... And the Policeman Smiled (44 page)

Grateful thanks go to Cheryl Mariner, executive director of the CBF, her honorary archivist, Dr Amy Zahl Gottlieb and all the CBF staff for their kindness and generosity. Also to Dame Simone Prendergast, chairman of the Jewish Refugees Committee of the CBF, for her long standing commitment to preserving CBF records. The CBF is the leading relief organisation for Jewish refugees and has a dramatic history stretching back to the early days of Nazism. The Refugee Children's Movement was just one of the many subsidiary groups which at the time of greatest crisis owed their survival to the financial support of the CBF. Today, CBF responsibilities are world wide and serve as a painful reminder that the refugee problem is still a long way from a solution.

If the CBF archive has been a prime source of material, a huge amount of support documentation has come from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Chief Rabbi's Archive, the Lambeth Palace Archive, the Wiener Library, the London Museum of Jewish Life, the London Library and, in the Netherlands, the Rijksinstituut Voor Oorlogsdocumentatie where Madelon d'Aulnis de Bourouill was not only kind enough to act as guide and translator but also made available to me material she had gathered for her forthcoming PhD thesis.

The inspiration for …
And the Policeman Smiled
came from Eva Mitchell, former executive director of the CBF, who ten years ago decided that the story of the Kindertransporte should be told. During that time she has remained an enthusiastic supporter of the
project, offering advice and practical assistance far beyond the call of duty. Inevitably, though I hope willingly, Eva's husband Felix has become involved. His enviable knowledge of German and Dutch combined with an eye for detail makes him a superb proof reader. His careful study of the manuscript has led to the removal of numerous errors. I need hardly add that those remaining are the responsibility of the author.

Thanks also to Alan Dein and Mark Burman for their skilled interviewing; to Lucie Kaye for invaluable research and advice on the sections bearing on religion and education; to Thea Bennett for sifting material and reducing it to manageable proportions; to Jill Fenner for transferring my nearly indecipherable scribble into a readable manuscript; and to Kathy Rooney, ever the constructive and sympathetic editor. And many thanks to Peter Morgan for his permission to use the cover photograph.

There is one more credit, the most important one of all. It belongs to the late Margot Pottlitzer, a journalist in pre-war Germany and herself a refugee and internee who subsequently joined the CBF Jewish Relief Unit in Germany to help survivors of the Holocaust. Margot left the greater part of her estate to the CBF. In financing the research and travel for …
And the Policeman Smiled
, Margot's executors have chosen a fitting, and I hope, a worthy tribute to her memory.

Jewish refugee children on a train, shortly after crossing the German border
Photo: Wiener Library

German refugee children embark in Holland for the journey to England
Photo: Wiener Library

12 December, 1938. Children from Vienna arrive at Harwich, most of them Jewish, the remainder ‘non-Aryan' Catholics and Protestants, or the children of anti-Nazis, They were than taken by a special train to Pakefield Holiday Camp, Lowestoft
Photo: Wiener Library

The children arrive at customs in England
Photo: Wiener Library

A distressed teenage refugee on arrival in England
Photo: Wiener Library

Two of the youngest refugees: the boy is five years old and the girl six
Photo: Wiener Library

A little girl from a party of children drawn mainly from Berlin and Hamburg clutches her doll Arriving in Harwich on 2 December, 1938, she was then taken to a holiday camp at Dovercourt, near Harwich
Photo: Wiener Library

A party of refugee girls at an English reception camp
Photo: Wiener Library

Refugee children wave from their chalets at a holiday camp in Dovercourt
Photo: Wiener Library

Dorli (now Dorothy) and Lisi Oppenheimer in Vienna, December 1938, before they left for England, where they stayed with Theo and Tilly Hall in Leeds
Photo: courtesy of Dorothy Fleming