... And the Policeman Smiled (3 page)

Meanwhile, the call that went out to young people to come to Palestine found a ready response in Germany as Nazi legislation aimed specifically against Jewish youngsters began to bite. As early as April 1933, German state schools were ordered to limit the number of Jewish pupils to under five per cent of their total intake. With the crazed logic of all racial legislation, exemptions were granted to those Jewish children whose fathers had been front line soldiers in the Great War and to children who had one Aryan parent or two Aryan grandparents.

More invidious than the restriction on numbers was the prejudice against Jewish children by teachers who were also Nazi sympathisers. Their bigotry was given full rein by the 193 5 Nuremberg Decrees which deprived all non-Aryans of German citizenship – no state employment, no access to the professions, no vote and no right to the ordinary decencies of life.

Johnny Blunt, then Johnny Eichwald, aged twelve, was at a school in north Germany, just twenty-eight miles from the Danish border. His father was a tobacconist, the only Jewish trader in the small town of Kappelin.

Teachers started calling me ‘Jewboy' in front of the class. And even my friends in the class got so used to it, they didn't even know what it meant. We accepted. I accepted the same as my friends. Then there was this yearly occasion – I don't know what you call it in English – it's like a sports day which is once a year where everybody shows their prowess in various fields and we used to have shooting. Now in this particular year I was the best shot. I had three shots right into the bull's-eye, but when the prizes were
given out I was put in second place. I heard one of my schoolfriends tell a teacher: ‘There must have been a mistake, surely Johnny had three.' And the reply was: ‘We can't have a Jewboy as king of the shots.' I was very upset about it.

Even the youngest children were not immune to persecution. Edith Taylor, then Birkenruth, was born in Neustadt, near Bremen. Her family, of Dutch descent, had lived there for more than a hundred years.

I was supposed to go to nursery school at the age of five and there was such a hue and cry that they wouldn't take me so I went to a Catholic nunnery. They were very kind and nice to me. Then at the age of six I had to go to the regular school and the first thing that greeted me was the children saying that I was a dirty Jew and I must eat in the toilet. My brother and I were the only Jewish children in the school and we had to eat our sandwiches in the toilet – the teachers were aware of this but did nothing. Sometimes I would eat my sandwiches near the toilet so that if one of them came along I could dash into the toilet and not get bashed over the head. We were at this school for three years and this sort of thing went on all that time. Classes were all right at first but then here and there would be a very anti-Semitic teacher who would do things such as send me out of the classroom saying I was a Jew and I didn't have to learn this and then call me back in and ask me questions. She would then say to the others: ‘You see, the Jews aren't all that clever, they don't know everything.' She liked to make fun of me and my brother. The children would laugh, they thought it was very funny.

Occasionally, a teacher showed a little sensitivity, as Hannele Zürndorfer remembers:

At school the class no longer stood up and chorused: ‘Good morning, Fräulein Ratchen!' when the teacher came in; instead we had to stand up, thrust out our arms and shout,
‘Heil Hitler!'
I never quite knew whether to join in or not. I knew Hitler was evil and the cause of all our troubles, but felt afraid not to raise my hand. Fräulein Ratchen, with her customary perspicacity, told me quietly one day that I need not do it. Instead of the little hymn or folksong with which we used to start the day, we now had to sing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles', ‘Horst Wessel' or other patriotic Nazi songs.

In 1936, discrimination against all Jewish children was made official; they could no longer mix with Aryan children. Peter Praeger was at school in Berlin:

Things were getting difficult for Jewish boys. Encouraged by their attendance at Hitler Youth group evenings, many boys refused to sit next to Jews. Also, some teachers were outright anti-Semitic. Our PE teacher, Herr Neumann, would make the entire class do punishment PE drills ‘because one of the Jew-boys didn't pay attention'. Our music teacher taught us Nazi songs, one of which had the refrain:
Wenn's Judenblut vom Messer spritzt, dann geht's nochmal so gut
. (When Jewish blood gushes forth from your knife, you can work much better.) The teacher would kindly tell us Jewish boys that we did not have to join in the refrain.

