Today, we may look back and wonder how different history might have been if other church leaders, in America and England, had followed Archbishop Temple’s lead. Or if his predecessor, Cosmo Lang, had spoken out for the rescue of Jewish refugees in the 1930s, before the Nazi persecution turned to mass murder.76
We may here also recall the controversial role of Pope Pius XI (Pope 1922–39). His failure to speak out was apparent to Edith Stein, who although born into an orthodox Jewish family in 1891, converted to Catholicism in 1922 and entered a Carmelite convent in Cologne in 1934. It was well known that she had written to Pope Pius XI in 1933; however the letter, dated 12 April 1933, was only recently discovered in papers in the Vatican archives. They were part of the mass of secret pre-war files opened by the Vatican on 15 February 2003. A Jewish-Catholic team of academics had asked to see the letter some three years before, but permission was denied at that time.77
Edith had held a post at the German Institute of Scientific Pedagogy in Münster, but the anti-Jewish legislation led to her being dismissed.78 At Easter 1933, her anxieties about the Jews’ plight led Edith to wish to speak to Pope Pius XI personally at a private audience. When this did not prove possible, she wrote to him describing the impact of the Nazi boycott on Jewish businesses. She told him that it had destroyed many people’s livelihoods and led to many suicides:
While the greater part of the responsibility [for their deaths] falls on those who pushed them to such gestures, it also falls on those who kept silent.
Not only the Jews, but thousands of faithful Catholics in Germany – and I think throughout the world – wait and hope that the Church will make its voice heard against such abuse of the name of Christ …
All of us who are watching the current situation in Germany as faithful children of the Church fear the worst for the image of the Church itself if the silence is further prolonged. We are also convinced that this silence cannot, in the long term, obtain peace from the current German government.79
In her diary, Edith noted that she received a reply from the Vatican sending the Pope’s blessings to her and praying that God would protect the Church enabling it to respond.80 In a memoir dated 18 December 1938 she wrote:
I know that my letter was delivered to the Holy Father unopened; some time thereafter I received his blessing for my self and for my relatives. Nothing else happened. Later on I often wondered whether this letter might have come to his mind once in a while. For in the years that followed, that which I had predicted for the future of the Catholics in Germany came true step by step.81
Edith was arrested by the Gestapo in Holland, as a result of Hitler’s order for the arrest of all non-Aryan Roman Catholics dated 26 July 1942. She was sent to Auschwitz where she went to the gas chamber on 9 August 1942, as a ‘reprisal against a Dutch Catholic Church official’s condemnation of Nazi-anti-Semitism’.82 She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1986 and on 11 October 1998 she was canonised as a martyr-saint. This caused controversy amongst Jews because the Nazis killed her precisely because she was not Aryan.83
When it comes to choices by bodies in the UK, there were different reactions in England in the pre-war period amongst the most educated in the land. However, bodies do not have their own minds – they are led by individuals and those individuals decide on policy.
As the Nazis’ persecution increased, the British government had to consider how to deal with all the visitors arriving at its ports who admitted to being refugees. The arrival of many refugees led the Cabinet to review its position. Medawar and Pyke examined Cabinet papers and noted that on 12 April 1933 the Cabinet had reviewed the question of the Jewish exiles. It decided to:
‘Try and secure for this country prominent Jews who were being expelled from Germany and who had achieved distinction whether in pure science, applied science, such as medicine or technical industry, music or art.’ This, the Cabinet considered, would ‘not only obtain for this country the advantage of their knowledge and experience, but would also create a very favourable impression in the world, particularly if our hospitality were offered with some warmth’.84
This resonates with the work of Varian Fry, who was sent out with a list of 200 names of prominent artists and intellectuals but ended up saving thousands of people – mostly quite unknown and insignificant. Instead of winning praise he was castigated on his return to the US for breaching his instructions and there was a major row with the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC). It seems that both the ERC in America and Britain’s Cabinet were only interested in the prominent and the famous. When Varian was expelled from Marseilles, the chief of police told him it was because ‘you have protected Jews and anti-Nazis’.85 When he returned to America, he was expelled from the ERC for helping anti-fascists who were mostly Jewish. This was covered in the original version of his book Surrender on Demand in 1941, although a modified version was published in 1945. As late as December 1942 his most famous article, ‘The Massacre of the Jews’, pleaded that immigration should be increased and the procedure for issuing visas improved.86
Whilst the British Medical Association (BMA) was not very sympathetic to its fellow refugee physicians in the pre-war years, Lord Dawson of Penn, President of the Royal College of Physicians, told Home Secretary Sir John Gilmour in 1933 that ‘the number that could be usefully absorbed or teach us anything could be counted on the fingers of one hand’. He was convinced that those doctors seeking admission were merely economic migrants.87
