... And the Policeman Smiled (11 page)

There was a happy ending. Ernest Jacob's parents did get out of Germany, just four weeks before the outbreak of war. But if the Rushbrooks had not encouraged a father to visit a sick son, it would have turned out differently.

Another of the boys was Herbert Rothschild. Mrs Rushbrook resumes the story:

I will always remember Herbert saying to me one day when we were out in the garden: ‘I wonder if you could do me a great favour? I have a cousin on my mother's side who would like to come to England and it would be helpful to her parents.' That we found very amusing. Her name was Margaret. She settled in with us beautifully, so thoughtful for our comfort and all the help she could give us. It was a very sad day for us when she had to leave for America, but we have been in touch ever since and regularly I hear from her and she always phones me on my birthday, Christmas, New Year and the anniversary of my husband's death. She was on holiday in Italy when he died and she made a point of coming over for two days for his funeral. Ernest and Paul (Sonnaberg) also came. You couldn't ask for more respect than that.

After
Children in Flight
, parcels of food and clothing started arriving at Dovercourt. There were shoes and coats from Marks and Spencer, the National Sporting Club sent a pair of boxing gloves and an Essex butcher provided beef sausages for all, once a week. Free tickets at the Harwich Electric Cinema provided a welcome diversion from camp routine, not to mention a painless method of learning English. News of Dovercourt travelled abroad. One day a trunk-load of winter woollens turned up, a gift from Johannesburg where a news item in the local paper had inspired a ladies' circle to start knitting.

But however welcome, such generosity did not help solve the central problem which was to find suitable homes for the children. Every Sunday, prospective foster parents gathered at Dovercourt to view the inmates. It was a ritual that distressed Anna Essinger and her staff but, given the pressure to move the children out of the camp so that others could take their places, nobody was able to come up with a better alternative to what was known as ‘the market'.

Sunday was the day for looking smart. For three hours in the morning the dining room became a barber's shop, with a queue
of youngsters waiting for their short back and sides. Baths were mandatory and not just a lazy soaking but a good scrubbing with carbolic soap. Then the best clothes were chosen, none of them the height of fashion nor even necessarily a good fit, but neat, tidy and clean.

The adults were told to arrive when the children were having lunch. That way, by walking between the long tables as if on a tour of inspection, they could view the prospects without embarrassment. Anyway, that was the theory. In reality, adults and children usually ended up furtively edging round each other, anxiously trying to detect matching personalities.

Leslie Brent was in Dovercourt for three weeks before going to Bunce Court, a happy chance which put him into the most favoured category of child refugees.

The selection process was not always done altruistically because some of the families wanted, for example, a blonde girl with blue eyes and of a particular age – hoping perhaps that she would be useful in the house. Fortunately, I was never involved in that. Couples sometimes had a rather clear idea of the kind of child they were looking for, and naturally the more attractive children ‘went' more quickly than the less attractive, and those with difficult emotional histories probably would have been the most difficult to place. I don't think one can be too critical of the way this was organised because it was all done in a terrific hurry, and the pressures were intense.

In the evening, the names of those who had been picked from the line-up were read out over the camp tannoy. The children were apprehensive, none more so than the newcomers who were still struggling with their English and were generally mystified by events. When Zita Hirschhorn heard her name, so little acquainted was she with all that was going on, she cried out:
‘Ich bin verkauft
' (‘I am sold').

The greatest sadness was the children who felt unwanted. These were not necessarily the shy or reserved ones, who were quite likely to be snapped up by ‘parents' who were looking for a quiet life. But a child who was unusual in some way – a thin, undernourished-looking boy, for example, or a large, overnourished-looking girl – were liable to feel the pain of rejection.

As a group, the older ones were the most difficult to place – because, inevitably, they were the most difficult to manage. It was said that these teenagers were easily offended. But who could blame them? Exiled from their own country for no reason, they developed keen antennae for any insult, actual or implied. They resented stern reminders not to speak German, to be polite and always, always to be grateful. Stuck in Dovercourt with little prospect of continuing their education or of fulfilling their parents' ambitions, they did not see what they had to be grateful for.

