... And the Policeman Smiled (26 page)

At first, having settled into the hostel, they would plan their spare time very carefully, studying serious books to improve their unfinished education, or taking up hobbies like stamp collecting. But circumstances were against them.

When they came home from work they had their dinner, then they sat around for a while, a little tired perhaps, talking of this and
that. Eventually one of them would make the effort and say, ‘Well, I have to go to my room now to get on with my reading.' But then his room mate would start talking about his day at work, his boss, the increase in wages he should have got but didn't. His friend goes downstairs again and finally sits in a quiet corner to start reading. It is now late and he is really tired and cannot take it in any more, so he puts the book down and says to himself: ‘Tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow I shall finish this chapter.' But the next evening is not very different – perhaps the discussion is on another subject but something is always going on. There is always the feeling of tiredness, and tired people need quiet so they can concentrate. But where can you find peace in a house full of young people? There is always noise! So after a while, even the efforts of this keen youngster to do some studying by himself come to an end and he becomes just like one of the others, one of the crowd, who just waste their valuable spare time …

In March 1939, a group of thirty boys from Frankfurt took over The Cedars, an eight-bedroomed former nursing home on the 6000-acre Waddesdon Estate of James de Rothschild. Nearly all the boys had started life in rural Germany but, to escape anti-Semitism, had been sent to Philanthropia, a Jewish school in Frankfurt. Here they stayed in a hostel run by Hugo and Lilli Steinhardt, which was attacked on
Kristallnacht
. A desperate letter of appeal from the Steinhardts to Lord Rothschild in London resulted in the handing over of The Cedars.

Among the other famous names who set up hostels for the
Kindertransporte
was Harry Jacobs, the head of Times Furnishing. He took in ten children up to five years old and guaranteed their upbringing and education to the age of eighteen. During the war he moved children to his home in Surrey, where a wing was converted into a nursery, and he engaged a cook and nurse and a maid to look after them. When he was called up, the children moved to Hemel Hempstead. Eva Minckes, now aged eighty-five and living in Israel, worked at the home. She was actually the real mother of one of the children, but was never allowed to say so – ‘to avoid sadness for the other children'.

Lord Sainsbury took twenty-five children, paid for their education and kept in touch with them afterwards. The Salmon family (Harry Salmon was chairman and Julius Salmon a director of J. Lyons), together with the Glucksteins, accommodated twenty-three
children in The Haven above Burton's Tailors on the Kentish Town Road in London. Peter Morgan remembers being taken out to lunch at the Trocadero and visiting Cadby Hall, the headquarters of J. Lyons.

Of the hostel he said:

It was new. It was magnificent. Everything was run almost on hotel lines. After all, they were hoteliers – they had the Strand Palace, the Regent Palace and the Cumberland. We lived a life of luxury, as I recall it today!

English names were adopted to speed up the process of assimilation. That was when Peter Morgenstern became Peter Morgan. To the same end, the clothes brought over from Germany were quietly removed.

‘On the train from Harwich to London our cases were taken away as our guarantors did not want us wearing funny clothes,' one girl remembers. ‘Even at the age of eight years old, I knew how much love had gone into that case …' Gifts of cuddly toys were no compensation. Peter Morgan had no complaints, however, and went on to work in the hotels and restaurants of the Lyons empire.

Among the non-Jewish organisations responsible for hostels, the Christadelphians were to the fore. With their faith rooted in Jewish law, the Christadelphians had a long-standing interest in co-operative ventures, contributing generously to attempts to re-establish the Jewish people in Palestine. When the exodus of children from Germany and Austria began, they were among the first to respond.

A refugee mother and her two teenage sons were the founder residents of one of the earliest Christadelphian hostels – Little Thorn, on the Bilton Road in Rugby. Here a small group of Jewish boys were given a home and were trained for careers in leather manufacture, cabinet-making, and engineering. The hostel also became a focal point for refugees to gather and socialise at weekends.

