... And the Policeman Smiled (22 page)

Because the hostel wasn't ready by the time the first batch of children arrived, we had to take them into our homes. My husband brought me two girls. He said he had noticed that the male members of the committee were choosing the prettiest, so he decided to go for two not-so-pretty girls. I suddenly had twins – two Hannahs. Our hearts went out to these children. One of them, Hannah Freulich (she was a plump little thing), had a letter inside her attache case with a big box of talcum powder from her mother. The letter said: ‘Please look after my little girl. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Bath her every night and use this powder; she is used to it.' So I did.

Meanwhile, we were getting the hostel ready. We didn't want it to be a grim place, we wanted it to be as near to home for those children as we could get. One lady said she was due to have a new dining room carpet and as soon as it came we could have the old one which was still quite good. The committee called on her and asked her when she expected her new carpet and she said in two weeks. And in front of her astonished eyes they rolled up her carpet.

The Schlesingers already had five children including one, John, who was destined to become a leading film director. Bernard Schlesinger was senior physician at the great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, his wife, Winifred, a gifted musician and linguist. With their sympathetic, open-minded attitudes to young people, they came closest to the RCM ideal for a foster family. The hostel was a large house in Highgate which the Schlesingers bought with money left by a relative. A matron was installed, and three helpers, one of whom did the cooking. There was room for twelve children. One of them remembers:

Mrs Schlesinger was at Liverpool Street to meet us all and we were very impressed that she spoke very fluent German. We were taken straight to Highgate. We were well received, well looked after, wanted for nothing; we were extremely lucky. There were five boys and seven girls in the group; we got on very well. We were enrolled in the local school, where we shared a classroom with the top form who were probably thirteen or so. We must have seemed a lot of oddballs – probably dressed a bit funny, and so on. We had more or less individual teaching, but I don't quite know how they managed to teach the English children at the same time in the same room. It couldn't have been easy. I think they involved those children in helping to teach us. We were only there for one term but we did a lot of reading, we learnt our tables – pounds, shillings and pence – by reciting in chorus: quite old-fashioned but most effective. In no time at all we knew that thirty-six pence were three shillings and the rest of it. It was also assumed that we hadn't had prior schooling, which of course wasn't true. This went so far that we were taught to write in copperplate copybooks. It completely changed our writing style – we learnt again as if we were five-year-olds.

There was one more refugee helped by the Schlesingers. As a relative, Dick Levy went to stay in the family home.

On 16 March 1939 I arrived in London, excited and bewildered. I met Uncle Bernard and Auntie Win and was taken to 15 Templewood Avenue. This was to be my new home and at nine-years-old I perceived that a great change in my life had occurred.

Soon I shed my German language and customs and adopted those of my new home. Auntie Win and Uncle Bernard became Mummy and Daddy. They gave me the same love and affection and discipline that they gave their own children. I was part of the family.

As the war approached, the spacious Templewood Avenue house was exchanged for the more intimate Mount Pleasant near Kintbury. When war broke out Bernard had to go with the army, first to Norway and later to India. For the next six years it was Win who held the family together, making those years – so tragic for so many millions – happy and busy ones for us children at Mount Pleasant. During the holidays we rode horses and bicycles, made music and put on shows, played in the house and, when it became too crowded, in pigsties converted into ‘offices'. Win never let us perceive how incredibly difficult it must have been for her to cope with six growing children, with a house often bursting with visitors and with all the uncertainties brought on by the war, while Bernard was at the other end of the world.

When the war ended and Bernard returned there was a big party in the country. It says much for the tolerance and humanity of the family that among the guests was a group of German POWs.

The extended family of the Schlesingers kept in touch over the years. Other foster children with happy memories did the same, though distance and new relationships combined to make contact sporadic.

Ya'acov Friedler returned from Israel to visit the Maggs family after a gap of fifty years. Siegmar Silber corresponded in the 1970s with the family he had stayed with before leaving at the age of eleven to join relatives in the States. There was so much news to exchange – careers followed, children born, marriages made. Edith Taylor's story is one of the most extraordinary. Four years after her husband died she returned from the United
States to marry her foster father, Mr Taylor, who was then a widower:

… because I had promised Mrs Taylor I would look after him. She had said jokingly: ‘You are the only one who knows how to make chopped liver as he likes it.' She had taught me, you see, and she wanted him taken care of. We had not quite twenty years together.

‘One of our girls was reported for sketching a village green
(an unlikely military target) and a boy who was overheard
describing his home in Vienna was branded as a spy, though
presumably not a very intelligent one.'

In the back rooms of Whitehall, where they worked on the knotty problem of what to do in a national emergency, there was a file on the likely effects of German air attacks on London. It started with the assumption that 100,000 bombs would fall on the capital within fourteen days of the declaration of war. Enormous casualties were anticipated. The partial remedy, for no one could think of exhaustive response, was to clear London and other big cities of children aged under fifteen, the sick and the handicapped: all those who were of more hindrance than help to the defence effort.

At the time of the Czechoslovakian crisis on Monday 28 September 1938, there was a temporary evacuation of schoolchildren and hospital patients from London. Just short of a year later, on 1 September 1939, came the real thing. Among the million and a half dispatched from urban Britain into the countryside were between two to three thousand refugee children who were experiencing their second dramatic upheaval within months. Fourteen hostels were evacuated
en masse
.