We had special lessons, called National Politics. One topic was called ‘Racial Theory'. According to our teacher, who was a professor of biology, the world was divided into a number of races which could be distinguished by the shape of their skulls. The highest development occurred in the Germanic Longheads. In order to prove his point, the professor made us three Jewish children stand up. He asked me to come to the front of the class. The teacher explained that my skull was several inches shorter than that of others, which meant that I was inferior. How well do I still remember my feelings when I stood there while the teacher measured my head. At first I was terribly frightened, but soon gathered up my courage when the teacher patted me on the back and said: ‘There is no need to be afraid. I shall not do you any harm. After all, it is not your fault that you are inferior.'

Such lessons served a double purpose: they gave a sense of superiority to the majority, and at the same time inculcated a sense of inferiority in Jewish children. This feeling began to develop within me, and when the boys played games in the playground I asked meekly whether I was allowed to participate. More often than not I was told, ‘Jews may not join.' I accepted this as normal and on the few occasions when no objection was raised, I was only given minor roles in the game. However, I was pleased, and accepted this minor role as normal. I regretted being Jewish and thus inferior, and secretly wished I was ‘Aryan' like my peers.

The humiliation of sitting apart in lessons, of being excluded from games and ignored in the playground was too much for some children. For them, it was a short step from depression to suicide. Others, like Johnny Blunt, fought back:

We had an Aryan school round the corner and very often on the short distance from the school back to the orphanage we were attacked by them [Aryan children]. And that went on for months and months. Many times I came home with a stiff lip or a black eye until I started to learn how to box. And I remember one occasion there was a small child – he was much younger than we were. He was on his own. And he was shouting obscenities at us. Of course, I think there were four of us and we tried to have a go at him and he disappeared round the corner. But what we didn't know was that there were about twenty of them waiting round the corner. So you can imagine how we came home.

While there was a big expansion of Jewish education, the demand was too great to satisfy in full. Before Hitler came to power, barely fifteen per cent of Jewish children went to schools outside the state system. There was not the staff or the accommodation to provide for all those who now wanted an alternative. Desperate strategies were called for, as in the case of young Leslie Brent, whose parents sent him to an orphanage in what is now East Berlin:

This was certainly one of the more traumatic experiences of my life because I was suddenly in an institutional environment; I was with boys of various ages, some late adolescent, some younger than I was, many of them orphaned and therefore with all kinds of emotional problems, some very disturbed. Although it was a humane kind of school it was nevertheless rather a shock coming from a small family into this environment. I was not bullied at all but it was distressing for me to see boys who were having great screaming fits and who were clearly very badly disturbed.

For those who missed out on formal education there was the chance of joining one of an increasing number of initiation courses for a pioneering life in Palestine. The Nazis were not averse to these enterprises, partly because they were paid for by others – notably the Central British Fund and its transatlantic offshoot, the Council for Germany Jewry – but more particularly because, as a
quid pro quo
, Jewish businesses in Palestine offered preferential trade deals.

The inspiration for transfusing Palestine with German enterprise and energy came from
Youth Aliyah
, a singularly well named organisation since the Hebrew word
Aliyah
can be interpreted as ‘uplifting' or ‘immigration'. Founded in 1932,
Youth Aliyah
was
the brainchild of Recha Freier, wife of a Berlin rabbi. Searching for a response to a group of unemployed teenagers who wanted advice on their future, she consulted Wilfrid Israel, head of a large departmental store who was later to be instrumental in saving thousands from the gas chambers. He came up with the idea of a training camp in Palestine. It started with the emigration of twelve Berlin boys.

There were several hitches; a friend of Mrs Freier's pawned some jewellery to raise funds, and, at the last moment, the parents raised an unexpected objection: the boys had no overcoats. In the semi-tropical conditions of Ben Shemen in the Palestinian coastal plain there was no need for heavy overcoats in any season, but parents in chilly autumn Berlin were worried. Twelve tweed overcoats, with velvet collars, were taken off their hangers in W. Israel's junior clothing department and presented to the apprehensive pioneers, and Recha Freier and Wilfrid Israel, together with the children's parents and a small choir, sent them on their way from the Anhalter station in Berlin on 12 October 1932.

