‘Into the arms of strangers’: child refugees of Nazi Germany remember
Hella was given the number 4672, and a small suitcase. She recalls saying farewell to her mother in Vienna, and her bewilderment, aged 11, on arriving at Liverpool Street station in London to an unknown future on 15 March 1939.
Alfred, aged six, remembers the tension and his parents’ fear, the Czech salami sandwiches his mother packed for him but that he didn’t touch during the 48-hour journey. He arrived in London in July 1939.
Hella Pick, a former Guardian foreign correspondent and diplomatic editor, and Lord Alf Dubs, the Labour peer and former MP, visited Berlin this week to mark the 85th anniversary of the Kindertransport, which rescued them as child refugees.
About 10,000 children, mostly Jewish and the majority from Germany, Austria and Czechslovakia, were brought to live with foster families in the UK to save them from the Nazis.
“The Kindertransport was a singular operation which saved over 10,000 children and allowed most of them, including me, to make very good lives,” Pick, 96, said.
The exhibition – titled I said, ‘Auf Wiedersehen’, which opens in the Bundestag, or German parliament, on Wednesday – draws on the emotions and experiences of the children, the parents they left behind, and the foster families who took them in.
The title also reflects Pick’s own disoriented slip of the tongue, saying “goodbye” to her new hosts on arrival “as it was the only English word I knew”, she said.
Lord Dubs, 91, who recalled the cheers of the older boys on his train as they left Nazi Germany behind them and crossed the border into the Netherlands, said the exhibition – focusing on a collection of letters and postcards exchanged between the children sent abroad, their parents and their foster families – was “a way of bringing the history of the Kindertransport to life” as well as “showing that there are ways of dealing with refugees, which Britain did, in taking 10,000 Kindertransport children, which other countries … wouldn’t do at the time. Therefore it shows what can be done when compassion and humanity determine the policy.”
The experience of being a child refugee has greatly shaped his own attempts to shape British immigration policy, especially in trying to increase acceptance of child refugees.
Both were extremely lucky, they admit. Not only to have escaped, but also that they were reunited with parents – in Pick’s case, her mother; in Dubs’s also his mother, who joined him in the UK shortly after his arrival, while his father died soon after.
The exhibition’s central exhibits are personal “commandments” or guidelines, written in a prayer book by Ferdinand Brann which he pressed into the hands of his daughter Ursula before she got on the train in Berlin in March 1939. Ferdinand was deported to Auschwitz and murdered. Ursula would never forget the loving words of advice, which have been reproduced on large placards in the entrance of the Bundestag, including: “Always be grateful to the government of the country you come to for giving you refuge. Be grateful to those who open their home and make it yours.”
Representing his grandmother, Ollie Gilbert from London said he was stunned to learn of her story and was
in the process of applying for a German passport in her memory.
“I never talked to her about it when she was alive. Now I’m piecing together aspects of her life and am really moved by all the detail, though I’ve still got a lot of letters to read,” he said.
A box of Ursula’s letters was discovered by chance in the family attic last summer by the exhibition’s curator, Ruth Ur, of the Friends of Yad Vashem in Berlin, the biggest such collection linked to the Kindertransport.
“It is a treasure trove,” she said. “The letters reflect what I found as soon as I started to engage with this subject and realised how dangerous and how desperate the situation must have been for parents to send their children into the arms of strangers,” she added. “Between the lines you realise the complexity of emotions they’re feeling.”
Most of the children would never see their parents again.
In total about 1.5 million Jewish children were murdered by the Nazis.
Pick talks of her experience shaping her whole life. “The journey of my life has been the constant search for escape from the feelings of insecurity as a refugee, which has never gone away. And from the moment I set foot in England, I was moving forward, not backwards, and that’s punctuated my life.”
The need to look forward is possibly why she cannot recall the 11 years of her Viennese childhood, she believes.
“I’ve always regretted that I didn’t go into analysis to see if I could recover some of the memories I’ve lost,” she said.
Delving deeper into the topic she has found some of what she calls the “ugly” details of the Kindertransport which have disturbed her – how children were often selected on the grounds of their physical and mental health, and how “bed-wetters” were automatically excluded.
“They did not want to bring in the children who somehow disturbed the social fabric of Britain,” Pick said.
The Kindertransport memorial at Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse railway station was recently attacked with anti-Israel graffiti, one of the many expressions of antisemitism to have reared up in Germany in particular since the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza.
“I think it’s almost inevitable that antisemitism will surface again under the present circumstances but it’s all the more important to remind people now of what this hatred can lead to,” said Pick.
Both say their Berlin visit has taken on even more significance due to these events, and due to the more recent fallout over the far-right populist AfD and revelations of its support for mass deportation plans.
Dubs said he was very relieved when he heard there had been demonstrations against the AfD all over Germany. “I was gratified by that. I hope that that will then work in terms of influencing public opinion in Germany. But it’s a good sign that people are demonstrating and saying this was not their sort of Germany.”
Dubs is hopeful that the German electorate will keep the AfD out of power. He is disturbed by much of what is happening in Europe, not least at home.
“Look at us in the UK,” he said. “I think we’ve got a long way to go because our policy on refugees under the present British government is abhorrent.”