... And the Policeman Smiled (27 page)

Yoash Kahn, who has taught in England for many years but who also has strong links with education in Israel, recalls his hostel days with affection, even if he did have problems adjusting to the regime.

At first I had difficulty settling down – I was a pain in the neck. I went to one of the three hostels in Devon – Exmouth (which closed), Teignmouth and Dawlish, which were run by a Jewish youth movement called
Habonim
, a socialist Zionist movement leading to Kibbutz life. They were keen to further the aims of the movement. They were very democratic, in that there was a general meeting and committees to make all the decisions.

The warden, the matron and the staff were not all that much older than we were. They were mostly
chalutzim
(potential kibbutzniks) who had been on their way to Israel but were stopped by the war. They came with no training; all they had was ordinary common sense. But somehow it worked. We had rotas for all the usual domestic chores – sweeping, peeling potatoes, darning socks …

In the early days Yoash was a natural rebel, refusing to make his bed with a proper hospital corner, throwing the blue collection box for the Jewish National Fund at a fellow student, and taking up almost permanent occupancy of the bed-wetters room.

I remember particularly, because it was an extreme measure, that they persuaded the general meeting to send me to Coventry. They were doing their best, but they couldn't see that ignoring me would just aggravate the problem …

Yoash ran away and was returned to the hostel. With time he began to settle and his school work improved:

They managed to get me into Teignmouth Grammar. The
Batim
(the Hebrew generic name for hostels) had a large number of pupils in this school and in my form there were about thirteen or fourteen of us out of thirty pupils. The competition was ferocious. Our form marks were calculated to a second decimal place in order to sort us out. Finally, in my last exams, I came top in the class. It all turned out for the good. There was a change of leadership at the hostel; I don't know whether they left all together or one by one, but with the second generation of leaders I established a good relationship and things went well.

Yoash became an ardent flag carrier for
Habonim
.

By the beginning of the war, there were around twenty
Hachshara
centres in Britain. The best known was Whittingham House, twenty miles from Edinburgh, described by an admiring nonresident as ‘a little Jerusalem in Britain's green and pleasant land'. Once the home of Lord Balfour, it was offered by his son, Viscount Taprain, for the training of 200 children in agriculture, horticulture and forestry. Children from
Youth Aliyah
and the RCM were housed there.

Almost immediately, there was a conflict of values between
Youth Aliyah
and the presbyterian governors. The school matron, herself a refugee, acted as an intermediary:

There was, for instance, the question of pooling all the pocket money, decided on at one of the school meetings. That smacked too much of communism to please the Edinburgh businessmen. Or – of less importance – I ordered cake for Sabbath breakfast. ‘Cake for breakfast?' It seemed awful to the Edinburgh people (including the baker). But it came punctually every Friday.

Well-meaning sponsors in London could be no less insensitive:

I hardly believed my eyes when I unpacked some sample clothes for the children – they were all khaki-coloured. So I sat down and wrote in my best (not very good) English that design and quality of the garments were excellent, but that I could not ask continental children to wear brown uniforms after their experiences with the Brownshirts …

Teachers were in short supply and those who did volunteer were naturally steeped in the Scottish tradition of education.

… For some, these foreign children were as strange as beings from another world. They had never seen such a lack of conformity, which resulted from the fact that they not only came from very varied social backgrounds and every part of middle Europe, but also had not undergone the levelling training of a British school.

The attempt by the first headmaster to run Whittingham as a Jewish Eton was not appreciated by the children. Erich Duchinsky, a
Youth Aliyah
worker, led the campaign to have him removed.

He had no understanding – a very old man with no idea of what it was all about. I persuaded the Whittingham committee he should go.

One of the younger teachers took over. Nonetheless, an inquiry by
Youth Aliyah
in the autumn of 1940 revealed a persistently unsatisfactory state of affairs. It was understandable that most of the staff had no previous experience with Jewish children, but there seemed to be little effort to make contact. Lessons took up only two hours a day and the farm work was badly organised. But the faults were not all on one side:

There was laziness and indifference amongst the children, especially in the first year of their stay, most probably aggravated by long times spent waiting in reception camps with hardly any work or tuition or leadership. So it was not a rare sight to see a group of boys playing football when they should have been in class learning English or arithmetic – there was much less absenteeism from practical work.

Two new teachers were engaged and six
Madrichim
drafted in to inspire greater devotion to Zionism. Nonetheless, the lack of
cohesive leadership took its toll, and by late 1939 thirty of the original 166 students had reneged on their undertaking to emigrate to Palestine. By 1941, places at Whittingham were left vacant by departing eighteen-year-olds. A year later, the school closed. Those children remaining went to Dalton House near Edinburgh.

Despite the high praise lavished on Whittingham by Norman Bentwich, among others (he called it ‘the most romantic of the agricultural centres'), it was hardly a success story either for
Youth Aliyah
or the RCM.

Conditions were just as tough at Great Engeham Farm in Kent. Handed over in 1939 by its owners in response to an advertisement in
The Times, Youth Aliyah
decided to use it as a transit camp for refugee children who were waiting for permanent
hachshara
. The farm itself housed twenty-five Czechoslovaks who were part of the overspill from Whittingham. The RCM placed fifty children, the agricultural committee of the Council for German Jewry another thirty, and the Women's Appeal Committee sent a small group of Polish children. They were all sent to work on neighbouring farms where pickers were in great demand. Out of season they helped build up local defences by filling sandbags.

Fred Duns ton (Fritz Deutsch), a
Youth Aliyah
worker and former Scout leader from Vienna, was drafted in as an organiser of the transit camp, which was to be built on a large meadow across the road from the training centre at Great Engeham Farm:

Transports to this camp started to arrive at the end of June 1939. The last one arrived one day before the outbreak of war, bringing the number of children at the camp up to about 300. Although they were not to stay at the camp very long about 60 were still there at the beginning of December. As these transports had been put together in a great hurry, quite a number of children were included, who did not belong to the
Youth Aliyah
at all.