(Naomi Shepherd:
Wilfrid Israel
, p. 70)

The popularity of
Youth Aliyah
owed much to the Jewish Youth Movement, from which it took many of its ideas. By linking physical work in the open air and other country pursuits with Zionist values, Recha Freier gave many Jewish boys and girls what they needed most – a sense of purpose. Not that it was easy going, as Philip Urbach recalls:

For me the most memorable thing was a gigantic hole in the ground which was, of course, a cesspit. I was detailed to empty this – along with several others – into a big wagon. I was basically a town boy – I was interested in reading, in music, I wrote stories of my own. I loved theatre and films. I had no real experience of this but I had no choice. The cesspit must have held thousands of gallons and we had long ladles with something like maybe nine- or ten-foot handles to get down there, and lift the stuff into a great big container. Of course, as you can imagine, the stuff, as you were trying to get it in, ran down you and you were covered in it. By the end of the day you began to enjoy it. It took me, it seemed to me, weeks to get rid of the smell. This was my most memorable experience.

Strong support for
Youth Aliyah
came from Britain where the CBF targeted for the training and resettlement of one hundred thousand young refugees in four years. Nods and winks from friends in government suggested that a way might be found to bend the rules on emigration to Palestine. The signals were sufficiently encouraging for Sir Herbert Samuel and Simon Marks to set off to America to raise two-thirds of the three million pounds needed to finance the project. A separate fund was opened to buy land in Palestine.

The general sense of urgency was intensified by the knowledge that little help could now be expected from the League of Nations. In late 1935 James Macdonald gave up the unequal struggle to advance the interest of refugees against the forces of retrenchment and appeasement. Before sailing home to America he urged the League to take a stand against Germany ‘in the name of humanity and of the principles of the public law'. But the League council ignored the appeal, choosing instead to refer the matter to the next meeting of the Assembly – several months ahead, this being in line with the well-established Geneva principle, to touch nothing which it did not adjourn. Sir Herbert Emerson was eventually appointed as new High Commissioner. He had the advantage over his predecessor in that he reported directly to the Secretary-General, but his brief was limited to refugees outside Germany. He was told to concentrate on judicial matters; relief and settlement were not his concern.

A measure of the growing Jewish disillusionment with the League of Nations was the hurried withdrawal from Geneva of Norman Bentwich who, after his stint as chief aide to James Macdonald, came home to take charge of CBF training and emigration. He shared this job with Sir Wyndham Deedes, an old Palestinian hand and convinced Zionist who was also a non-Aryan Christian. As such, he was able to speak on behalf of those in Germany who were of Jewish blood but not of the Jewish faith. Being half-Jewish was no protection against persecution and, though it was difficult to estimate the numbers, some indication of how many were at risk could be gleaned from the marriage statistics which showed that of all the marriages in the Jewish community nearly a third were mixed.

While Bentwich and Deedes were both to be closely involved in the Refugee Children's Movement, they had little in common. Bentwich was urbane and sophisticated, a man of radical views
who nonetheless enjoyed the good life. Deedes was a workaholic and a dedicated aesthete who gave much of his life to social work in London's East End. His frail health caused his friends some worry, although it was Bentwich's view that there was nothing wrong with Deedes that could not be fixed by a square meal.

The money to support the emigration programme came in large part through the efforts of Rebecca Sieff, an indefatigable promoter of twin causes – the independence of the Jews in Palestine and, on a wider front, the liberation of women from male hegemony. She was the sister of Simon Marks and the wife of Israel Sieff, who shared with Simon the credit for putting Marks and Spencer on the map. But as a strict feminist, Becky Sieff preferred to be known as a founder member of the Federation of Women Zionists and president of the Women's International Zionist Organisation (WIZO). From this vantage point she launched out on a campaign trail which took her to every major city in Britain.