... And the Policeman Smiled (5 page)

Greta, the daughter of a left-wing journalist, spent her childhood in Germany. When she married Charles Burkill, a Cambridge don, she brought to her adopted country a healthy distrust of conventional politics and an inextinguishable desire to help the victims of fascism. She was not Jewish, but from the mid 1930s on she sought out jobs in the university for Jewish boys who could not otherwise have got visas. A boy who was suffering at a German school because his father was in a concentration camp, she made one of her own family. He was followed by an Austrian boy who adopted the name of Burkill by deed poll. Not surprisingly, Cambridge was soon to become one of the most active centres of the child refugee movement.

The collapse of democracy in Austria did have one positive benefit. It stirred the conscience of the United States, and brought the administration to the point of asking if there was anything to
be done about the refugee problem beyond hoping that if it was ignored long enough it would go away.

In June 1938 President Roosevelt proposed a meeting of government representatives of all the countries of America and Europe except Germany. Recognising the tribulations of German and Austrian Jews the conference ‘would manifest before the non-European world the urgency of emigrations, chiefly to Palestine'. The British did not like the sound of that. Roosevelt was asked to narrow the scope of the conference by avoiding the subject of Palestine, and at the same time to widen it by considering the problems of all refugees, not just German Jews. He agreed.

The representatives of thirty-one countries assembled in the Hotel Royal at Evian on 6 July 1938. To everyone's surprise Jewish delegates from Berlin and Vienna were allowed to attend. They were joined by representatives of at least a hundred distressed minorities who split into thirty groups, each to choose a spokesman to address the conference – which was soon to be dubbed the ‘Modern Wailing Wall'.

That America seemed at last to be rediscovering her traditional friendship towards refugees inspired ‘extravagant and almost Messianic hopes', according to Norman Bentwich who was at Evian for the CBF. But Bentwich went on to report that the hopes faded with the succession of vague resolutions – a decision to appeal to the German government to set fair conditions for evacuation; the appointment of a committee to work out plans for group settlement overseas; and a refusal by all governments to accept financial responsibility for emigration.

‘The published outcome,' said Bentwich, ‘seemed a little flat, like the mineral water of Evian.' Someone remarked that Evian spelt backwards gave ‘naive'.

The only genuine encouragement was the American offer to cut the formalities on the entry of German refugees. By law, the upper limit on German immigrants was 30,000 a year, but throughout the 1930s this figure was never reached. So cumbersome was the bureaucracy (deliberately so) that only about half the quota got through. Now there was to be a genuine effort to achieve the maximum figure.

This much-heralded concession caused some worry in British government circles where the theory of appeasement held that any suggestion of a relaxation of the rules would simply encourage the
Germans to act more ruthlessly. As if to counterbalance American policy, the British government tightened up on immigration procedures. In April 1938, soon after the
Anschluss
, Central Europeans intending to come to Britain had to apply for visas, which meant a lengthy interrogation by a passport control officer attached to every embassy and consulate. This was thought to deter Austrians ‘who were largely of the shopkeeper and small trader class and would therefore prove very much more difficult to emigrate than the average German'.

Thereafter, every obstacle was put in the way of extending the work of the refugee organisations. Official pressure could not be exerted on the Germans (for fear of making matters worse), old prisoner-of-war camps could not be made available for refugees and numbers admitted into Britain could not be increased. With money going out faster than it was coming in, Otto Schiff asked to be released from his undertaking that Jewish refugees would not become a public charge. He was told that any exceptions needed individual approval by the Home Office.

The softly softly approach to the Nazis was the preliminary to the ‘peace in our time' Munich agreement and the tragic months of disillusionment when the German armies began the carve-up of Czechoslovakia. In October 1938 another wave of Jewish residents in Germany were deported back to Poland. Among them were the parents of seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, who was hiding out as an illegal immigrant in Paris. On 7 November, he entered the German embassy with the apparent intention of assassinating the ambassador. Instead, he shot the third secretary Ernst von Rath, who died two days later.

The Nazi leadership snapped at the opportunity to provoke another outbreak of anti-Semitism. A vicious tirade by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was the signal for party activists and stormtroopers throughout Germany to indulge in an orgy of destruction.

‘Late, late, my father came home – an old broken man –
because of what he had seen and could do nothing about.'

At around midnight the fires started. By morning 267 synagogues had been destroyed, thousands of Jewish shops and homes devastated, one hundred Jews murdered and many thousands arrested. This was
Kristallnacht
– the night of broken glass.

A Quaker observer reported back to London:

In some towns every private house was entered, in others this attack was partial. The usual procedure was to smash any articles of value with axes, and often everything breakable, down to the last tea-cup, was broken. The men were allowed to dress and were taken straight away, carrying nothing with them. In a number of cases I heard that the arrests were made courteously and with some expressions of regret. But often the treatment was rough. In Erfurt the men arrested were gathered in the hall of a school and there beaten before being taken off to the camp. In Chemnitz one man was shot dead in his own house and the rabbi was beaten and severely wounded while trying to save his sacred books from the synagogue fire. A number of men escaped arrest by flight or absence from home; these were in hiding, in some cases in Christian homes … In some cases in Dresden the wives were arrested and held as hostages until their husbands gave themselves up.

At both Buchenwald, where 10,000 Jews had been collected, and at Dachau, where there were 12,000, conditions were very bad and by the end of the month some had already died in these camps. From Buchenwald some came out wounded, with torn clothing … In Plauen I found only three men had come back and all were
in bed, seriously ill. I saw one, but he could hardly speak … Every day at Weimar station a group of Jewish women (led by the widow of a former rabbi of Erfurt) met the released men, with whatever supplies of clean socks, handkerchiefs, etc. they could get together, gave them coffee, and tried to clean them up a little before they proceeded by various trains to their homes. In the Erfurt area all the men released had to sign a paper undertaking to be out of Germany within three weeks, under penalty of reinternment.