Also in the Midlands, Elpis Lodge (‘Abode of Hope') opened in April 1940 at 117 Gough Road, Edgbaston. Managed by Birmingham Jewry, the running of the hostel was funded by the Birmingham and Coventry Christadelphian Ecclesias. Dr Hirsch,
previously headmaster of a school in Frankfurt, and his wife were wardens of the hostel, which accommodated twenty teenaged boys.

The atmosphere of the hostel was orthodox. Aside from the practical aspects of caring for the young people, there was much talk of spiritual care and regeneration, so that the young men at Elpis Lodge would go out into the world ‘imbued and enlightened with the hope of a better future', and not embittered by the ill-treatment and injustice they had experienced. In the years up to 1945, forty-eight boys learnt woodwork, tailoring, engineering and many other trades, often carrying on the work traditional to their families.

Evidently there was some feeling that life at Elpis Lodge was too comfortable. A contributor to
The Christadelphian
of January 1941, set out to correct the impression:

A remark made at the opening of the Hostel has given rise to the suggestion that the Hostel is a somewhat luxurious place. It was referred to as a palace and the garden was likened to Eden. These are figures of speech and should not be taken literally. The house is old. So is the garden. The presence of an old cedar tree lends dignity to the garden and there is a rockery which has been beautiful and could be made so again. The house itself is very simple in design inside and out. There is nothing palatial about if and in its furnishing and equipment it resembles a hospital. Any suggestion of luxury is completely absent.

If comfort was at a premium in the average hostel, in the agricultural training centres it was entirely absent, often as a matter of deliberate policy.

Käthe Fischel, who was at the David Eder Farm in Kent throughout the harsh winter of 1939, remembers:

We were in barracks with no floors, just earth stamped down. We washed in jugs and ewers and the water was always frozen. We crawled into each other's beds for warmth. The food was terrible – no-one knew how to cook. A friend of mine, who afterwards married a well-known German journalist, was working in the kitchen. Potatoes were boiled and stood in huge buckets. Someone came in in Wellingtons and stood in a bucket and those potatoes were still served. They had huge packets of dates but they must have bought them cheaply because they were as dry as dust. They
looked like camel fodder, which perhaps is what they were supposed to be.

The centres were mostly run by
Youth Aliyah
, in cooperation with the RCM, but there was one notable exception where the RCM took all of the responsibility – and all of the blame.

Barham House, just outside Ipswich, on the Essex–Suffolk border, started life as an overspill camp for Dovercourt. It had accommodation for 200 boys.

There was no mistaking Barham House. Built as a Victorian workhouse, it had a grey, forbidding look which must have deterred all but the neediest applicants. Its defects were emphasised by its proximity to Shrubland Park, a splendid Palladian mansion with a long drive and imposing gatehouses, which first-time visitors sometimes mistook for the RCM building. They were soon put right.

According to the book of ‘daily happenings', life at Barham House was a model of domestic harmony.

We have a nursery of 18 boys aged nine and under. Most of these have short lessons in the morning. They are taken for walks, play games and are generally supervised by competent workers from the time they get up to the time they go to bed.

Boys ten to sixteen years of age have school all the morning … the basis of teaching is English and they are grouped in accordance with their knowledge of English.

Boys sixteen and upwards do field work all day. This is done under the supervision of a trained agriculturalist. At the moment they are preparing the ground for the reception of seeds in the early spring, and in the summer of next year we shall be more than self-supporting in potatoes, greens, beet, celery, etc.

With the exception of cooking, all the domestic work of the building is undertaken by children supervised by staff. The laundry, except for sheets and towels, is done by boys under the supervision of a washerwoman.

There is a tailor's shop, carpenter's shop and a bootmaker's shop, all run by boys under supervision. Special classes for carpentry and bookbinding are being commenced in the New Year under a trained teacher.

The camp was run by a staff dedicated to the belief that young people thrived on fresh air, early morning runs and cold showers.
Even assuming the truth of this, the experience of some of the inmates suggests that it was possible to have too much of a good thing.

