... And the Policeman Smiled (24 page)

The mood soon passed. Refugee children had proved their ability to adapt. Once they found their bearings some of them even discovered a few side-benefits to internment:

Apart from the daily roll-call, we were left entirely to our own devices. These were in some ways quite remarkable. The number of professional men, artists and intellectuals among the inmates was disproportionate and soon made itself felt. For me this became a time of intellectual awakening, or rather re-awakening.

Walter Friedman, who was running a hostel in London and who himself just managed to avoid internment, points out:

Surprisingly enough the life behind barbed wire, with all the inherent disadvantages, was not too bad for the young people … They had to learn to live together with people whom fate had thrown together and who came from a great variety of backgrounds. However, there were adults, Jewish refugees belonging to all classes of society. Many of the young people found contact again with congenial older people, such as they had no chance to meet since they arrived in this country …

In almost all of the internment camps lectures and school classes were held. Youngsters who had hitherto been isolated on farms and factories could now take part in informed discussion on a wide variety of subjects. Politics was a favourite topic.

Fred Dunston remembers a particularly heated discussion:

A very interesting man called some of the younger ones together and asked each in turn how they visualised their own personal future after the war. There were some convinced Communists and Socialists, who thought that they would like to return to Austria or Germany. There were quite a number of Zionists, who were
hoping to go to a kibbutz in Palestine. Some of the people said they would like to stay on in England. I said I did not know, as the future was too uncertain. Then the man said: ‘Supposing there is a huge earthquake and the whole of Palestine becomes submerged in the Mediterranean Sea, so that it no longer exists. What would you do then?' Pandemonium ensued. ‘It is not possible! It can't happen! You cannot make such ridiculous assumptions!' The point the man intended to make was obviously missed and the meeting broke up without any conclusion being reached.

Visiting the Isle of Man for the RCM in November 1940, William Simpson was impressed with the efforts being made to give youngsters an education, though he was anxious that an ‘English' influence should be maintained. Often, all education was conducted by the internees themselves – English lessons being given by people who had been in this country for a number of years. At Onchan:

The camp university has an average of thirty courses running each day, with some 600 internees out of a total of 1200 in the camp attending. Up to 19 October, the total number of classes, lectures, tutorials, etc., was 3900 and the total attendance over the same period numbered 78,000.

There was also a youth college offering farming, commercial, technical and general courses. In the technical section both elementary and advanced training is given, while in the general section students are prepared for the matriculation exam.

The number of boys in the camp between sixteen and twenty-one years of age was 231 at the time of my visit and the average attendance at the school was about 100. About fifty of the boys were unable to attend, so I was told, because it was necessary for them to work in order to earn pocket money.

The college is housed in a quite small house without proper blackout arrangements and without furniture. Students are urged to bring their own chairs and the roughest of desks have been knocked together from rough boards. These desks are quite useless for lessons in machine drawing, etc. There was also difficulty about heating the school, since the Island authorities would only allow coal for dwelling houses, and therefore would not make any allowance for a house used entirely for cultural purposes.

Reporting on a common complaint, Mr Simpson noted a serious shortage of football boots.

Billeting arrangements were subject to strain. The promised allowance to cover extra heating and lighting was not forthcoming, and as the days lengthened and winter approached there was understandable bad feeling between landladies and their reluctant lodgers. Mr Simpson spoke of the unaccustomed burden the landladies were having to carry and stressed the need for ‘good public relations work'.

But ex-internees remember well the monotony of the boarding house diet:

Herrings three times a week. We did our best to ring the changes; baked, boiled, fried, even as roll-mops, but in the end imagination failed us and we tipped a whole day's supply down the drains. We got away with it. Other houses tried it too and got found out because the drains blocked up.

(Lewis Erlanger – copyright reserved.)

Ya'acov Friedler was interned in the women's camp at Port Erin with his sister, who had asked for him and his brother to join her there. He remembers a culinary repertoire consisting of kippers alternating with macaroni in tomato sauce. Internees did the work of chambermaids and waited at table:

It was not of course our business to worry about the hotel owners' finances, but the fact that we were not wholly a burden on them did give us a better feeling. I cannot recall an instance of any of the owners recriminating with their long-staying, if involuntary, guests.

However, emotional tension did occur in the camp on another front:

… the hotel next to us housed true enemy aliens, several dozen German women who in 1940 were still openly flouting their support for the victorious Nazis.

In their wisdom the authorities boarded next to each other a group of women who were self-confessed Nazis and another who were refugees from Nazism and opposed to it with all their hearts …

Our next door neighbours thus wore a permanent smirk as long as Hitler was gaining his easy victories in Europe. Sometimes they would make a show of greeting each other with the raised arm Nazi
salute when they saw one of us in the offing. While we ground our teeth and prayed for the Allies, they strutted along the seafront, their heads held high. Needless to say, none of them were Jewish.

The women in the camp made Ya'acov and his brother Solly the focus of their affections:

Though Solly and I had been separated from our mother for a long time, we got all the mother love boys could take from the enemy aliens of Port Erin. They diverted to us all their pent-up affections, expanded by their idleness and sharpened by their sexual frustrations. After having been motherless for so long we now found ourselves mothered with a vengeance. We were hugged and fondled, kissed and stroked. Many was the embrace we didn't manage to wriggle out of that would have been better appreciated by older males. We brushed them off as a nuisance.

For some Movement children, the hardship of internment was compounded by plans to ship ‘enemy aliens' to Canada and Australia. At a cabinet meeting on 24 May 1940, Churchill stated in an aside that he was ‘strongly in favour of removing all internees out of the United Kingdom'. In June, Canada volunteered to take 6000 to 7000 and Australia 10,000 prisoners of war and dangerous internees. Lumped together, these two groups were no more than 4000 strong. By no stretch of the imagination could the majority of internees be described as ‘dangerous'. Nonetheless, it was decided to make up the numbers with category B and C refugees.

