If Britain Had Fallen (39 page)

Anti-Semitism, like colour prejudice, flourished most where its victims were most numerous. A small Jewish population who had ‘merged with the landscape’ rarely suffered persecution. It was where, as in Eastern and Central Europe, they formed a community within a community with its own language, religion, diet, schools and customs, inter-marrying with
each other, favouring each other in business and having little contact with the life of the country which sheltered them, that they were most unpopular. Around 1899, in the Dreyfus case, anti-Semitism had split France into opposing parties, and between the wars the whispered warning ‘Don’t let the Jews drag you into another war!’ had been the most effective of all Goebbels’s arguments. In the freedom-loving United States, with its large Jewish population, ‘anti-Semitism’, noted Sir Oswald Mosley after a visit in 1926, ‘appeared in various sections of American life from top to bottom’. He was, he says, shocked to find that even the bathing beaches in some areas were divided into ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’.

Mosley himself insists he was not anti-Semitic; his quarrel was only with those Jews, or indeed anyone else, who wished to see Britain involved in another war with Germany. Not all his supporters, however, were equally guiltless and there had been ugly scenes in the East End in the 1930s when Jewish shops were attacked during Fascist marches and individual Jews chased and assaulted. The British public reacted promptly. At a time when ordinary Germans stood watching elderly Jews being forced to scrub the streets and Jewish shops were being openly looted, the British people compelled its government to pass an Act making the wearing of military-type uniforms illegal, there were widespread public protests at the violence used at Fascist meetings, and crowds of Gentiles, as well as Jews, gathered to break up Blackshirt processions in Jewish areas. All this suggests that Hitler would have had nothing like as easy a passage in enforcing anti-Jewish measures in Great Britain as in other European countries. It would be dishonest to deny, however, that beneath the surface the Jews were unpopular with many British people who were violently anti-Nazi, and the war by no means destroyed this feeling. It was widely stated in 1940, in print as well as by word of mouth, that Jewish faces predominated in many air-raid shelters (as indeed they did in the East End, where they formed a large part of the population) and a little later at least one author (although, oddly enough, he was on the Nazis’ ‘banned’ list) drew attention to the large proportion of Jewish names among those charged with black-market offences. During the flying-bomb raids in 1944 the old stories about ‘cowardly Jews’ never leaving the shelters or, alternatively, fleeing in hordes to safer areas were widely heard again. Those who passed them on, or who told anti-Jewish jokes, of which many circulated during the war, were as horrified as anyone else at later revelations of German atrocities, but whether there would have been a general strike to protest, or even violent riots, when the signs reading ‘Beware Jew’ began to appear on little tailors’ shops in
Whitechapel or on kosher restaurants in Finchley, seems more doubtful.

The Gestapo ‘Commando Group’ for Judaism should, it was suggested in Berlin, take over the house of Sir Herbert Samuel, a leading British Jew, as its ‘operational base’, to which in due course such other key victims as ‘Rothschild’ (though which member of this famous financial family was not specified), ‘Hore-Belisha’ (the former War Minister) and ‘Mond (Chemical Trust)’ (presumably the second Lord Melchett, a director of Barclays Bank and deputy chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries) were to be brought. A document listing ‘Opponents of Germany’, produced a week later, listed a curious rag-bag of other candidates for early attention, among them ‘The Chairman of the Committee for Jewish Refugee Children (name not known) in Blackpool’, ‘The manager of the Kailan Mining Association … his country house is said to be in Somerset’, ‘Sir Benjamin Drage, Jewish director of Drages Ltd, London [who] expressed himself in
The Times
as in favour of accepting Jewish emigrants’,
The Cabinet Maker and Complete Home Furnisher
[which] is a Jewish paper’, and most oddly of all, a bookmaker ‘regarded as the king of East London’ and a Woolwich Jew ‘known as a cigarette adulterator’.