Our headmaster, Mr Percival, fixed our windows so that they could not be shut at night. In that cold winter I got sciatica and one morning I couldn't move my legs.

That is what happened to Ernst Sicher. Others recall the plague of rats ('They tore away the bottoms from the boys' trousers and at night you could hear their squeaking very clearly') and the epidemic of scabies.

Two doctors, one from Vienna, the other from Berlin, were in daily attendance. But there were also cases of diphtheria and scarlet fever. This meant that all of us had to be kept in quarantine and with all the new cases, the quarantine was extended for weeks.

With the spring, there was a dramatic improvement in the quality of life. The damp retreated down the walls, the gardens came back to life and there was fresh food in the kitchen. But relations between the youngsters and their adult minders did not change for the better. A stream of complaints to Bloomsbury House led to the sacking of the more objectionable roughnecks. One of them made a farewell address:

Whoever's behind this can count himself lucky. If there was a war on, I'd shoot him.

The new regime consisted of a triumvirate of English Protestant, Irish Catholic and Jewish interests, with each representative chasing hard for jobs and foster homes for their charges. It was not an ideal arrangement, but it worked well enough for youngsters to feel that Barham House was on their side. In fact, the only serious problems at this stage involved children who did not want to leave the security of the one home they knew.

Two boys had such a strong resistance to leaving, they made themselves ill, one by eating a large portion of butter, the other, more drastically, by eating soap.

With the first days of the war came another change, a retrograde one this time, in the way Barham House was managed. By a mysterious logic which was lost on the majority, a retired military officer took command, demanding total obedience from all foreigners in the camp.

‘There's a war on now and all of you are in enemy territory,' he announced to a general assembly. ‘Whoever criticises my authority is criticising the government and will be interned.'

Once again, Bloomsbury House was inundated with complaints. The reaction was to try to speed up the reallocation of those remaining at Barham House (a process which was unintentionally assisted by the activation of the internment laws), to provide the best possible reason for closing the place down. The last residents moved out towards the end of 1940, leaving Barham House to be taken over by the army.

Youth Aliyah
would not have given up quite so easily. The concept of
aliyah
– immigration to Palestine to live on agricultural settlements – was a passionate ideal which took priority over all other considerations. The children were split into two age groups,
Youth Aliyah
for the fourteen to seventeen-year-olds and
Hechalutz
, the adult movement, for the rest. The younger children, who had completed nine years of school but who were not quite old enough to join the
Hechalutz
training programme, combined a half-day study syllabus with agricultural work.

Youth Aliyah
was opposed to the very principle of fostering refugee children. It was an article of faith which led to disputes with the RCM and lively discussions between Rebecca Sieffand her younger sister, Elaine Blond.

There were those like Becky who believed that hostels, with their minimal standard of comfort, were the best training for a hard pioneering life in Palestine. I think she had visions of a strict regime of early morning runs and cold showers. It was not my idea of a proper upbringing …

The appeal went out for the loan or gift of farms or country estates where
Youth Aliyah
children could live, learn and work collectively. If this was not possible, then they had to be placed as ‘hands' on conventional farms where they were close enough together to meet in the evenings with their
Madrichim
(group
counsellors) for cultural communion. A former worker at
Youth Aliyah's
London office argued:

While the RCM cared mostly for the children's physical wellbeing, we cared also for their values and gave them a purpose in life, a goal to work towards.

Contact between the various
Youth Aliyah
training centres was chiefly by newsletters published by the London office, but some groups brought out their own monthly bulletin with such exalted titles as
The Plough, Seeds
and
Our Life
. At first written in German and Hebrew, these publications soon turned to English.

Within
Youth Aliyah
there were several competing Zionist factions ranging from the strictly orthodox
Bachad
to the moderate
Maccabi Hazair
, the Zionist scout movement. All these groups were keen to add to their numbers, which could lead to problems when more than one faction was active in a locality. Still, for all its divisions,
Youth Aliyah
provided a sense of cultural identity and companionship which the RCM was not capable of offering.