It is generally known that the medical profession became very agitated by the attempts to permit Austrian doctors to come to England following the Anschluss in 1938, when Germany took over Austria. Viscount Templewood, who was descended from Quakers on his father’s side, wrote of his time as Home Secretary (1937–39) and his sympathy for the desperate Jews. However, his attempts to help caused suspicion – was he letting in German spies or ‘endangering professional and Trade Union standards by admitting cheap labour’? In his memoirs he wrote:
More than once I received an unpleasant shock to my humanitarian sentiments. When, for instance, I attempted to open the door to Austrian doctors and surgeons, I was met by the obstinate resistance of the medical profession. Unmoved by the world-wide reputation of the doctors of Vienna, its representatives, adhering to the strict doctrine of the more rigid trade unionists, assured me that British medicine had nothing to gain from new blood, and much to lose from foreign dilution. It was only after long discussions that I was able to circumvent the opposition and arrange for a strictly limited number of doctors and surgeons to enter the country and practise their profession. I would gladly have admitted the Austrian medical schools en bloc. The help that many of these doctors subsequently gave to our war effort, whether in the treatment of wounds, nervous troubles and paralysis or in the production of penicillin, was soon to prove how great was the country’s gain.88
Nevertheless, he had to be more circumspect when he answered questions in the House of Commons. On 7 July 1938 he was asked about the numbers of refugee doctors, dentists and oculists permitted to practise after being registered with British medical and dental registers since 1933. The answer was 185 and 93 respectively. 89 A week later, the question was raised again and the Home Secretary was discretion itself; reading his answers in the debate one would never have known his true feelings. He referred to co-operation with the medical profession, the refugee committees and the Home Office to reconcile the needs of the refugees and the fears of the doctors ‘of flooding the profession here with doctors who are not required in the country’. Perhaps he should have been more open with his views.
The lack of understanding of the refugees’ true plight is exemplified by the final question to the Home Secretary that day. Mr William Thorn, MP for West Ham Plaistow, asked: ‘Does not the right hon. Gentleman think that if an application were made to the German Government, they would allow these doctors to stop in their own country?’90
It appears that dentists were more fortunate than doctors, since
those holding German diplomas were allowed to practise without undergoing extra training.91
A positive reaction to the plight of the persecuted European academics came from the Academic Assistance Council (AAC), which was created mainly at the instigation of Sir William Beveridge. He was then Director of the London School of Economics (LSE) and was encouraged by a Hungarian nuclear physicist, Dr Leo Szilard, who wanted to set up a ‘University in Exile’. Beveridge himself was a witness to the early dismissals of Jewish academics when he visited Vienna in March 1933 with his colleague from the LSE, Professor Lionel Robbins:
This distinguished pair of British academics read in a newspaper, whilst sitting in a café, about the suspension of 12 important Jewish scientists from German Universities. Beveridge realised that all this knowledge and experience had to be saved, and that the dignity of the German academics must be upheld for the benefit of the entire learned world.92
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:
He was in a state of panic all the way because in the next compartment was a youth, little more than a boy, whom he took for a Nazi agent, detailed to keep watch on him and hand him to the police. My friend’s fears may have been imaginary, but his panic was real, and mind-and spirit-destroying.93
The letter to The Times, with its forty-one signatories, was his first move.94 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.’ 95 He said his father was always sorry there was no Jewish blood in the Cavendishes as there was in the Cecils.96 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’.97
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.’98
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!99
However, I find poignancy in his participation when considering some of his most famous lines from A Shropshire Lad, verse XL:
Into my heart on air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
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).100
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.101
THE HOLOCAUST AND RWANDA AND DARFUR
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:
I wish I had moved in Rwanda quickly. I wish I had gone in there quicker, not just waited ’til the camps were set up. We might have been able to save, probably not even half those who were lost, but still a large number of people.
I really regret that. I care a lot about Africa and I don’t think that these … wars are inevitable and these kinds of murders are inevitable. And I’ve spent a great deal of time in the last ten years trying to make it up to Africa in general and the Rwandans in particular – so I regret that deeply.102
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.103
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.104 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.105 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:
So in a sense he did not want to be thought of as exceptionally great or as a hero in any sense because the only standard by which he was exceptional was by comparison with the abysmal measure of the murderer. And so he did not want to accept that you were an exceptional man for not having become a murderer. He wanted to think they were exceptional for having become murderers. But he was very clear about it. He was shocked by how many people he knew had crossed the line and co-operated with the genocidal order without much resistance. And as he always said, ‘They could have done as I did if they had wanted to’.106
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.’
The Other Schindlers Page 26