Even at the tender age of ten, he revered pianist Vladimir Horowitz. Many years on he wrote to me in one of his more sentimental moments of nostalgia: ‘Horowitz once removed a bee sting at the tip of my left index finger when, at the age of five, I visited the villa where he was staying with my father; ever since, my left index finger has been holy and if you look carefully, you’ll spot the halo that surrounds it.’
Alexander was a strict old-school Prussian disciplinarian; family folklore suggests that my father inherited his short-fused temper. Laura was apparently an excellent cook, famous for her strudel pastry, as fine as gauze: my father claimed he could read through it. He talked reverently about her roasted goose and her knödel, potato dumplings filled with plums or apricots, whose stones she replaced with a sugar cube that melted during poaching. She was so fussy and exacting about ingredients that on the rare occasions the family dined in restaurants she would insist on going to inspect the kitchens to check how fresh the produce was and how well it was being prepared.
My father’s favourite uncle, Ludwig Schiffer, was a distinguished partner in a law firm. Before the rise of the Nazis, the family socialised with Arthur Seyss-Inquart, a prominent lawyer with his own practice, who would go on to become Hitler’s Austrian Minister for the Interior for just two days before the Anschluss merged Austria and Germany. Later he imposed a reign of terror over the Netherlands, sending thousands of Jews to their deaths before being tried and executed at Nuremberg.
But in pre-Hitler Vienna, Seyss-Inquart’s anti-Semitism did not prevent him from associating with Jewish colleagues, not only in their offices but at home. On one such occasion, someone took a photograph of him pushing my father, who must have been about five or six years old, on a swing. In the light of subsequent events, this photograph has assumed mythical status in family lore, but of course, no one has a copy of it today.
Uncle Ludwig was sent to Dachau for six months, possibly by Seyss-Inquart. The story goes that his formidable wife, Olga, dressed in her best fur coat, went to see first Heinrich Himmler and then Seyss-Inquart, whom she reputedly slapped across the face for his act of betrayal. Why she got away with this is a mystery. Ludwig was released and he and his family emigrated to America. But that was much later.
In 1938, Alexander and Laura Baum saw the writing on the wall and decided not to delay. After hearing about a rescue operation to take Jewish children out of Eastern Europe through the Red Cross, my grandparents lobbied the Jewish emigration authorities, which had been established earlier that year under the command of SS captain Adolf Eichmann. They secured places for my father and his sister Franzi on the first convoy of children to leave Vienna.
Who told them what was to happen? When? How? Were they sitting at the dinner table? Was the mood sombre? Did Laura fight back tears? Was Alexander stern or reassuring when he told them they were going on a holiday to England? That they would join them later? Did the children get to ask any questions, like how soon will you come, or were they too obedient to ask anything at all except what could they take with them?
Uncle Ludwig, recently returned from his concentration camp experience, interceded personally to secure an export permit so that my father could take his most precious possession, his stamp collection, with him. On 7 December 1938, a date that stuck in my father’s mind forever, they went together to a Nazi office to obtain the required official document. Four days later, my father and his sister left Vienna.
The rescue operation became known as Kindertransport. While Kinder means ‘children’ in German, I like the fact that in English, the word implies the kindness it demonstrated so tangibly. It was the ultimate manifestation of compassionate action, bringing together Quakers, Christians and Jews with a shared purpose. Many were exceptional individuals who showed great personal courage as volunteers travelling to Prague, Berlin and Vienna to organise the train convoys that brought thousands of children to a safer life in Britain. They had been galvanised into action by the incessant lobbying of the British Jewish Refugee Committee, which prompted a debate in the House of Commons that led to an agreement allowing a limited number of children under seventeen years of age temporary residence. Ten thousand were saved from their fate.
The logistics of Kindertransport were a remarkable demonstration of cooperation and collaboration between unlikely partners, including the Nazis themselves, who supplied the trains. The children undertook their journey in sealed carriages, according to orders from Nazi command that echo the sinister conditions of those who travelled on cattle trucks to the death camps a few years later.
Each child could only take one small case (some managed to smuggle violins in their bags) and the Nazis imposed a rule that parents could not accompany their children on to the station platform to say goodbye, although my father disputed this, remembering that both his parents said their farewells at the train. Perhaps the regulations were tightened later. When I imagine this harrowing leave-taking—those last hugs and kisses and banal admonishments to be good which parents feel duty bound to mouth in such circumstances—I console myself with the fact that Laura and Alexander had no idea what lay ahead. How much more unbearable it would all have been if they had known.
I don’t know whether my father knew any of the other children in his compartment or not, whether they played games, sang songs or found other ways to pass the time, whether the sealed compartments were claustrophobic, whether they could see out of the windows and work out where they were. I do know that initially my father was separated from Franzi and that he pleaded with one of the nurses or nuns (he can only remember them as women dressed in grey, and is unsure of their status, but I think they must have been Red Cross volunteers) to help him cross the alarmingly unstable section between two carriages so that he could be reunited with his sister. From then on, they stuck together.