Perhaps it would have been better for them if they had gone straight to hostels or agricultural training camps. This was certainly the view of
Youth Aliyah
workers like Erich Duchinsky. He argued that teenagers were wasting their opportunities at Dovercourt, keeping the futile hope alive that they would be adopted by rich families and lead a fine life, when they could have been using their time to constructive purpose.

Why then did the RCM insist on fostering as the only way of emptying Dovercourt and Pakefield? A report circulated in the spring of 1939 admitted that the camps ‘became slave markets where people with the best intentions in the world went to help one child, yet unconsciously did harm to many by looking them over and rejecting them'. But the report concluded: ‘There was good reason for the Movement not to follow the example of the continent (where hostels were the rule) for France and Germany are definitely clearing stations. It would not profit the children there greatly to learn the culture of those countries when in a few months they would have to go overseas. Yet the case is different with the children in England, for when they emigrate, the vast majority will go to English-speaking countries, and they will have profited from the intimate contact they had with the English life and language.'

As it happened, re-emigration was a non-starter, but it remained government policy and, until the war, it was seen as the only long-term solution to the refugee problem. The other question that needs answering is why the RCM did not take more care in choosing foster parents. As many children were soon to discover, being taken into a family was no guarantee of happiness. But the RCM was working against the clock with little in the way of professional back-up. As one organiser put it:

In an ideal world we would have checked the needs of the children and matched them with carefully compiled family profiles. But in an ideal world, refugee children would not have existed.

The longer the older teenagers remained at Dovercourt, the more dissatisfied they became and the more difficult to control. Anna Essinger tried to keep discipline by appointing group leaders, but responsibility did not rest easily on youngsters who were preoccupied by their own future, or apparent lack of it. Formal discipline gave way to the survival of the strongest. Not surprisingly, the younger ones associated the bullies with the violence they had encountered at home:

There were rumours that some of the older boys were members of the Nazi party. I was certain that two boys were members of the Hitler Youth Movement planted there as spies.

There was no evidence of this, but it is clear that old rivalries were used as an excuse for fights.

I remember being amazed at the enmity between the Austrian boys and the boys from Berlin – they hated each others' guts! There was evidently some enmity between Austria and Germany and the Jewish boys were part and parcel of this; they had accepted this. There were some knife fights in the camp between sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys. I was quite shocked about that – it had never occurred to me that one might hate someone merely because he came from a different city. So Viennese and Berlin boys – boys who had just escaped from Nazi Germany – were kept apart in separate chalets.

As one who did get into quite a few scrapes, Henry Schwartz admits that the Viennese and Berliners divided into rival camps, but thinks that the seriousness of the fighting was overstated.

The Germans still thought of themselves as Germans and the Austrians still thought of themselves as Austrians; they didn't think of themselves as Jews primarily. When you think back on it there was no justification. One of the Germans said: ‘You shut up. You have only come to Greater Germany; we were there before,' and I said: ‘Why the hell don't you keep it? We didn't want to come.' He was proud of the fact that he was part of the German empire, so
we had fights over these things. Of course, boys will have fights, but they were not that serious. There were tensions which were a bit stupid. We just didn't mix with them. It seems a bit silly in retrospect.

At the time, it was anything but silly. Fears of serious outbreaks of violence were real enough, as too were the risks of public reaction against the
Kindertransporte
if stories of indiscipline got out. Those who had to keep order had no power of retribution, except the withdrawal of minor privileges. All they could do was plead for commonsense or, in desperation, threaten a stern lecture from Anna Essinger, a device which usually succeeded when all else had failed.

Youngsters falling out was one thing, but just as worrying were reports that some of the more mature boys and girls were getting on with each other just a little too well. Like other teachers at Dovercourt, Howard Franks was under orders to curb the romantic inclinations of their wards.