Accommodation was provided by big marquees, high enough to take double-decker bedsteads. Later on some old railway carriages situated on the farm were also used. A kitchen, washing facilities and lavatories were to be built, camp style, in the open. It was hoped to accomplish all this within a week. This did not prove possible, but all the same the camp was soon in full swing. A few army bell tents were put up quickly, but the marquees remained packed in huge bales while lorries kept arriving with yet more
gear. Arrangements were further complicated by the arrival of an orthodox
Bachad
group who demanded a separate kosher kitchen all of their own, which they maintained right up to the time of their departure to Gwrych Castle at the outbreak of war. Arguments between different factions of
Madrichim
and competition for the children's allegiance caused more headaches:

There were children belonging to at least six or eight Zionist Youth Movements, all with very different ideologies.
Madrichim
, or youth leaders, all had their own ideas of how the camp should be run. Instead of running it jointly they went all out for indoctrination and made lots of promises to attract recruits. Unfortunately, the
Madrichim
had more political knowledge than practical experience in dealing with children and of camp craft.

During the first two weeks about 180 children arrived at Great Engeham. They went short on just about all the basic resources including water, which had to be transported over the fields in a two-wheeled handcart. As there was no proper path, half the water was lost on the journey. To keep up with demand, teams of carriers worked in shifts throughout the day.

There was consolation in knowing that others were worse off. A party of girls who went on an outing to a local Guides' camp were surprised to find that the accommodation there was even more primitive than that at Great Engeham. The only difference was that the Guides could look forward to returning to comfortable homes.

The abundance of physical work prevented
Madrichim
from spending enough time with the children, let alone helping them with their education. This meant that the troublemakers, including many who did not want to come to Great Engeham in the first place, were given a pretty free run.

Fred Dunston and his fellow workers can recall children who ‘turned our hair grey', they were so difficult to handle.

Many children did not understand why they were there. They were certainly not expecting to spend up to two years training for a life on a kibbutz. Not surprisingly, they were very unhappy and unsettled when they found out. It was a difficult task for us to calm them down. They said they had been sent by the
Kultusgemeinde
, Vienna and not by the Palestine office. They had been promised
they would go to foster parents … Some of the girls were crying their eyes out, refusing to go on
hachshara
with the type of louts who were on their transport. We had full sympathy for these girls … There were at least four or five boys who were not suitable either for our camp or for
Youth Aliyah
. We simply did not know what to do with them …

Even those who were prepared to join in found it difficult to understand what the camp was trying to achieve.

The motto of the Kibbutz is ‘everybody gives as much as he can and receives in return what he needs'. However, some of these children came from well-to-do, middle-class families who had no sympathy with this philosophy. They were here because their parents were desperate for them to escape from the Nazi tyranny. They were not necessarily the most clever or the most suitable for
Youth Aliyah
. To try to forge a community, the
Madrichim
simply pointed ahead – ‘When we are in Palestine it will all be marvellous' – but you can't keep children going on promises like that. It would have been better to have concentrated on proper English, Ivrit, history and geography lessons and maybe some other type of training – but that was impossible under the given circumstances.

With the approach of war, the children responded to the danger by working more closely as a group, by exceeding their targets for filling sandbags, and by camouflaging their tents with foliage. At this point the first contingent of
Bachad
children was sent off to their own training centre, Gwrych Castle, in Wales.

Soon the weather turned to almost constant rain. Living conditions deteriorated steadily and the tents had to be pulled down as life under canvas became almost impossible. The remaining children had to move into the old railway carriages as well, making them rather crowded. They had to stay on till their respective training centres were ready to receive them.

At the beginning of December 1939, Fred Dunstan was one of the adults who went with the last group of children from the transit camp to ‘Bydown', not far from Barnstaple in North Devon. This was an old country house with large grounds providing room for about sixty to seventy people. Accommodation there was good in every respect and there was a good staff ratio so
that agricultural work and educational lessons could be organised properly in half daily sessions. The local Refugee Committee took great interest in the centre, and visits to the pleasant town of Barnstaple were much enjoyed.

It was a sort of country home for about sixty children. Accommodation was good, cooking facilities adequate, and Barnstaple a very pleasant town. Here we established a proper
Youth Aliyah
centre, with half-day lessons and half-day farm work. In March 1940, some of the children went to Braunton on the other side of Barnstaple and worked on a smaller farm there.

In March 1940, Fred, together with some adults, members of the
Hechaluz
and about twenty children from Bydown and other centres, moved into a house at Braunton, which was also not far from Barnstaple. The work for this group had been arranged on a large but highly specialised farm, which concentrated on growing bulbs, flowers and potatoes. However, from the
Youth Aliyah
point of view, the general conditions on this farm as well as the work demanded from the children was totally unsuitable:

The work consisted in walking up and down flowerbeds of an enormous length, carrying a basket on your arm. You had to make up bunches of daffodils or simply cut off the blossoms of tulips and put them into the basket, which, when full, had to be emptied into a lorry. This went on without change day in day out. It was hard labour, not an agricultural training of any kind. The children had to leave the house at 5.45 in the morning (with special permission from the police, because all ‘enemy aliens' were under curfew restrictions). The walk to the farm took about an hour, so they just arrived in good time to clock in before seven o'clock in the morning, when the foreman blew his whistle and work had to commence. There were only two half hour breaks during an eight to ten hour day. This would not have mattered so much if the children had been older, but the farm did not want to employ seventeen-year-olds and older ones as they would have had to pay them much higher wages.