When the train reached the Hook of Holland, Dutch families were waiting on the platform to pass the children cheese-filled bread rolls and pieces of chocolate. They then crossed the North Sea—which must have been my father’s first experience of travelling by ship—and disembarked at the port of Harwich, where they were photographed by the waiting British press, wearing their ID number tags around their necks like labels on parcels.
In these images, some looked cheerful, others stricken: most had never been separated from their parents before. From there they were taken to a holiday camp owned by Billy Butlin called Dovercourt Bay in Essex. The camp was brand new, and Butlin had offered it to the relief campaign as a generous gesture. But it was winter, and the weather was wet and cold; my father remembers the place primarily because of the mud between the barracks-style accommodation blocks that housed six hundred children.
Staffed by Quakers, including students on university vacations, the place had a canteen and a post office, and charities and various businesses donated items to the refugee children: one day Marks and Spencer delivered hundreds of pairs of much-needed gumboots.
On Sundays, visitors who were prospective foster parents could come into the camp and view the children while they ate lunch in the canteen. If a child appealed to them, they were allowed to take them on an afternoon outing as a sort of trial run, to see if they were compatible. My father got his hopes up when he and Franzi were taken out by a smart couple in a Rolls Royce, who lived nearby in a rather grand mansion, but they were returned at the end of the afternoon without any follow-up. Younger children were more appealing and easy to place, so Harry and Franzi, who insisted on not being separated, were harder to find a home for. What can it have felt like to see other children leave and to be left behind?
Children who were taken to London on subsequent Kinder-transports arrived at King’s Cross Station, where they went to a large gymnasium divided by a rope. They stood on one side of it, and prospective foster couples stood on the other. When the child’s name was called out, they stepped forward to the rope and met their new families. There was no vetting, no checks on suitability or circumstances.
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p; After a week at Dovercourt Bay, Mr Blodek, one of the camp’s army of volunteer guardians, took a group of about thirty children to Bath. Late one night, Harry and Franzi were delivered to an imposing house covered in ivy on the outskirts of town.
Writing about it many years later for a Kindertransport anniversary newsletter, my father heightened the theatrical, Dickensian atmosphere of the place and its owner, turning her into his very own Miss Havisham:
My sister and I were assigned to a certain Mrs Tanner, who was as nutty as a fruitcake and lived in a twenty six room house called The Cottage, with no electric light, no heating and no domestic staff.
On our second day, my sister tried to make some coffee, and found a dead mouse in the coffee grinder. The only food in the house was a supply of tins of Heinz baked beans, which we thought a great treat and some home grown artichokes, but we had no idea how to eat these. Our Christmas presents were a tube of Rowntrees fruit drops each.
But the Cottage did have its compensation in that Mrs Tanner owned not one, not two, but three Bechsteins: one in the hall on the ground floor, a second in the drawing room on the first floor, and a third in her bedroom on the second floor. She was an accomplished pianist and would start, dressed only in a wafting negligé, usually with some Liszt or Chopin on Bechstein number one; then, suddenly, she would stop, and accompanied by a manic giggle rising in tone with her increasing lunacy, she would run upstairs to Bechstein number two, and continue at the precise points where she had interrupted herself; after a few more minutes of playing she would ascend to Bechstein number three for the grand finale of her performance. We could hardly complain of a lack of high class entertainment.
There was a collection of rather handsome suits of medieval armour positioned on the landings of the staircase leading to the upper floors, but when I ran past one of these, the vibration caused one knight’s visor to snap shut suddenly and the lance he held in his right hand fell clean across my path so that I was convinced he was alive. I ran out of the house screaming blue murder, with Franzi following, until we reached Bath, where we took refuge in the home of one of the other Kinder. In the morning, we phoned Mr Blodek and told him we could not possibly stay with Mrs Tanner. We begged to be allowed to return to Dovercourt Bay until they could find another home for us. Mr Blodek was sympathetic and kindly arranged for us to be repatriated to the camp. We learned later that Mrs Tanner had been removed to a home for the mentally ill.
Back at square one, and waiting to be re-fostered, my father went to the camp post office daily, hoping for a letter from home. He was also allowed to call his parents but I have no idea how often he received news from his family or what they told him of what was happening to them in Vienna. His regular appearance attracted the attention of David Hughes, a seventeen-year-old Quaker in his first year of studying geography at Cambridge, who was volunteering there during the term break. He spoke German fluently, having spent the summer of 1938 cycling all over Germany, and soon extended his friendship to my father.
‘I remember a quiet, neatly dressed small boy politely asking for stamps, his head not much above the level of the counter,’ David Hughes wrote, when I asked for his first impressions of my father.
In January of 1939, David Hughes sent a letter to his parents, John and Mary: ‘The main thing is these children must be taken in somewhere. There are two I have noticed in particular, a boy of 9–11 and his sister of about 16. The boy, Harry Baum, is brilliant, naturally well-mannered, and you fall for him immediately. Both of them have an exceeding charm and grace … these kids are among the most outstanding in the camp. The children were given a test in German today on general knowledge and Harry came out top. I am convinced that he could walk away with a scholarship after six months of English.’
