The Other Schindlers (34 page)

Szilard was staying in Vienna temporarily in a hotel, and being somewhat nosy he checked the hotel register and found Beveridge was residing there too. Szilard decided Beveridge, a true member of the British establishment, could be his ally over this issue and contacted him. Beveridge duly promised to do something on his return to London. Beveridge himself has described his concern on reading that leading professors were being dismissed by the Nazis ‘on racial or political grounds’. He detailed the fear being created when he travelled back to England from Vienna with a German professor he knew slightly, not yet proscribed:

The letter to
The Times
, with its forty-one signatories, was his first move.
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He invited the distinguished 1908 Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Lord Rutherford (1871–1937), to become chairman of the council. Although in poor health, and against the advice of both his doctor and, perhaps more importantly, his wife,
Rutherford agreed. He was the immediate past president of the Royal Society and head of the famous Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge – originally funded by a former chancellor of Cambridge University: William Cavendish, 7th Duke of Devonshire (1808–91). William’s descendant, Andrew Cavendish, the 11th Duke of Devonshire (1920–2004), was a good friend of the Jews as recorded in the
Jewish Chronicle’s
obituary, 28 May 2004. Andrew told me that it was his father who gave him such respect for Jews. The 10th Duke had been instrumental in supporting Zionism in the years before the 1917 Balfour Declaration, and Chaim Weizmann was a regular visitor in their London home. He wrote of the
excitement
in the house when a visit was due: ‘My father had an enormous admiration for the contribution the Jewish community had made to our national life. He was at great pains to make me share his regard and enthusiasm for the Jewish
community
.’
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He said his father was always sorry there was no Jewish blood in the Cavendishes as there was in the Cecils.
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In reply to a question I asked him, he wrote his father had ‘a considerable number of friends who shared his passionate views on justice for the Jewish people’.
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Beveridge chose a younger and more energetic Nobel Prize winner, Professor A.V. Hill, to be the AAC’s vice-chairman. His partner in receiving the 1922 Nobel Prize was Otto Meyerhof, who, together with his wife Hedwig and son Walter, were helped to escape from Marseilles by Varian Fry in 1941. Walter Meyerhof (1922–2006) was born the year his father won the Nobel Prize for Medicine. When he retired in 1992, Walter set up the Varian Fry Foundation to honour his family’s rescuer. It must be remembered that in the early days there was no understanding of the Nazis murdering the Jews. As A.V. Hill wrote to Beveridge in 1934: ‘It is not that these academics will perish as human beings, but that as scholars and scientists they will be heard of no more, since they will have to take up something else in order to live.’

His concerns were merely that ‘knowledge and learning were threatened by petty-minded and vindictive edicts of a racial nature, and that much important scientific work was in danger of being lost because dedicated people with fine minds were being denied the chance to work. That they were generously given that chance in this country should always be remembered as a glorious moment for decency and humanity. As we know only too well, those who had not left Germany before the outbreak of War in 1939 did in fact perish.’
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A.E. Housman (1859–1936) was one of the forty-one signatories of the letter in
The Times
in May 1933. I have tried to establish how active he was without much success. I found three letters from him – two sending apologies for not attending meetings (on 1 June 1933 and 21 February 1936) and one dated 7 May 1934 complaining to the general secretary that he had been listed in the annual report as a Fellow of the British Academy!
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However, I find poignancy in his participation when considering some of his most famous lines from
A Shropshire Lad
, verse XL:

These could have been written by any exiled refugee, remembering his
homeland
with nostalgia, at any time. But I feel it has a particular intensity in this context. He remembers the landscape of home and a lost happiness which he can no longer visit. Only a year or so before she died, my Aunt Ibi, the last of my mother’s three sisters to pass away, spoke to me in Toronto about her family and suddenly said: ‘I wish I could go home!’ She had had a really tough life. I often wonder exactly what she meant – I don’t think she meant she just wanted to go back to Hungary; I think she wanted to go back to that secure time of being within her family, with parents and sisters and all the extended family before it was so tragically disrupted.

