Cruel World (34 page)

The cumulative effect of many nights of such violence led to what one government observer described as “listening tension.” Listening for the planes, listening for the bombs, which would eventually produce a “resistance break” and an overwhelming desire to flee. Now it would be the turn of the British authorities to struggle to set up soup kitchens and makeshift accommodations in such uncomfortable milieux as movie theaters and empty school buildings.
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Vivid reporting of the plight of civilians in Britain and on the Continent once again led to an outpouring of American proposals for aid to the stricken countries. At the end of June, President Roosevelt requested, and Congress approved, $50 million to provide supplies for the refugees. Supplies were fine, but suggestions, such as one made by Francis Biddle, the Solicitor General, to send ships to Bordeaux to evacuate endangered continental children from the battle zone, once again fell into the morass of immigration rules.
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Seven different bills were introduced in Congress to save not only the children of and in France, but also other groups, such as several thousand Polish children who had managed to get to France, Spain, and Portugal. Congressman William Schulte (D.-Ind.) proposed
the issuance of a special visitor’s visa for any European child under the age of sixteen “who sought asylum from the dangers or the effects of war” but tribalism again prevailed, and the bills were defeated. Chauvinism was not limited to the Americans. Fifty needy French children who were threatened with malnutrition, and for whom the Nîmes Committees finally managed to get visas by devious means, were refused exit visas at the last moment by the Vichy government, which found it unacceptable that they should be separated from their families and be exposed to foreign ideas. In the end, the committee managed, with extraordinary effort, to extract only some 300 children from France before the Germans took over that country entirely in 1942.
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One of the last groups of children to get out left on a train for Lisbon that was to pass near the Gurs camp, where their parents were still interned. In a fit of humanity, the French allowed the parents to go to the station to say good-bye, a scene so sad that even the police are said to have wept.
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British children were a different story when it came to immigration into the United States. Here there were no ethnic or quota problems. The British quota was 65,000, and its children were perceived by certain elements as being from the same crowd as the Founding Fathers and other “real” Americans. Hundreds of families who could afford to do so had already sent children over to stay with friends and relatives for the duration, and many in the British government wished to extend this possibility to everyone. Despite the disapproval of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who felt that overseas evacuation of the young people might be construed as “defeatist,” Parliament authorized funding for the evacuation plan on June 18, 1940. The process was to be organized by the Children’s Overseas Reception Board (CORB). Only English-speaking countries were considered (offers from South America were politely refused), and the boys and girls were to be lodged with families. Parents were expected to contribute six shillings—about $7.50 a week—to their upkeep, a pittance that eventually led to some resentment on the part of American foster families as the war years passed and support of the children became burdensome.
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But in 1940 all was euphoric support. There was enormous press coverage of the British program. Under the aegis of such luminaries as Eleanor Roosevelt and Marshall Field, the United States Committee for the Care of European Children was established on June 20, 1940. Fifteen thousand offers to take children were received in the first three weeks. Liaison was soon established with CORB and the U.S. government’s Children’s Bureau, and some 15,000 children, by now dubbed “Seavacs,” were scheduled to
arrive in Canada and the United States by the end of August,
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while other large groups were prepared to go to Australia.

There were still problems: a few basic changes would have to be made in the daunting American immigration procedures before the British children could enter. Although quota numbers were no problem, it was necessary to remove the restrictions on the number that could be admitted each month. The rules requiring that a child must be entering to join a parent and the prohibition of sponsorship by an organization were waived. In addition, a system of group affidavits for financial support was permitted, as was the use of visitors’ visas for an indefinite time period. The latter privilege applied only to British children, who still had a country that was perceived as being able to take them back at some point in the future.
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Cutting such red tape was one thing, finding a way to get the children across the sea quite another. British vessels were vulnerable to German submarine attack, and under the U.S. Neutrality Act, the only American ships that could enter the European war zone were those carrying Red Cross supplies. This rule was immediately attacked by the very determined American Women’s Committee for the Release of Mercy Ships for Children, which soon had hundreds of other ladies’ groups backing it, not to mention a very influential men’s committee. Under this onslaught Congress quickly amended the Neutrality Act to allow unarmed U.S. vessels to transport the children if the ships were given a safe conduct by the Germans.

The way now seemed clear for the entry of thousands of British boys and girls, but even this seemingly desirable influx was a threat to the true nativists, who once again viewed the measure as a wedge that would eventually allow entry to millions of unwanted aliens. One congressman wanted to limit the rescue to 75,000 children. Another insisted that all escorts be American citizens, warning that otherwise “one or more adults could come in for every child.” Others felt that the project was merely a propaganda ploy by Roosevelt to get the United States into the war. Despite all, the bill passed on August 27, 1940. But the Mercy ships were not to be: vessels could not be found for the project, and, more importantly, the Germans refused safe conduct.
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The British government, which had received some 200,000 requests for evacuation overseas, now decided it would risk the use both of its own vessels, with identifying markings painted over, and those of the Polish and Dutch governments in exile. By the time the first groups left, the bombing of London and other cities had become so intense that the dangers of the sea seemed minimal by comparision. The farewells for parents were no
less difficult than those of any of the groups that had already sent their children off into the unknown, while they themselves stayed in a danger zone:

The dangers were real, even before the ships sailed. One group arrived at the embarkation port in the midst of an air raid and had to seek shelter in the musty basement of the train station. During a lull in the bombing, they were moved to a cleaner school building. The raids continued for hours, destroying the school kitchens, and the hungrey children could not board their ship until after dark the following day.
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Once aboard, the most important thing was the lifeboat drill. Lumpy life jackets were issued immediately, and the passengers had to wear them at all times until it was felt the ships were beyond the reach of submarines. Drills were repeated daily at random moments to make the children, as well as the escorts, familiar with the procedure, not always an easy task with bunches of excited and obstreperous five-year-olds.

