... And the Policeman Smiled (42 page)

It was the start of a career which led to the creation of the biggest jewellery manufacturing business in Britain.

With her special interest in the academically gifted, Greta Burkill kept a watchful eye on the advance of her proteges. Writing in 1978, and taking the country as a whole, she gave the RCM credit for one vice-chancellor, nine professors, four university lecturers, four medical consultants, a Shell executive, a deputy legal adviser to the International Labour Organisation, two judges, one silk and a senior administrator at the BBC; not to mention a leading film-maker, Karel Reisz, and several journalists, the best known of whom are Fritz Spiegl and Hella Pick.

In the early days after the war, feelings about Germany centred on hopes of finding relatives who had survived. The RCM coped with a flood of enquiries from children who were desperate for news:

Ilse returned her Search Bureau cards, of which four sets are completed. She tells us she has heard through an eyewitness that seven of her near relatives have been murdered in Lublin and she has filled in forms for those about whose fate she is not yet certain.

Ilse heard a few months later that her parents had died in a camp. Only one cousin remained out of her whole family.

For the lucky ones, those whose parents did survive, the joy of an anticipated reunion was squashed flat by the problem of making contact. The RCM was forced to admit ‘We have not as yet felt we can even write to the parents in liberated countries because we
have no answer to their question, “When and where can I see my child?”'

There were simply no procedures for arranging travel to Germany.

… nor is it yet possible for relations to go from England to Germany. The only practicable solution would be for parents to endeavour to obtain a visiting permit for Holland and Belgium and for the child to go there to meet them.

Reunions, when at last they did take place, were not always the blissful occasions both sides had anticipated.

The children had been encouraged to look to their own futures, not dwell on the past. Their experiences could not have been more of a contrast to those of their parents and, when they came together, they met as strangers. Even the language was different. And this was only the beginning of the emotional pressures. It came as a terrible shock to realise that fondly remembered parents, who had once offered confidence and stabiHty, were now themselves in need of reassurance and desperate for affection. Few youngsters had the emotional maturity to cope, as Liesl Silverstone discovered:

Eventually I heard that my mother had survived. They found her in the mortuary at Mauthausen Camp. She must have made a little sound when the Camp was liberated – so back she came from the dead. She was extremely ill. At first she went to Prague. She had typhus. No one else survived at all of all the people I grew up with.

When she was well enough she came here. We met again. I saw her last when I was twelve and now I was eighteen. There was an enormous gap. One of the first things she said to me was that I was the one left to her to make life all right again. I couldn't do it. It was no longer a mother-and-daughter relationship. I couldn't upset her. How do you proceed with a mother who has been to Auschwitz? In retrospect, I realise that after the war I got a different mother back.

It was all too confusing and awful. The things we needed to say we were not ready to say to each other. She died before it could happen. She never cried after the war. She just carried on coping, like I did. So we were both denying things. Two different people, with the war limbo in between. We survived as best we could.

Liesl and her mother returned to Czechoslovakia, where Liesl was the only person of her own age-group left alive out of a Jewish community of 60,000 in her home town. In 1948, when the Russians took over, she came back to England.

Francis Wahle did not realise that his parents were alive until 1945, when a cousin of his father's was forwarded a Red Cross message which had originally been sent out by Francis's parents in 1939. The cousin looked up the father's name on a list of judges in Vienna, discovered that he was alive, and passed on the good news to the children. Francis's mother was also alive, and was able to visit Paris on a conference, when she came to England very briefly, but it took another four years for the whole family to reunite:

My mother had obviously changed. You don't survive a hunted life without that. She refused to send us photographs because she didn't like to look old. So it was quite a shock when we met. My father had changed less, strangely enough, because he was older than she.

They had to adjust to having children again and we had to adapt to having parents. We had grown in different ways. It was almost shadow-boxing at first. There was a lot of tension. But we avoided ructions.