By August 1933 the AAC had raised
£
10,000 from British academics and the Jewish Central British Fund (CBF – later World Jewish Relief). Albert Einstein had spoken at the Albert Hall in October 1933 to help raise money and
subsequently
a special fund was set up at LSE where staff donated 1–3 per cent of their salary for persecuted German colleagues. These funds were used to provide for refugees who could not find work; married scholars were given
£
250 a year whilst the single had
£
180. In 1936 the AAC became the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL), and later the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA).
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These grants were generous, bearing in mind that the 10,000 children who came on the Kindertransport by September 1939 were divided into ‘Guaranteed’ and ‘Non-Guaranteed’. The Guaranteed were those for whom relatives or friends undertook to pay, as we have already seen Iris Origo did for six Jewish children. The ‘Non-Guaranteed’ were those sponsored by an organisation or local communities.
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We can speculate on what has changed in international affairs since McDonald’s attempts to arouse world opinion in the 1930s were so unsuccessful. The League of Nations has been replaced by the United Nations but world mayhem and massacres continue. Sir David Frost interviewed Bill Clinton in July 2004 for the BBC and asked him what he wished he could change about his presidency. Clinton said:

The Rwandans saw the UN stand aside in 1994 and Tom Ndahiro of the Human Rights Commission told the BBC that Yugoslavia was treated differently to Darfur and Rwanda – western countries do not move unless their national
interests
are at stake. Perhaps indifferent is the word he meant.
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The Rwandan genocide also produced its own rescuers – Sara Karuhimbi hid over twenty people, but does not believe she did anything special and cannot understand why anyone would not do the same. Paul Rusesabagina’s story was told in the film
Hotel Rwanda
.
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Paul was a hotel manager in Kigali, and when the manager of the Hotel des Mille Colline, the best in town, left the country, Paul, a Hutu married to a Tutsi woman, was moved in to manage it. When the Hutus started killing the Tutsis, more than 1,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus took refuge in the hotel and he protected them by using the alcohol on site to
influence
the militia that he invited in.
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Also, he and the influential guests phoned everyone they could, including the White House, the French foreign ministry, the Belgian king and Sabena HQ. Paul was a true hero but his modest words echo very closely those of Holocaust rescuers:

In 2005 Holocaust Memorial Day (27 January) was marked in Kigali, Rwanda. At the newly erected memorial to the victims of the Rwandan genocide there is an exhibition about the Holocaust. Teddy Mugabo, who lost her grandparents and many other relatives in 1994, told BBC reporter Robert Walker about the similarities between the Nazis and the Hutus. She said: ‘It shows how the Nazis started segregating people and it shows the way they measured the nose and eyes to show that they are different people. In Rwanda when they were killing Tutsis they did the same thing. They measured the nose. They were measuring the eyes, heights and it is very similar.’

Additionally, in both genocides the victims were dehumanised by their enemies, who called them vermin and cockroaches. This is a classic tool:

A Rwandan survivor, Beata Uwazaninka, has stated:

Yad Vashem, recognising the significance of the Rwandan genocide, held an innovative seminar in November 2005. Entitled
The Genocide in Rwanda: Have we Learned Anything from the Holocaust?
, the seminar was a turning point in Yad Vashem’s history because it was the first time a non-Holocaust-related issue was dealt with at its international school for Holocaust studies. The seminar was the initiative of a group of Tutsi survivors who sought help from Yad Vashem in
planning
their own remembrance, and it was conducted with the help of a Belgian and Rwandan based Tutsi NGO and the French Shoah Memorial. Yolande
Mukagasana, director of Nyamirambo Point d’Appui, was one of the first
survivors
of the Rwandan genocide to document the event. She lost her husband, brothers and sisters, and her three children in the massacres, and has devoted her life to caring for orphans and helping her savaged country reconstruct itself. She said: ‘You suffered before we did, and you have important lessons to teach us … We need you in order to rebuild.’
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Yolande had contacted Yad Vashem and asked if ‘members of different
organizations
, involved in memorializing the Rwandan genocide, could come to Yad Vashem to learn about Holocaust remembrance in Israel, as well as educational activities related to the Holocaust and its consequences worldwide, that might serve as a model for similar efforts on the part of the Tutsi tribe’. The most moving part of the event was when Rwandan survivors met Holocaust survivors and the latter came to listen. This encouraged the Tutsis to talk about their experiences, perhaps for the first time. Yolande said: ‘The meeting with the Holocaust survivors helped me more than anything to cope with the trauma I experienced. Other people, even psychologists, know how to pity. These meetings helped me understand what I really feel.’
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Avner Shalev, chairman of Yad Vashem, commented that survivors and the international community, which had failed to prevent both the Holocaust and the most recent Rwandan genocide, were obliged to create a system of values for human existence to prevent such catastrophes.

However, even as the survivors of these two genocides seek comfort from each other, another catastrophe has unravelled before the world’s televisions since 2003 – Darfur. But the world has prevaricated, as it did to James McDonald’s warnings and as it did with Rwanda. Elie Wiesel has been speaking out about the situation in Sudan since 2004. Whose voice has greater credibility and authority than this survivor of Auschwitz, when he says: