Last century’s flight from terror
Get The Children Out! Unsung Heroes of the Kindertransport By Mike Levy
Lemon Soul, £9.99
Reviewed by Robert Low
WE HAVE been here before: thousands of refugees are forced to flee their European homeland and clamour to come to Britain where charitable organisations and decent people offer them shelter, yet are faced with timid politicians and obstructive officials. It’s happening today with Ukrainians, and it happened 80-odd years ago with Jews fleeing from Hitler, most poignantly with the nearly 10,000 children of the Kindertransport.
Their story has been well documented over the years but it still retains the capacity to move and inspire. Numerically, the Kindertransport children were only a drop in the ocean of Jewish adults and children who weren’t so lucky, but there was still a huge amount of work involved in rescuing them. Some of the key figures, like Sir Nicholas Winton and Frank Foley, have become well known, but Mike Levy’s timely book focuses on the many other people who worked tirelessly for years to help save and then care for the children, and who have long been forgotten.
I am writing this near the street in Jerusalem’s German Colony named after Sir Wyndham (misspelt “Windham” in the street sign) Deedes, one of Levy’s unsung heroes. Devout Christian, passionate pro-Zionist, First World War Brigadier-General, and deputy to the British Mandate Palestine High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel before retiring to work with the poor in the East End, Deedes threw himself into the task of rescuing Jews from Germany in the 1930s, helping to set up various bodies including the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany. He worked so hard that his health suffered, as happened to several other leading lights in the rescue movement. You can’t ask for greater commitment than that.
Many of them were inspired by their religious beliefs. Bertha Bracey was a Quaker who in 1933 became Secretary of the Friends’ Germany Emergency Committee, which brought out hundreds of Jewish refugees. Alan Overton, a Rugby shopkeeper, was a Christadelphian who, says Levy, “galvanised the entire Christadelphian movement around Britain … to support Jewish refugees”. Henry Carter was a Methodist leader and advocate of reconciliation with the Jews. As Joint Chairman of the Central Office of Refugees, he negotiated relentlessly with the Government as well as setting up a refugee children’s hostel in Lancashire.
Other activists were inspired by the progressive beliefs that flourished in the era between the wars, such as Anna Essinger, a formidable German-born educationist who set up a school mainly for refugees in Bunce Court, a manor house in rural Kent, with strong artistic leanings: pupils included Frank Auerbach, Frank Marcus and Gerard Hoffnung. Given a week’s notice to quit because of fears of invasion, she found another large house in Shropshire and after signing the lease moved the whole establishment there within 48 hours. Such energy and resourcefulness were typical.
Others were just pressed into service but got stuck in, like Frank Bond, manager of Dovercourt Bay holiday camp near Harwich, where many of the first Kindertransport kids were housed in December 1938. He responded magnificently, organising education, entertainment and recreation for the disorientated youngsters, downplaying his role as “a labour of love”. It was indeed.
Mike Levy has produced a worthy memorial to a remarkable group of people.
Mike Levy’s book is a timely reminder of history’s forgotten rescuers