For the ordinary citizen without close Jewish friends the first reminder that anti-Semitism was now official policy would probably have been the signs reading ‘Jewish business’ over every Marks and Spencer store and over all the branches of many food shops, cinemas and restaurant chains about whose ownership the public had hitherto shown little interest, German propaganda no doubt making the most of the extent to which the nation’s economic life now depended upon Jewish businessmen. Later such businesses would probably have changed their names, as the owners disappeared, or as Gentile friends took over the business to protect it from confiscation. The greatest effect would have been on the men’s tailoring trade, the women’s fashion trade, especially among smaller ‘rag trade’ manufacturers, and bookmaking. Kosher restaurants and delicatessen shops would have disappeared, and synagogues have been offered for sale as storerooms or warehouses. More defensibly, Jewish slaughter-houses would also have been shut down, though not before the maximum publicity had been given to the methods of killing in use in them, against which many British people, in no way anti-Jewish, undoubtedly felt—as they still do—intense revulsion.

The Jews in Great Britain had always been concentrated in a few areas, especially London, and their removal would have thrown on the market a great deal of property at knock-down prices, tempting some eager purchasers not to enquire too closely what had become of the previous owners, though property in London in 1940 was in any case very cheap. In Bethnal Green and Stepney, in Hampstead Garden Suburb and Marylebone, the ‘For Sale’ and ‘To Let’ boards would have been everywhere, though many Jewish estate agents’ businesses would themselves have been up for sale. Other signs of the times would have been slower to appear, like the disappearance of ‘Jewish New Year’ cards from the stationers’ counters, of Jewish recipe books from the bookshops, and, by the time the 1942 editions of diaries and almanacks appeared, references in them to Passover and other Jewish religious festivals would have vanished. Within two or three years, if not before, all evidence that the British Isles had ever had a large Jewish population would have disappeared, apart perhaps from a thinly patronised anti-Semitic exhibition set up by the Nazis in some corner of the National Gallery or the British Museum left vacant by looted art treasures.

After being warned that they were listed as Jewish, the next step on the road to the concentration camp for British Jews would probably have been the order to assemble, with no more luggage than they could carry, at a local assembly centre, two obvious choices being the Golder’s Green Hippodrome and the People’s Palace in the Mile End Road in Stepney, and here, as in other capitals, Red Cross workers would no doubt have done their best to help the assembled crowds who might otherwise have been left, as happened in Paris, without food, medical care or even water for several days. At this stage, much of the organisation would probably have been in the hands of leading Jews themselves, who might well, with German help, have set up ghettoes where they could at least practise in peace their own religion and the rigid dietary rules and other taboos associated with it. When the day came that they were ordered to prepare for a move to the Continent, like their coreligionists in Europe they would surely have gone, if not willingly, at least non-violently. What else, after all, could they do? Both they and their countrymen would have believed they were merely going to internment; but even had they known their real destination, the prospects of successful resistance would have been small.

The present Chief Rabbi, the Very Rev. Emmanuel Jakobovits, was in 1940 a young minister who had himself arrived in England as a refugee from Germany only a few years before. He believes today that in 1940 ‘much the same pattern would have been witnessed here as in all the other countries of Nazi occupation’, and the loyalty of many Jews to their religion would, he believes, have made their detection easy. As he explains:

There are quite a number of communal records … which preserve with very minute detail entries on Jewish marriages and Jewish burials and Jewish registration of membership of synagogues and Jewish organisations and schools and so on, so that the documentary evidence itself may well have given away the bulk of the Jewish community, which was highly organised here. Most Jews were in fact members of some Jewish organisation or community or other. Those not on those lists may well have been found through the indiscretion or malice of some neighbour or someone else who happened to know or had old scores to settle or some personal grievance … as happened on such a massive scale in other European countries. The possibility of Jews actually getting away with it simply by not being detected as Jews … would have been very remote indeed. I know of hardly any cases on the Continent where this was the cause of the survival of Jews. They survived in hiding or by flight, but not by non-detection.