I remember patrolling chalets, loos, shower rooms for this kind of thing, and I actually discovered and separated youngsters who had had intercourse!

The nearest Dovercourt came to real scandal was when some of the boys discovered the red light district of Harwich. Ironically, it happened when a party was staying at the Salvation Army Sailors' Hostel for a fortnight before going on to Dovercourt, at the kind invitation of Major and Mrs Parker. In the evening, some of Major and Mrs Parker's guests wandered off into town.

‘The boys had a few shillings,' recalls Erich Duchinsky, who had to find the miscreants and return them to camp. ‘I don't know where they got the money, but it was a nightmare. I tried talking to them. I don't know how successful I was but I don't think it happened any more.'

The incident came at an awkward time, preceding by a few days a visit by the Chief Rabbi. Fortunately, he was diverted from any inquiry into the sexual morals of the camp by a report that boys were playing football on the Sabbath. A reasonable defence might have been that field sports were preferable to roaming the docks
but, instead, the chief rabbi was assured that the boys needed the exercise. He was not convinced:

As these children have had little exercise before, one day of rest, after six days given over to sport, might do their constitutions more good than any additional exercise on the Sabbath.

If, however, there are reasons why such additional exercise is advisable, I am of the opinion that something less strenuous than football should be selected.

Rabbi Hertz had his way.

Dovercourt ended its days as a refugee centre in March 1939 when there were less than a hundred, mostly older boys, still in occupation. The orthodox boys went to a hostel at Westgate (closed at the end of 1939) and the non-orthodox to Barham House, just outside Ipswich, which soon became an agricultural training centre.

For a short time, Dovercourt was restored to its original function, but in 1942 it was requisitioned as a prisoner-of-war camp. It was another five years before the holiday-makers returned. Today, a few of the ticky tacky chalets occupied by the refugee children can still be seen. Until recently they were the location for the television series
Hi Di Hi
. But the days of Dovercourt holiday camp are numbered. There is a plan to clear the site to make way for a spanking new conference centre. No doubt every comfort will be laid on, though, in winter, there will always be the sharp east wind to remind occupants of tougher days at Dovercourt.

‘
So one morning the day of our departure had come – I
remember crying bitterly and saying – “Please Mummy, please
don't send me away.” I saw the heartbreak that was going
on around me. I was eleven years old
.'

By Christmas 1938 the RCM was in desperate straits, though the staff were working too hard to realise it. At the root of the crisis was a shortage of hard cash. While demand for places on the
Kindertransporte
showed no signs of letting up – indeed, was beginning to increase at an alarming rate – the resources to meet the challenge were simply not to hand.

On 8 December, the former prime minister, Stanley Baldwin (Lord Baldwin), had made a successful radio appeal on behalf of refugees, ‘the victims … of an explosion of man's inhumanity to man'. The broadcast was subsequently distributed on record at eight shillings a disk. Christie's held a charity auction, and up and down the country the rotaries and women's institutes geared themselves for yet another season of money-raising fetes and flower shows.

The Baldwin Fund brought in some £500,000, but not all of this was for child refugees. In fact, it was not until April 1939 that the RCM was given its allocation of £200,000. By then, the critical decision had been taken to restrict the flow of refugee children into Britain. Forced back on a policy of self help, the RCM soon discovered that the public responded best when appeals were made of behalf of specific projects – £40 to support one boy in a course of agricultural training, say, or £60 for a year's schooling. The next step was to call for volunteers to act as foster parents, either
at their own expense, or with the help of a small grant. The campaign was got under way on 25 November when Lord Samuel delivered an emotional appeal to the British public to open their homes to refugee children. The response was encouraging; over 500 offers came in, and though the inevitable, lengthy process of inspection deprived those on the early
Kindertransporte
of any immediate benefit, the principle of recruiting guarantors to act as foster parents was well and truly established.