At the start of the operation, children went every day to school equipped with gas masks in cardboard boxes and carrying a small case ready packed – no one knew which day they would actually be leaving and the destination was secret. When the day finally came, each child was tagged with a number for identification. Iron rations were issued for the train or bus journey. Some children
had last-minute treats of ice cream and sweets which made them very sick. Weeping parents bade goodbye to their offspring. It was almost a rerun of experience in Germany and Austria.

At the reception centres children were billeted by haphazard allotment or by ‘cattle market' selection. They were paraded around while householders took their pick, a routine familiar to refugee children who had passed through Dovercourt. Many families had children forced on them by billeting officers. Local authorities appointed volunteers to go from door to door to see who had room and who didn't; those on the receiving end had no choice in the matter.

No child could be expected to enjoy the experience, but for refugee children there were several factors which made evacuation more than typically painful. Even those who had arrived in early 1939 or before did not as yet have complete command of English and this made communication with their new and sometimes reluctant hosts difficult. In rural areas the heavy regional accents added to the problem.

Some refugee children underwent, for the second time, a fall in living standards from those they had been used to in Europe, which added to the depression they were already feeling as the threat of invasion increased.

As Dorothy Hardisty wrote in her journal:

… children were quickly moved by the authorities, sometimes with their foster parents or hosts, sometimes with children of the homes they had just entered, sometimes as individuals. It was right that they should receive just the same treatment as British children, but suddenly they were bereft of all sense of security. These blows had been preceded by long periods of unhappiness and fear – they had seen persecution of their relatives; they knew of men and boys being taken away from their homes; they had heard of the dread concentration camps; they had suffered humiliation and deprivation educationally. It was not surprising therefore that some children found it hard to settle initially. Even for some of those that did settle well, evacuation was a catastrophe.

The worst sufferers were those children who were placed in remote places where strangers were automatically suspect. Magda Chadwick, born in 1928, experienced this thinly veiled hostility:

Being evacuated away from my guardians, the Morts, was the most terrible incident in my life. Having only a smattering of English, I went to the Lake District near Grange-over-Sands (Cartmel). We went to the village hall and you stood there and people came and chose you. If your face fitted. They let brothers and sisters stay together and I stood with two sisters who were very kind to me. They asked if we were a family and I said, ‘No, but I would like to be with them.' So the two girls went to a couple of spinsters, who said that the farm next door needed a girl. But they got me there to be a housemaid. They asked me to wash the kitchen floor. I said I had never done it and I wasn't going to start.

I lived in the farmhouse. The country wasn't my style. I am a town person. There were no mod cons. The two sisters had a croquet lawn at their place – it was luck of the draw.
I
had to deliver the milk. In the dark, carrying two milk cans, I walked right into the wall because there was no light and I didn't know where I was going.

For Margaret Olmer, born in Vienna in 1931, despite forebodings at Liverpool Street, rural life in Norfolk proved congenial and, perhaps because she had already had to learn to adapt, she settled in more quickly than the daughter of her host family who was evacuated with her. She loved the countryside, the dogs and the local school.

In the Blitz she returned to London and then was sent to the Midlands, until the Jewish Committee returned her to a Jewish environment in 1945:

This life of moving on and readjusting made me detached. I could easily keep starting again – I have had four children with five-year gaps in between.

In many cases ‘the religious question' was exacerbated by evacuation. Refugee children naturally gravitated towards people showing them kindness, and were thus susceptible to proselytisation by their Gentile hosts. Desperate to ‘belong', many Jewish children were happy to attend church or chapel with their hosts, even if there was a synagogue in the vicinity. This was especially so in the Midlands, where there was a high concentration of Quaker and Christadelphian families.

Very little explanatory information was given to householders who received refugees. The local RCM committees followed up
in the wake of evacuation, but this was too late for orthodox children arriving at their billets on the evening of Friday, 1 September. Householders unaware of Sabbath conventions caused much discomfort to their young guests until they became better informed about Jewish religious observances. Orthodox pupils of the Jewish secondary school were greeted on arrival at Shefford with a welcoming ham omelette. With their lack of English they were unable to explain why they chose to go hungry rather than eat such a choice dish.

Throughout the autumn, a period of successive Jewish holidays, the Anglo-Jewish press reported a general absence of kosher food in reception areas. Some communities provided a communal hot kosher meal at noon for Jewish children, who had to make do with cold vegetables and bread for breakfast and dinner. The Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, suggested that this should be a general measure, but few local authorities saw the need to exert themselves.

The happiest results came when householders gave their evacuees time to settle in and made some attempt to understand their cultural differences. One such family took in two sisters:

We said please take us because nobody wants us. So they went to the kitchen and discussed us and their hearts melted and that's how they took us both. It was a wonderful thing to do because they had no idea about the Jewish problem and all their family were wondering about them taking Germans. But that didn't last very long. While we were there we spent a very happy Christmas with her parents on a farm in Hertford and after the war, when my relatives came over from Holland on a visit, they met my uncle.

Kurt Weinburg's evacuation began disastrously but, thanks to his headmaster (who had already proved his sensitivity by introducing Kurt on his first day to the only other Jewish boy in the school), it turned out better than he expected:

… I just assembled with all the other children at the school and we walked to the station and then went to Burgess Hill. We were billeted with various families and I remember the first family I was sent to didn't want to take me because I came from Germany. So whoever was in charge of billeting took me next door to the home of Mr Crombie. He was my headmaster who was about to open
the school in Cornwall. As I had no family and certainly no money, he took me with the school servant, two dogs and one other boy in his old Morris from Burgess Hill to London, and then we drove early in the morning from London all the way to Cornwall. I became a boarder and Mr Crombie gave me free schooling until I did matriculation in 1942.