Their Promised Land

by Ian Buruma

  By this time the world was already edging closer to the abyss. The question is when the signs of disaster were first detected by a well-to-do upper-middle-class Jewish family with German roots. We know that many people of a similar background in Germany chose to ignore the signs until it was too late.

  Family holiday in Switzerland

  The year 1931 was not a spectacular one. Japanese troops had incorporated Manchuria as a puppet state of the Japanese Empire. The old field marshal Paul von Hindenburg was still president of the German Republic, his stern Prussian face glaring with watery eyes from the blue 25-pfennig postage stamps. Hitler was hovering, but not yet in charge. Lord Robert Cecil, president of the League of Nations, declared that war was never so improbable.

  Win and her mother visited Kassel and Berlin in April 1931. The only hint of any unpleasantness is an offhand remark in one of her letters about Uncle Adolf, the orthopedic surgeon, who seems “desperately depressed and quiet.” He “is very changed,” but she doesn’t explain why. The reason may have had more to do with ill health, due to his heart condition, than any external circumstances. In the event, he died in 1933, deeply humiliated that a German patriot like himself, awarded the Iron Cross for his military services in World War I, would suddenly find himself unwanted in the only society he knew.

  Franz Rosenzweig had died in Frankfurt in 1929, leaving his mother, Tante Dele, in deep mourning. (Soon she would be consoled by a female companion, an aristocratic lady down on her luck named Fräulein von Kästner.) But on the whole, life was still untroubled in Kassel in 1931. There was no hint yet of what was to come only a few years later, at least not in Win’s letters, and perhaps not in the lives of her relatives either.

  “It seems a far cry to Hollycroft Avenue & all of you now,” Win writes on April 8. “Cassel is so closely associated with my youth that I feel quite unmarried & unattached here.” She worries about getting fat despite “my spot of daily exercise,” because “the food is so good.” Everyone is “charming as ever.” There are “pukka” dinner parties. They “get up in full evening dress” for a performance of Faust, Parts I and II, which, she declares, was “very interesting and amazingly well produced and acted—though Part II was incomprehensible on the stage.” There is an excursion to see a “dubious light comedy by Molnar.” They watch a movie starring Grock, the famous clown, which has not yet come to London. In Berlin, the Sterns—“as nice as ever”—pick up Win and her mother at the railway station. Ernst Stern, an industrial chemist, married to Win’s cousin Maria, drives them around “in his lovely big car.” A “wonderful programme of theatres and concerts has been planned.”

  One year later, Hitler would run against Hindenburg in the presidential election. He lost, but still got 35 percent of the vote. Two years later, when Hitler was in full control, the Sterns escaped to London, where they would spend the entire war in the Schlesinger house on Templewood Avenue.

  On the last day of 1931, Bernard is abroad for a medical conference, and Win writes a letter from Hollycroft Avenue, commiserating with his difficulties in securing a permanent hospital job. She is worried, in a typical fit of self-doubt, that the first seven years of their marriage might have been a disappointment to him: “I realize how lamentably short of your ideal I have fallen, and yet I do care so much and I have tried so hard to be a good wife. If you cease to believe in me, then there will be no one left.” She ends this cry with the “hope that 1932 holds something good in store for you in spite of this wicked world.”

  Quite what she meant by “wicked” is impossible to tell. Was she thinking of the hospitals that refused to take Bernard, or was she just emitting a sigh about the wickedness of the world in general? She was an avid reader of the news—in The Times, and after the war The Daily Telegraph. Perhaps she was thinking of the Japanese war in China. Or possibly it was the rise of Hitler and the brownshirts, brawling in the German streets with Communists, Jews, or anybody else they didn’t like. That Bernard and Win were far from oblivious is clear from their early membership of the International League Against Anti-Semitism, founded in France in 1927. Together in June 1939 they attended a congress of the league in Belgium, which they found a gloomy and anxious place.

  The first mention of the troubles in Germany comes in August 1933. Win is with her children in Wales. They are joined by a fourteen-year-old German boy named Reinhard, who, Win writes, “is not keen on reading.” She is afraid that he must be “frightfully bored.”

  Reinhard was in fact Uncle Adolf’s son. I knew him very well as Ashley Raeburn, a distinguished director of Shell and vice chairman of Rolls-Royce. Ashley, to me as a little Anglophile in The Hague, was the consummate English gentleman, who bore a slight resemblance to the young Prince Philip. I stayed with Ashley and his Welsh wife, Nest, in Japan in the 1970s, when he moved around Tokyo in a Rolls-Royce as Shell’s chief man in the Far East. We used to play games of croquet on his vast lawn. The keen pleasure he took in knocking away his opponent’s croquet ball was the only hint of his steely will to succeed.