Most of the ships traveled in convoys that formed up outside the ports, and seaplanes accompanied them for the first hours. During the day the presence of the surrounding naval escorts and the towering warships was unforgettable and comforting. Some were so close that their crews were plainly visible and every command could be heard.
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But the day was not the problem. Submarine attacks came at night, preferably in rough weather, when the attackers were less visible. On August 30, 1940, the
Volendam
, carrying 335 Seavacs plus some 300 other passengers and crew, was torpedoed and sank. Miraculously, the lifeboat drills having been well learned, all but two crew members survived and were taken back to Scotland. This was considered a setback, but did not lead to cancellation of the CORB program or a falloff in private passengers.

On September 12, therefore, the liner
City of Benares
, with 90 children, some of whom had been rescued from the
Volendam
, and 200 other
passengers, left Liverpool as planned in a convoy headed for Canada. Five days out into the Atlantic the weather turned stormy and German spotter planes were seen. According to one witness, the British escorts had by then turned back and the Canadian ones that were supposed to replace them had not yet appeared. Late that night the ship was shaken by multiple explosions. Cadet Officer D. Haffner, only seventeen himself, rushed to the damaged area of the ship to search for children. It was a dreadful scene: many of the cabins had been transformed into a mass of jagged metal, and the children inside had been killed or wounded. Water was pouring in as Haffner took all the children he could find to their lifeboat stations.
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Elsewhere in the darkness, older children and escorts struggled to get themselves and the littlest ones into life jackets and to their boat stations. Bess Walder, a teenaged Seavac dressed in nightgown, dressing gown, and raincoat, got three smaller children on deck and returned for a fourth. To her horror she found the cabin door blocked by a fallen wardrobe. Walder managed to force her way in and saw that the child was near death. Wrapping the girl in a coat, she struggled out of the cabin, by now half full of water. Collapsing staircases blocked access to the decks, and when Bess finally found her way to the lifeboat the injured child was dead. Saying a prayer, one of the escorts gently lowered her body into the water. As Bess, feeling herself at the limit of her endurance, moved off from the doomed ship in her lifeboat, she felt that the worst was now over. She was wrong.

Walder’s overcrowded lifeboat soon began to take on water and capsized. She and eight others managed to cling to the keel. In the night the wind rose and huge waves repeatedly lifted the boat out of the water and smashed it down again. By dawn, so numb that all feeling was gone in their faces and fingers, Bess and one other girl were the only ones left on the boat; they were totally alone on a sea where only large fish and ice floes could be seen.
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Cadet Officer Haffner, pulled by a miracle into another boat, had been put in command because of his uniform. He managed to shelter everyone under the canvas boat cover so that they would be protected from the sleet, snow, and freezing salt spray. Here the sea was not empty, but strewn with debris and bodies, many those of children.
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Exposure was the worst enemy. One man held the stiffened bodies of two dead children in his arms and sang to them so their dying mother wouldn’t know they had succumbed to the cold. “I didn’t know women and children could die so easily,” he said after his rescue. The children who survived had been no less heroic: one ten-year-old also held a dying
nurse in his arms and vainly tried to encourage her by saying over and over, “I see the boats, nurse. It won’t be long now.”
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The final toll was high: 206 adults and 87 children died. One recently bombed-out London family alone lost 5. Public outrage at this sinking was enormous. For the CORB program the loss was disastrous: two weeks after the sinking, it was canceled. Although small private groups of children continued to be sent, the mass removal abroad of British children did not take place. In the end, only about 16,000 children, the vast majority privately sponsored, would go the United States and the Dominions.
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(photo credit p3.1)

In their zeal to purify and mold the citizens of Germany itself and expel all those of alien race, the Nazis had not forgotten those of German blood scattered all over the world. Hitler aimed to make full use of the members of the “German Diaspora.” His original impulse was to recover or conquer the areas bordering Germany, leave all resident ethnic Germans in place, expel the non-Germans, and replace them with people of proper racial descent, who would presumably be available as a result of his efforts to increase the German population. In addition, he intended to locate ethnic Germans living beyond the contiguous areas and lure them back to help repopulate the new Reich, soon to be extended well beyond the border areas at the expense of his neighbors. Hitler was indeed interested in a world empire. Recovery of Germany’s remote ex-colonies, lost after World War I, was desirable, but the ideal Reich would be a contiguous one peopled by a pure race. The gathering in of the world’s ethnic Germans was a vast undertaking that would require that they all be found, listed, and vetted for suitability as German citizens.