Flight from the British Isles, with the nearest friendly land nearly 3000 miles away across the Atlantic, would have been almost impossible but when it came to hiding the Chief Rabbi believes that ‘compared to the situation in other European countries, the Jewish community here was extremely well placed. Anti-Semitism … had in no way struck anything like as wide and deep a root in society as it had done in Germany or in Austria, let alone in Poland or in some of the other Central and East European countries … . My guess would be that at least as many Gentiles here would have been found to risk their lives, if necessary, by protecting Jews and keeping them in hiding as were found in a country like Holland or … Denmark.’

Some British Jews, Dr Jakobovits believes, would have put up a fight before surrendering. ‘I would think that resistance would have been altogether highly organised here and that Jews would have been among some of the main resistance fighters in much the same way as Jews played a principal role in the Maquis in France.’ But the fate of British Jews would not, he thinks, have been particularly influential in encouraging the United States to come to the rescue of the British Isles.

Anglo Jewry has had a peculiarly insular past, by regarding itself as somewhat distinct from the Jewish communities on the European continent on the one side, and the American Jewish community on the other. There were very few Jews … in America who were of British origin. I would think that American Jewry would be likely to be touched more deeply by the fate of Central and Eastern European Jews, from which after all the bulk of American Jewry was drawn, and where everyone had relatives and a family or possibly a place of birth with which to identify in a personal way.

With resistance probably futile, and no outside help forthcoming, what does the Chief Rabbi consider would have been the fate of British Jews if their country had been occupied?

At first, I think, Jews would have been herded together in closely packed ghettoes reserved exclusively for a Jewish population and almost hermetically sealed off from the rest. There would then have set in a process of deportation of large numbers of people beginning with the leaders and then eventually entire family units would have been shipped across the Channel and then right through Europe to Eastern Europe and … the various concentration camps. There may have been quite a number of Jews who would have found refuge in hiding with Christian neighbours who, themselves, at the risk of their lives would have protected a number of families, as indeed did a great many families in Holland, where quite a few thousand survived the occupation by living in hiding. [But] while that occupation eventually came to an end because of the final victory of the Allied Forces, had Britain been occupied I doubt if redemption could have come in time to secure those people from detection. And therefore if there had been a prolonged occupation exceeding two or three years it would probably have been physically quite impossible to hide them away for ever.

All over Europe Jews turned in the hour of desperate need to their ministers, for guidance and spiritual comfort. The advice they gave is unknown, since pastors and their flocks are alike dead. The Chief Rabbi in Great Britain has considered what comfort he too might have been able to give his people if in 1940 the Germans had landed:

I would hope that under the burden of such a challenge I might emulate the example of countless rabbis who were in fact placed in this position and first of all give those in my spiritual charge not only a message of faith in ultimate triumph and the ability in fortitude to withstand the kind of suffering and martyrdom which … is the hallmark of our history, but I might also by personal example and by reference to … our … literature, evoke the kind of popular response that would enable spirit to prevail over matter. And that would enable our people under such excruciating conditions to see itself as really a speck in a long line of history, and not merely view the present as being a disconnected self-contained unit unrelated to a past and a future … One would have stressed under such conditions the supreme importance of strengthening ourselves from within, by shoring up our family life, by trying … to spiritualise our day-to-day existence and thus take the mind off some of the pressures from without … Very often we don’t realise our own potential in the face of adversity until we meet it. It is only under stress of those burdens that sometimes the fineness comes out in man. I would never despair of the ability of a human being to withstand ordeals which rationally speaking one would imagine he is bound to succumb to.

About what would have happened to British Jews who were caught, there need be no speculation. One Jersey woman, then a child, has not forgotten the strange sight which caught her young eyes on the boat on her way back to the island from internment, for travelling with them was one of the few Jews who had also survived. ‘She had her hair all shaved off, her arm was in a sling and there was a number printed on her arm.’ A little earlier, when they were still detained, she remembers her mother,
having quarrelled with some Germans, being threatened with being sent to Belsen, a name that meant nothing to them until, just before the war finished they realised its significance when a lorry-load of survivors from that terrible place were brought into the camp.