That letter sealed their fate. Thirty-six hours later, Mary Hughes wrote a one-word reply to her son: ‘YES’. Although of modest means, and already stretched to the limit by appeals for help from extensive aid networks, the Hugheses took Harry and Franzi into their home without hesitation or conditions.
Describing them in her diary as ‘shy and apprehensive’ after their first experience, Mary seated them by the fire to warm up after their journey and made them feel immediately welcome as the first Kinder to be received in York. Others were to follow.
My father later wrote: ‘Our circle of fellow refugees soon expanded. The generosity and kindness of the city knew no bounds. We had unlimited access to the cinemas and theatres and to public transport, free of charge.’
The hospitality is ironic, given York’s notorious past as the scene of ferocious pogroms against Jews during the times of the Crusades. But my father was as unaware of that distant violence as he was of what was happening in Vienna. He found himself in the bosom of a loving family, his school fees paid by donations from strangers across the community.
The Hugheses were cultured and well travelled. Educated at Oxford, John Hughes had served as president of the prestigious Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, the heartland of American Quakerism, for two years. Mary Hughes was not only a genuine royal Stuart but a direct descendant of Robert the Bruce, the King of Scotland. Her mother, known only as Granny Stuart, made a lasting impression on my father: ‘She lived in a large house in Harrogate with a staff of five, including a chauffeur, and always wore a toque, just like Queen Mary, even when she was in her own home. Whenever we went to tea there at the weekend, she would organise all the staff to form a receiving line and they would be introduced to us as if we had never met before.’
I wonder if the Hugheses spoilt my father just a tiny bit, even though material possessions were never a priority in Quaker life. I hope so. Quakers are not renowned for their cuisine, and coming from a Viennese home, Harry and Franzi would have missed Laura’s cooking acutely. But even in wartime, Mary Hughes made an effort in the kitchen, recording in her 1941 diary that she served the children damsons and custard, Bakewell pudding and, as a special treat for Christmas, a goose, prepared, as his mother used to, roasted and stuffed with apples.
Harry was thrilled to receive a Raleigh bicycle as a birthday present, and became such a daring and speedy rider that the police eventually banned him from city streets for being a hazard to public safety after he clipped a pedestrian. Mary Hughes’s diary paints a picture of a young man I do not recognise, brimming with physical vitality, riding to the Lake District with schoolfriends during holidays. A couple of years later he spent a summer holiday exploring Scotland with a chum on a tandem. Mary records him being a willing and diligent helper in all domestic chores, even digging in the kitchen garden, which is hard to believe. He never set foot in the garden at home.
Like the Baums, the Hugheses loved classical music and choral singing; the house was frequently filled with Bach and Beethoven, which must have provided a great sense of comfort and continuity to both Harry and Franzi. They all attended concerts at York Minster. As Mary Hughes noted approvingly in her diary, ‘No wasting time on jazz for Harry.’ From that time forward, his tastes were set to the highbrow end of the scale and never wavered.
As David Hughes predicted, Harry soon won a scholarship to Bootham, the top Quaker school in the country. Located within the medieval walls of the fortress city, Bootham was a liberal and progressive public (that is to say in Australia, private) boys’ school where students were allowed to call teachers by their first names. I am trying to imagine how my father managed to thrive there when he had only just acquired English, but he must have had some inspirational teachers who gave him a lifelong love of history, which became his passion and in which he soon achieved top marks. He became a prefect at the school and was instrumental in establishing its debating society. Holidays were an opportunity for high-culture pursuits including his first visit to Stratford-upon-Avon, where he would become a lifelong patron of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The Archbishop of York at the time was Dr William Temple, a committed social reformer who was also a member of the Labour Party and who later, wit
h Rabbi Joseph Hertz, went on to found an anti-bigotry group known as the Council of Christians and Jews. Dr Temple also had close links with the local Quakers (including John Hughes, one of his contemporaries at Oxford), although he earned their dismay by refusing to condemn the carpet-bombing of German cities by Allied forces.
I have no idea whether only occasionally or on a regular basis, but my father says he remembers being invited to sumptuous afternoon teas at Bishopthorpe, the prelate’s palace, on Sundays, when he feasted on strawberries with cream. Rather than merely enjoying this as a treat, my father, always strategic, used these occasions as an opportunity to lobby Dr Temple, whom he was invited to call Uncle Bill, to help him get his parents out of Austria. Dr Temple duly obliged, and after writing letters to sponsor her, he managed to secure a visa for Laura Baum to work as a domestic servant, which was the only kind of work the British government permitted the parents of Kinder, so that they could not be accused of depriving British nationals of jobs. She arrived in July 1939.
Alexander should have joined his family in September of that year, also with a visa secured by Dr Temple, but the outbreak of war made this impossible. He disappeared without trace. For many years, we presumed he had died in a concentration camp, along with most of my father’s other relatives.
There is no question in my mind that my father felt he had failed personally in saving his father. I also believe that, though this was never overtly expressed, in some way he resented his mother for getting out instead of his father. Alexander loomed larger in his life, absence magnifying his impact. Perhaps the reason that music always made my father so emotional was that it conjured up the parent who took him to concerts. Certainly I have never seen anyone listen to a symphony with more intensity, as if communing with a higher power.
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