Ruth Michaelis was with her third foster family when her mother came to fetch her:

I had really settled down after being kicked out of my own country and then shunted from foster parents to foster parents. I didn't want to be uprooted again and my foster family wanted to keep me, so there was a battle royal between my foster mother and my mother and it took some sort of legal process to get me repatriated.

They did not repatriate my brother, which seemed very unfair to me. My parents wanted him to have the chance of going to Cambridge. But right through the war I had depended very heavily on my brother. He had been the one who always explained to me what was going on. They didn't realise what it would do to me to split us up. Had my mother come straight after the war and taken both of us back, I would never have resisted.

My mother and father rowed all the time. My father had a job in Mainz and my mother stayed on Lake Constance, which is several
hundred miles away. My father only came every other weekend and then it was just rows.

I was fourteen and a very bolshie teenager. I refused to do anything. I refused to learn German. (I had forgotten it all and I flatly refused to learn.) When they wanted to send me to school I said no, and I was very surprised when they didn't take me by the scruff of the neck and deliver me there. I stayed six months before they gave in and let me come back to England.

My parents saw me off at Mainz. It was a difficult departure, not because I had any ambivalence about going, but because I was trying to avoid saying goodbye to my parents. At that time I could not deal with my mother's wish to hug and kiss me. I kept my mother at arm's length, which must have been torture for her.

During this year Ruth returned to her foster parents and to school in England. She gained a place at Reading University, but before taking it up she stayed with her parents in Germany again. It was not for long:

I thought my parents were having a row one day – though they were just heatedly discussing one of my father's cases – and I got fed up. I took my passport and left for England. It was a nasty thing for me to do but I was afraid of getting trapped in Germany.

Culture and background, as well as language, could prove a barrier. In 1945, Ella called at Bloomsbury House to ask if her parents could force her to stay with them. She was feeling stifled by family life.

Ella says that she always has to be in at nine, if she is allowed out at all, and that she cannot go to any dances except once a month. She always does the housework when she comes home from work and helps as much as she possibly can. She gives the whole of her wages to her father, only keeping back 8/- for herself.

Bloomsbury House acted as a safety valve. A week later, Ella telephoned to say that all was well again.

When the break did come, Bloomsbury House had invariably to try to repair the damage, not always successfully.

Bruno called at his mother's address and was very shocked at the place. He found his mother had left the week before, leaving no
address. He was very upset, having had no reply from her to his letters. He seemed doubtful about our
bona fides
, thinking we knew all about his mother and were concealing it from him. By the time he left, the boy was fairly well reassured of our good faith, but we were unable to reassure him about his mother. It may be difficult for us to find her.

There was a tendency at the end of the war for family skeletons to be released. It was a time for confession, which was entirely understandable, except that, by opening up more divisions, it could make reconciliation all the more difficult. It was, for example, news about her grandmother that so much disturbed Elli Adler:

My mother told me, years after she came over after the war, that my grandmother, who was very anti-Semitic and had disapproved of her marriage, had found out about my mother's application to leave and had gone to the office saying, ‘I am a poor old lady, I am all on my own and have nobody', and they had struck my mother's name off the list. My mother did not find out until long afterwards and it finished her. She had never liked her mother, because she treated her very badly, but it was beyond her comprehension that anyone should do such a thing.

When her mother arrived in England, Elli went to meet her at Victoria Station.

It was a very strange experience. I was a little girl when I left and now I was a woman with a baby. Although it was August, she was wearing a fur coat in order to bring it with her. She was a stranger to me; it was terrible. It didn't get any easier; it was always difficult.

Angela Carpos resented her mother embarking on a new relationship:

My mother married a Greek, because the Germans wanted to send her back to Germany and she wanted to stay there. She used to meet British servicemen and tell them to look me up in London and take silk stockings or a cake … When I got a phone call in London that she had arrived and I was to go and see her, it was with very mixed feelings after eleven years. It was very difficult picking up the relationship. She was trying to put eleven years of lost mothering into me, and I was just trying to do what I wanted to do. I only really got close to her after I was married.