Helga Kreiner, now Helga Samuel, was just eleven at the time of
Kristallnacht:

One night is especially vivid in my memory – when we heard the Nazi boots tramping along the street, stopping at the main front door of the block of flats where we lived, banging on the door – and my mother hurriedly put out all the lights in our flat and hid with us in the corner of a bedroom, having to be quiet as mice … The boots tramped up the stairs, gruff voices, while our hearts beat faster and faster, the boots still tramping, halting for a moment's agonising silence outside our front door, and then going up the next flight to the flat above … We heard the next morning that the gentleman who lived there, also a Jew, had been arrested. This time, they had passed us by.

I remember being very frightened at having to hide and having to be so quiet, sensing my mother's fear. But really I was too young to appreciate the significance of the whole situation. This didn't really strike true, until the day my father was arrested on the street, on his way home from the barber around the corner, taken to police headquarters and from there to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. I had gone that day to play with a schoolfriend and had not accompanied my father, as was my usual custom, as I enjoyed sitting in the barber's looking at the magazines. My mother always said afterwards that I was my father's lucky mascot, his protection, until this terrible day. When my father did not return after a couple of hours my mother, fearing the worst, rang the police station and was told that he was being held in custody. For what?

This went on for several days, until she received a printed card signed by my father (address Buchenwald), asking for strong boots and warm underclothing. (These, we learned afterwards, he never received … ) I did not see my father again until several months after I had arrived in England.

Lorraine Allard, then Sulzbacher, lived in Fürth in Bavaria, a town with a sizeable Jewish population. Her parents, both with solid roots in the prosperous middle class, thought of themselves as Germans first and Jews second. Until Hitler's arrival. On
Kirstallnacht:

I remember being woken up at 1 a.m. Two Brownshirts were running about in our flat. My mother was crying. We were told to dress. I remember walking to a square in the town and being assembled there with lots and lots of people we knew. Many were crying. People had come from the hospital, old people. It was pandemonium. It was very frightening. It was very cold and dark. They were beating the rabbi from our town and they made him jump on the Torahs which they fetched from the synagogue.

We were there for what seemed like an awful long time and then we were taken to a theatre. We were told to sit down, men at the front by the stage and women and children at the back. We were there, I think, from daybreak. During all this time they called up men onto the stage and made them perform like animals. They had to jump over tables, over chairs. All kinds of things to make them feel silly, and if they couldn't do it they beat them. We were sitting there like at a performance. The women and children were sent home in the early afternoon. We hadn't had anything to eat or drink. My father came home long after supper, at about 9 o'clock. He was over sixty so they had released him. The men under sixty all went to Dachau. We were lucky because we were together again.

In every town, small or large, it was the same. Fourteen-year-old Ester Friedman lived in Vienna.

My father had left early to go to the American embassy – one of many, many times – to see if there would be a possibility to get a visa to go to the States and leave Vienna. We were anxious, the atmosphere up and down the road was electric; we did not know why but a feeling of fear pervaded the air. I stood by the window – no sight of my father – but then it happened: a crowd of brown-clad SA men, with the fearful swastika arm band on their sleeves, marched down the road. I leant out further. They entered the old people's home of the Jewish community. The windows opened and out flew books. The doors opened and out came the old people, being pushed and pulled by their beards as they could not walk quickly enough for the hordes of brown youths. When they had congregated in a heap of old decrepit flesh, they were made to
watch their precious prayer books burn. And I watched. Buckets were brought and the ashes had to be shovelled by the old men and women. The youths and the crowds laughed at the sight. Water was brought and brushes and rags, and the old people were made to kneel and scrub the pavement. Beards were pulled until blood flowed, old women fainted – or died – I don't know. And I saw. I smelled smoke. I turned my head and looked up the road. Our synagogue was burning – bright and high the flames roared – but I heard no fire engines.

Late, late, my father came home – an old broken man, because of what he had seen and could do nothing about. He did not look Jewish and got away.

Once the most tolerant of cities, Berlin had its share of violence and wanton destruction. Leslie Brent, who was enjoying education of a sort in a Jewish orphanage, believed that he escaped lightly:

A mob stormed the orphanage and broke through the gates. There was a great
mêlée
with some of the older boys trying to keep the gate intact. Eventually it was broken into and the older boys just melted into the crowd and didn't come to any harm. A good friend of mine, Fred, and I were terrified and we rushed up into the highest part of the building, which was the loft under the roof, and hid amongst the rafters there until the whole thing was over. I learnt afterwards that the mob had ransacked the basement and the ground floor including the orphanage synagogue and were just moving up a rather grand staircase when a teacher (Heinz Nadel) met them with a small boy in his arms and said to them very calmly: ‘This is an orphanage, we look after children here. Would you please leave the building.' And they did. One of those miracles.

After the crowd had gone we reassembled and had strawberries and cream in the garden, so strawberries and cream have always had a rather special significance for me, as you can imagine.

Even out-of-the-way places did not escape the attention of the stormtroopers, as Philip Urbach can testify:

When we came back that night from Leipzig, the police were waiting for us at home in the village and took us into what they called protective custody – the whole family – which meant in fact the local prison, in a cell – my first experience of prison. They kept us there just for twenty-four hours. Not very long. But on returning home, the police called again, this time accompanied by the Gestapo,
or the SA or whatever, I forget now. And my father was taken away into a concentration camp.

After
Kristallnacht
, families were without a breadwinner. Youngsters had to make their own way, scraping a living as best they could. Clive Milton lived in Hanover: