The Other Schindlers (3 page)

In 2002 the London Jewish Cultural Centre held an exhibition called ‘Visas for Life’ about diplomats who between them saved about 250,000 Jews from the Nazis. The opening event gave me an opportunity to meet John Paul Abranches, son of de Sousa Mendes,
13
who lived in California, and Agnes Hirschi,
stepdaughter
of Carl Lutz,
14
who lives in Switzerland, with whom I had been corresponding for some time.

Other rescue stories were accumulated through the press, in particular
The
Jewish Chronicle
and obituaries in
The Times
. Some have been purely as a result of social conversations and sheer coincidence. I attend a lot of meetings and when, in response to enquiries about what I do, I tell people about my research, quite often they can name someone I should contact. There has certainly been a
snowball
effect over the last few years. I was surprised at being criticised for stating that these stories were collected at random – I find this odd. Collecting stories about Holocaust rescuers cannot be done in the same way as researching the
consumption
of fish fingers. Extraordinary stories turn up in the most unlikely ways.

In July 2004 I was in Brussels for a meeting at the EU and wondered if someone bilingual would speak to Robert Maistriau,
15
a rescuer who only spoke French, for me. One of the EU secretaries consented and subsequently in conversation told the driver assigned to us what she had agreed to do for me. He quite
spontaneously
told her that his mother, Gisele Reich, had been saved from deportation to Auschwitz at the age of 5 in 1941 because the Nazi officer at the transit camp at Malines (Mechelen) felt sorry for her – she was a sickly child who suffered from a lung disease. The driver had never mentioned this to anyone outside his family before and the story would not have come to light but for my request for help and this chance conversation.

My efforts resulted in the creation of a group of about thirty rescuers/rescued from a variety of countries, where I have had personal contact with either the rescuer or the rescued, or their child or other close relative. This has enabled me to pursue the question of motivation directly, by questioning someone extremely close to or actually involved in the events described. Some of these people have also written books about what happened and these have been referred to in the
text. Nevertheless, additional specific information has always been obtained by interview (face to face or by telephone), e-mail or letter, and these are all detailed in the footnotes.

The book consists of four parts. The first three contain the narratives of the
rescuers
and those they rescued. These are categorised by their expressed motivation – religious convictions, humanitarian motives, being a member of the Resistance, feelings of loyalty to the rescued and paid rescuers. The final section discusses the relevance of these events to our lives today and attempts to understand what turns a bystander into a rescuer.

This book is a personal attempt to show the general reader the reality of the Holocaust. This is particularly important now, when the Holocaust is being
regularly
denied and its scale continually trivialised. Additionally, we are seeing a swing to extreme right-wing politics. When I talk to young people about the Holocaust I ask them to remember four things:

This book aims to record the remarkable stories that were entrusted to me. Indeed, many of my informants have died since they contacted me. I hope that I have been able to do justice to their stories and also offer some insight into what made this remarkable group of people turn from being passive bystanders into rescuers during one of the darkest periods in human history.

On 10 March 2010, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown honoured a pledge he made on a visit to Auschwitz last year. He recognised twenty-eight British Heroes of the Holocaust who were awarded a silver medal engraved ‘in the service of humanity’ above clasped hands. I was delighted to be present as, aided by some forceful lobbying by me, Bertha Bracey (see p.
21
) and Henk Huffener (see p.
107
) were included on the list. Bertha’s great niece Pat Webb, with her husband Donn and daughter Delia, received Bertha’s medal, and Henk’s daughters Clare and Josephine, who I only tracked down on Friday 5 March, received Henk’s medal.

As I revised my research for publication during the closing months of 2009, I was awaiting the birth of my first grandchild and inevitably I thought about
my parents and their experiences in the Holocaust. I also wondered about my maternal grandfather, Armin Klein, who refused to leave his native land, and was murdered in Auschwitz around the time of my birth. James Harry Spier (Jamie) was born in London on 1 January 2010 – the great-great-grandchild of Armin and Rosa Klein, and Eugenie and Malkiel Grunwald, and great-grandchild of my beloved parents. Had the unknown official not sent my mother and me back, our line would have ended in 1944. With this in mind, I ask the reader to follow the Biblical exhortation, which Jews everywhere read every year at the Passover meal, telling the story of the flight from Egypt. In the book of Exodus (13:18) it is stated: ‘And you shall tell your son on that day …’ If the true horror of the Holocaust and the amazing courage of the persecuted and their rescuers is remembered and re-told to the next generation, is it not possible that people may consider their own views and attitudes, and perhaps create a far better world for everyone?

My father, Philipp Grunwald, was so embittered by his experiences as a forced labourer that he wouldn’t bring any more children into the world after the war and he committed suicide in 1955, leaving my mother Leona to bring me up alone. However, I am blessed with three wonderful sons, Daniel (father of James), Ben and Simon, and a lovely daughter-in-law, Michelle. I can only hope that the world in which they bring up their families will never see such horrors again. Perhaps then all the victims of the Nazis – like my grandfather Armin Klein – and all those other millions may not have died in vain?

Quakers were amongst the most active group of rescuers which saved Jews in the Holocaust. This was recognised in 1949 by the award of a Nobel Prize for their humanitarian efforts to both the British Friends Service Committee and its American counterpart.
16
The Quakers, so named by Judge Bennet of Derby because they trembled at God’s word, have a history of helping social causes and those in need of humanitarian support. They look only to the Almighty for guidance and have no priests or hierarchy of clergy acting as the conduit to God:

The Quaker religion is different to most, lacking a formal structure; followers take responsibility for themselves. They do not wait to be told what to do or be led by a clergyman; neither do they assume that someone else will deal with a problem.

Bertha Bracey OBE (1893–1989)
was a Quaker Englishwoman who had a
profound
influence in rescuing Jewish children from the Holocaust in what became the Kindertransport. She was born and brought up in Birmingham where she became a Quaker when she was 19 years old.

She was the seventh of eight children. All the family were intelligent, but it was only Bertha who received an education because by the time she was born the family had a bit of spare cash. Additionally, all the children except one inherited their father’s character. He was very forthright and always knew he was right.
19
No doubt these qualities stood Bertha in good stead in the years ahead.

She attended Birmingham University and spent five years as a teacher. In 1921 she left teaching to go to Vienna to help Quaker relief workers who ran clubs for children suffering from deficiency diseases. Whilst there, her German improved and in 1924 she moved to Nuremberg as a youth worker. From 1926–29 she was based in Berlin. She was subsequently recalled to Friends House in London to do administrative work relating to Quaker centres in Europe. She was to become the central point of a network of help for persecuted Jews coming to Britain.
20

Because of her time spent living in Germany, Bertha had a very clear view about the situation there. As early as April 1933 she reported: ‘For the moment the forces of liberalism have been defeated, and in the March elections fifty-two per cent of the electors voted National Socialist.’ She was perhaps more
perceptive
than many commentators when, within weeks of Hitler’s election, she commented on the tragedy of the Jews in Germany based on her own recent visit to Frankfurt for the German Quaker Executive Committee:

This showed a very full understanding and enormous empathy for the plight of the persecuted Jews. Her close friendship with the Friedrichs influenced her
knowledge
.
Leonhard Friedrich, from Nuremberg, had an English wife called Mary. They had met when he was working in England before 1914 and were married at the Sheffield Friends’ Meeting House on 3 August 1922. They were active Quakers and involved in a Quaker relief centre funded by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), set up through the intervention of President Hoover, himself a Quaker, who was worried about the impact on Germany of the reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. These reparations caused great hardship and malnutrition and President Hoover asked the AFSC to organise a large-scale school feeding scheme and 11,000 centres were opened. This help was badly needed and continued as the hyper-inflation of the 1920s aggravated the situation.
22

The Friedrichs suffered considerably for their faith and their daughter, Brenda Bailey, has described her mother’s response to early anti-Jewish activity:

This was an extremely courageous act by Mary Friedrich, but further difficulties were to follow. Quakers were sympathetic to the Jews so early on, as, in 1933, many German Quakers lost their jobs because they would not sign the loyalty oath; amongst them was Leonhard Friedrich. A welfare fund was created to help such unemployed Quakers and those still in work contributed.