Ya'acov Friedler's mother was ill and confused after her time in the camps. Because of a technicality, she was not officially allowed to enter the country. Ya'acov went straight to the top, writing a four-page letter to the then Queen, now the Queen Mother.

I do not recall everything I put into my letter, but I remember feeling confident that if her Majesty might be but a fraction as touched reading it as I had been writing, she would aid us in our distress …

In the event, a letter came from the Home Office informing Ya'acov that, on the command of Her Majesty, the application had been reconsidered and an entry visa granted for his mother. In 1947, Ya'acov went to Holland to fetch her.

Our reunion was not tearful. I was too overcome and mother received me matter-of-factly, as though the seven years and the Holocaust that had separated us had not happened. She asked a few questions about my sister and brother, enquired whether we had regular mail from father, and then reverted to the torments of her mind. Quickly she became incoherent. This was much worse than we had feared. How was I going to be able to get mother past the immigration officer in England in such a state?

The flight back was Ya'acov's first but he was so worried about what would happen at the airport, he scarcely had time to feel excited.

I was appalled by the fear that mother might make a scene and, notwithstanding her visa, be barred by the immigration officer. But my fears turned out to be unjustified. Perhaps my anxiety got through to my mother and danger was the only thing she could take care of. We got through the border control at Croydon airport with flying colours.

His worries over, Ya'acov was struck by the pathos of the family reunion and of his mother's luggage:

A cardboard suitcase with a few pieces of clothing provided by the Red Cross and the Jewish Committee and a few necessities I bought for her … But there was also a battered old tin plate and water
bottle to which she obstinately clung. They were the only possessions she had been able to cling to since she had first been taken away … they had gone with her through the camps and she would not give them up or allow us to dispose of them. They were her lifelines to the past and it took a lot of coaxing to persuade her to start eating from normal tableware.

Later, in Palestine, Ya'acov met up with his father.

At last I knocked on father's door. Our reunion was embarrassing. The image of father I had carried in my heart for the past ten years was that of a self-confident stoutish man, with the expansive aspect of middle-age success. Now I was embracing a grizzled old man, small and slight, bent by physical injuries and years of mental anguish. He had grown a goatee beard, which, like the sparse hair he had retained, was quite white. I am short myself, but here I found myself towering over father.

For the great majority, whose families were wiped out in the Holocaust, feelings about Germany started inevitably with thoughts of retribution. But opportunity came only to those, like Johnny Blunt, who were part of the occupying forces and just happened to pass through their home towns.

I went to the marketplace and lit a cigarette and the first person to approach me was my old teacher, the one who used to call me ‘Jewboy' and who used to tell the story of how a Jewish peddlar knocked on his door and he kicked him up the backside, saying ‘I don't want to be done by a Jewish bastard!' He came over to me, not recognising me, because I had my goggles on. I just looked like any other British soldier. He said in very poor English, ‘Can I help you, sir?' I removed my goggles and put them on top of my helmet. His mouth fell open as he looked at me. ‘You are Johnny Eichwald, aren't you?' ‘Yes.' He said, ‘I am very glad you survived the war.' I just looked at him; I never said anything.

Later, Johnny was told that the local head of the Nazi party was asking to meet him. Johnny agreed.

He attempted to come over to me, obviously to shake hands. I kept my hands in my pockets. I didn't offer him a seat. He asked me if I had been aware that he was always a good friend of my father. I just looked at him. He went on and on. Eventually, he came to the point,
that he found himself in a little difficulty because he had to fill in his de-Nazification papers and he wondered if I would back him up in this. I had not said one single word. My mouth was completely sealed. I hadn't said yes or no, I just listened. After about five minutes he stopped talking. ‘Is there anything else, Herr Burrose?' I asked. ‘I don't think so, I can't think of any thing else …' he said. I took a little pistol out of my pocket and weighed it in my hand. I looked him straight in the face. ‘Herr Burrose,' I said, ‘if by the time I count to three I still see you in front of me, you will breathe through your stomach – one,' before I could say two, he had gone.