carefully drawn evacuation plans of several countries useless.

In Holland the appropriate signals were now given, and in towns across the eastern part of the country families began to make the dreadful preparations necessary for total abandonment of their lives. In Wageningen, a small town on the Rhine that was to be evacuated by boat, a little stream of people was observed carrying pets to be euthanized by the veterinarian. By the time families were assembled on the dock, the sounds of battle
were quite distinct. The loading not only of 12,000 people, but also of archives, hospital equipment, and various provisions took hours. It was late afternoon before the convoy left, heading down the Rhine toward Fortress Holland. They were too late. The Germans, using newfangled airborne troops, had simply bypassed Holland’s flooded fields and other Dutch defenses and taken many of the Rhine bridges before they could be blown up. The Wageningen convoy was forced to stop with several others totaling fifty boats and 20,000 people. After thirty-six very uncomfortable hours on the vessels they were put ashore and dispersed to villages along the river. Those who tried to escape by foot and train did rather better, including the 130,000 cows, which were driven into the Fortress area and were undoubtedly requisitioned by the German Army. On the fourth day after the invasion, Holland, impelled by the gratuitous bombing of Rotterdam, surrendered and the evacuees slowly made their way home. There they often found sections of their towns in ruins and their houses looted. It was all quite surreal: ducks, rabbits, and chickens, released from their coops before their owners departed, wandered the neighborhoods, and the trees were made colorful by uncaged parrots and canaries.
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By the time the good burghers of Wageningen were assessing the damage to their dwellings, the vanguards of the Wehrmacht were well across Belgium. Before them some two million of Belgium’s citizens, using every known kind of conveyance, headed toward France. Among them were tens of thousands of young men between sixteen and thirty-five, who had been asked by Belgium’s fleeing political leaders to cross into France and regroup in Toulouse, where, theoretically, they would be of use to the Allied cause. Once arrived, they spent some weeks languishing in a stadium before being moved, like the Spanish refugees before them, into a number of primitive camps where living conditions were filthy and food inadequate.
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There was, in fact, little else the French authorities could do at this fateful moment, for their scenario of carefully staged evacuation of towns by train had evaporated before the Nazi onslaught, despite the heroic efforts of French railwaymen. People fleeing the bombing of towns in the north of France did indeed get on trains heading away from artillery barrages and the rapidly advancing tank divisions. But the mixing of civilian and military activity on the rail lines would prove fatal. Troops and ammunition trains on tracks next to those jammed with families were relentlessly dive-bombed by the Germans. Stations, usually in town centers, became the sites of terrible carnage. On May 19, an officer traveling to Arras from Rambouillet reported seeing