Bertha was very active in Europe in the 1930s. ‘It was Bertha’s task to interpret what was happening in Germany to the world outside. So she travelled three or four times a year to listen and to strengthen Quaker links in Germany, Holland, France, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, Norway and Sweden.’
24

Her experiences led her to become involved in the creation of the remarkable Kindertransport enterprise. It became apparent from Germany that desperate parents were willing to send their children away if this would save them from the Nazis. Wilfrid Israel, a member of a wealthy Jewish retail family that owned N. Israel, one of Berlin’s oldest and best-respected department stores, was involved in the early planning. His mother was English and that meant that when German Jews were in danger, he was able to exploit both his business and English contacts to help them flee.
25

Jews seeking to flee could try the Jewish Agency’s Palestine Office to get to Palestine, or the newly created umbrella organisation Reich Representation of German Jews (
Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden
), finally set up in September 1933 and led by common agreement by Rabbi Leo Baeck. The two largest groups were the Central Committee for Relief and Reconstruction and the
Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden
(Assistance Organisation for the German Jews). The
Hilfsverein
helped Jews with the procedure of emigration, advice on visas, contacting
relatives
abroad and, if necessary, finding money for tickets and so on. Wilfrid Israel was one of the most prominent members of the
Hilfsverein
.
26
Rabbi Leo Baeck’s nephew, Leo Adam, was one of Wilfrid’s employees in the store. One of his friends was Frank Foley, whose job as passport control officer was a cover for his real role as MI6 head of station in the German capital. Wilfrid and Frank had been friends since the 1920s when Frank, as a junior consular official, had helped Wilfrid’s father, Berthold Israel, obtain a visa to join his wife in London, where their daughter Viva (Wilfrid’s sister) was dying. Their friendship was to prove extremely useful for the fleeing German Jews, and Foley himself is now credited with saving 10,000 Jews.
27

On 15 November 1938 Wilfrid Israel cabled the Council for German Jewry in London and gave them ‘details of the problems facing the community, and proposed the immediate rescue of German-Jewish children and young people up to the age of seventeen’. As a result, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was approached and, although he was non-committal, the proposals were
discussed
in the Cabinet the next day. The council decided someone needed to meet Wilfrid Israel, and because it was unsafe for a Jew to travel to Germany, five Quakers agreed to go instead and meet him in Berlin. Ben Greene, who was one of the five, accompanied Bertha Bracey to the meeting with the Home Secretary, Samuel Hoare, on 21 November 1938. ‘Greene testified to the plea of the German parents and their readiness to part with their children.’
28

That very night, in the House of Commons, Samuel Hoare announced that the government had agreed to the admission of the refugee children using Ben Greene’s evidence, and the first party of 200 children arrived from Germany on 2 December 1938. Meanwhile, Ben Greene returned from a second visit to Germany and reported that ‘the Jewish suicide rate was now so heavy that “the Mainz town authorities have turned off the gas in every Jewish house”’.
29

Bertha herself noted her efforts more modestly:

The UK and its government had no excuse, even in pre-war 1939, for claiming not to know what was happening in Europe. As early as 1936 a book detailing ‘the outlawing of half a million human beings: a collection of facts and
documents
relating to three years’ persecution of German Jews, derived chiefly from National Socialist sources, very carefully assembled by a group of investigators’, was published by Victor Gollancz. Its introduction was written by the Bishop of Durham, Hensley Henson. He concluded on 12 February 1936:

The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs had published a Command Paper in 1939 which included several documents listing the horrors occurring in Germany. The introduction refers to the excuse provided by the German government when His Majesty’s Ambassador in Berlin made a complaint in 1933 about the ‘violence and brutality of the Nazis’. They claimed they regretted the incidents ‘but regarded them as unavoidable in the first ardour of revolutionary fervour’:

However, even this evidence failed to find overwhelming support. The
Daily Express
commented, ‘there is crime and cruelty among the citizens of every nation’, and the extreme right-wing weekly
Truth
hinted that it might all be ‘a Jewish invention’.
33

After 1939 Bertha’s role changed and she dealt with those refugees that had arrived in the UK and were being interned as enemy aliens. Government policy changed following the fall of France, Belgium and Holland. There was greater fear of invasion and what was called ‘fifth column’ activity, which led to thousands
being interned, and this included both men and women, some of whom were sick. This caused those refugees tremendous personal problems and the refugee bodies combined to create a Central Department for Interned Refugees (CDIR). Bertha Bracey became the chairman and dealt with different government
departments
to resolve these issues, such as ‘the unsuitability of ordinary prisons for internment, the possibility of children joining their mothers as aliens, the
provision
of married quarters, and the whole business of relief from internment’.
34

The most important area was the Isle of Man where most aliens were interned – there was a maximum of 10,000 internees during the Second World War. Bertha visited the two women’s camps to see for herself the true situation. She found there were only six members of staff dealing with hundreds of internees and suggested they should use volunteers as an interim measure. She also found that those released did not have the money for the journey back to the mainland, and the elderly and infirm, or those who spoke little English, needed help on arrival.