In early June, the RCM was summarily informed that the
Duchess of York
with 2600 passengers, including a handful of teenagers from Huyton, was on its way to Canada. At the end of the month, the
Arandora Star
, once advertised as ‘the world's most delightful cruising liner', set sail with nearly 1200 internees and 200 British troops to guard them.

The ship, carrying two and a half times its normal load of passengers, was sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland at 6 a.m. on 2 July 1940. Amongst those who lost their lives were 143 Germans and Austrians and 470 Italians, but the total number of casualties, which included members of the crew and some British troops, was not revealed.

The only message survivors were permitted to send, a postcard with the words ‘I am safe', puzzled the recipients, who knew
nothing about the deportations. Distracted relatives, not knowing whether their menfolk were interned in this country, interned in Canada or drowned, were directed by the Home Office to the War Office and from there to the Admiralty, who sent them back to the War Office. Such was the official secrecy, or confusion, that it took several weeks to confirm that no RCM boys were among the casualties.

Despite the tragedy, the deportation continued. The
Dunera
, an 11,000 ton former troopship, bound for Australia, set sail on 10 July. It carried 2543 men, of whom 2100 were category C aliens, refugees from the RCM and
Youth Aliyah
were on board. Alfred Cooper was among them:

I was on the
Arandora Star
first but that got torpedoed. I don't really remember much – it was early in the morning. I don't know how I got out because I can't swim. A naval destroyer picked us up. There weren't many Jewish people on the
Arandora Star
, it was mostly Italians and political refugees.

Then we went on the
Dunera
, about a week after being torpedoed. They didn't tell me that I was going to Australia, they just put me on the boat in Liverpool and off we went. We had trouble on the
Dunera
… the guards used to urinate in the porridge; we all had dysentery. I think five people died. It was so crowded that some people used to sleep in hammocks and some on the mess tables. There were no proper toilets on the ship – there was one long board with different holes and water flushed through all the time and of course that made the dysentery worse …

We were kept down below all the time but once a day they used to take us for a walk. We were behind barbed wire … I saw Table Mountain at Cape Town – everyone was allowed a minute at the porthole. We were not allowed off the boat until Australia.

The man in charge of the men who guarded us was Captain O'Neill. He had the VC from the First World War. He used to rob the rich Jews. I saw him do it myself. When I first got on the boat the first thing I saw was a lot of suitcases opened. They used to beat us and tell us to hurry up and they would rip open the suitcases with their bayonets. Everybody made a claim when they got off the boat. My brother made a claim and the War Office repaid him for everything he had lost.

The
Dunera
was very bad. There were suicides. One of them walked in front of me and just jumped overboard. And one got killed in a fight over a hammock.

Conditions were no better, and possibly worse, on the
Ettrick
which made for Canada with 220 RCM boys on board.

We were herded together in the bows of the ship in a three-tiered space with a shaft in the centre. The three tiers were connected by companion ways – the top tier was at about sea level. Most of the space was taken up by dining tables, benches, the shaft and the companion ways. At the top level, over 500 people lived and slept for twelve days and nights.

In the event of an emergency the only way out for the internees on the lower tiers would have been the companion way and from there to the lower deck, but at the top of the companion way there was a barbed wire barrier which left a space of some four feet for passage during the day but was entirely closed and under military guard during the night. To reach the upper deck and the lifeboats we would have had to get through another barbed wire barrier and two further companion ways, which were always heavily guarded, while the doors at the top of the companion way were kept locked.

The only supply of air came through the ventilating pipes which ran through the body of the ship.

Not enough hammocks and blankets were issued to the internees; people slept on the dining tables, on the benches, on the floor, on the companion way, literally on top of each other.

For two days we were not allowed to emerge, for we were not to see any part of the Scottish or Irish coast. After that, congestion was relieved during the daytime by two-hourly shifts of half the complement on deck. There were two inadequate meals a day, one at 8 a.m. and one at 6 p.m.

Many people were seasick almost the whole time and a few buckets were allotted to them and put down among the people who had to lie on the floor at night. During the second night a sudden epidemic of diarrhoea broke out. The gangway leading to the lavatories was closed by barbed wire and, as the guards refused to open them even in an emergency, people had to relieve themselves wherever they stood or happened to be. This situation was repeated during the following night and the prisoners were finally granted another few buckets, for which there was hardly any room left on the floors where people were lying.

After their arrival in the Canadian camp all the refugees' belongings were taken away by NCOs and privates. They were told that everything would be returned the next morning. However, when two days later the luggage and confiscated goods were returned, it was discovered that money and such things as watches, pens,
lighters had disappeared. While the luggage was laid out for examination and collection, the thieving continued.

The
Dunera
almost shared the fate of the
Arandora Star
. Early in its voyage it was grazed by a torpedo, but thereafter she avoided the attention of the German U-boats, docking at Melbourne Bay on 3 September, where some of the
Arandora Star
survivors disembarked. The others continued to Sydney, where they were taken to an internment camp at Hay, three miles up the railway on the Murrumbidgee river. For Alfred Cooper, as for his fellow passengers, journey's end came as a welcome relief:

The only trouble was the flies. It was very hot. I used to hang the washing out and by the time you had put the last bit out the first bit was dry. We had everything there. Football teams, lectures, good entertainment. The guards were very good to us. The commandant used to give us virtually everything we wanted. There were two camps opposite to each other. At the beginning we were all together, but then some wanted kosher food so they went off to the other camp.