  Reinhard, as he then still was, had come to live with Uncle Walter’s family. Walter had persuaded Uncle Adolf that his children would no longer be safe in Germany, even though they had been baptized as Christians. Reinhard arrived in England with fresh memories of Jew baiting at school. Possibly on Walter’s advice, or perhaps based on his own instinct for survival, the German Gymnasium student quickly remade himself into a proper Englishman. By the time I knew him, the transformation had long been complete. But it couldn’t happen soon enough for Win.

  Fresh air and lots of exercise were among the main purposes of family holidays at the seaside. This, by the way, was not a fetish peculiar to them. Uncle Adolf had been a keen Alpine mountain climber. Healthy fresh-air pursuits were cultivated by many German Jews, perhaps as another sign of distinction from the pinched lives of poorer Jews in the fetid shtetls and slums of central Europe. After a long climb up the rocks, Win reports to Bernard on August 18, 1933, that Reinhard “is developing into rather a serious lad, under Walter’s guidance no doubt, and he lacks the sporting instincts and the agility of an English lad of his age . . . He doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself unduly.”

  John and Nanny

  The other adults in Wales were a German governess named Paulinchen and a nanny, who “is positively sadistic” toward John “and rants at him like a virago for every misdemeanour.” (John would nurse a profound loathing of “bossy women” for the rest of his life.) There was also a guest from Germany, named Fritz Schneider. I have not been able to find out who he was. But Win writes that he was “charming.” Reinhard, however, “says very rude and tactless things to Fritz, who is very firm with him, and sometimes deeply hurt . . . Last night, for example, R. said to F. at dinner ‘Bavarians are only a second class people anyway.’ This may have been by way of light banter, but it was greatly misplaced. He always hurls all the misfortunes of the Jews in Germany at Fritz’s head, and there are occasionally some awkward moments.”

  Going through the correspondence of 1934, I was stopped by the following passage in a letter from Win, written at Templewood Avenue on August 28: “‘A Journey Through England’ makes dismal reading & one wonders what is going to happen to us all and our children.” This was written three weeks after Hitler abolished the presidency and became the führer, but still a year before the Nuremberg racial laws deprived German Jews of their nationality and made life unbearable. The only book of that title I could find was a compilation of letters written in 1722 by an English gentleman to a foreign friend. I cannot imagine that this made for dismal reading. I have a suspicion that what she meant was An English Journey by J. B. Priestley, published in 1934 to great acclaim. It described the lamentable social conditions in working-class England and advocated socialism as the only solution.

  —

  One might have expected a more pronounced anti-German tone to creep into the letters by the mid-1930s,
but there is no evidence of it yet. In March 1935, Win is in Dorchester, rehearsing for an amateur concert to be held there at the Corn Exchange. She suffers from her usual feelings of inadequacy. On March 3, she writes to Bernard, who is now busy in London juggling jobs at various hospitals, including Great Ormond Street and the Royal Northern, “I feel that I’m not really up to it, at least not without far more work . . . The oboist is rather a typical German pedant—no quarter given, and he is far from satisfied with my performance in the Bach, so that now I have such an inferiority complex about it that I can scarcely play it at all. He is as a matter of fact a very sound musician . . . [and] quite the lion of the neighbourhood, being made much of by all the musical spinsters in Dorset—and they appear to be legion.”

  Bernard is entertained for dinner at the German restaurant Schmidt, in Charlotte Street, an establishment that survived well into the 1970s. The food is “excellent.” He longs to take Win there. In August 1933, he refers to one of their temporary maids as a Dreckmädchen (shitty little girl), not a flattering term, to be sure, but slightly unusual for an Englishman who affected to barely know a word of any foreign language.

  In August 1937, six months before the German army marched into Austria and jeering mobs in Vienna forced Jews to get on their hands and knees to scrub the streets with toothbrushes, Bernard is planning a Continental holiday, taking in Vienna and Paris. But Vienna is dropped at the last minute, not because the Nazis were spoiling to take over, but because he needs more time to complete a lecture series, still hoping for a job at St. Thomas’ Hospital.

  Then comes the letter, already mentioned in the previous chapter, written on July 2, 1938, four months before Kristallnacht, when Nazi storm troopers ran amok in all the main cities of Germany, torching synagogues, beating up Jews in the streets, ransacking Jewish shops, quite literally throwing Jews out of their homes, and driving the men into concentration camps, from which some never reemerged, and many of those who did were physical and mental wrecks reduced to numb silence. The letter is written from the Grand Hotel in Bristol. Bernard won’t get the job at St. Thomas’. “It is the old, old story,” he writes: “(45) The senior job is not for me at any price.”

  As a consequence of this encounter with the “old, old story,” twelve lives would be saved from almost certain murder. Before others, mostly British Jews and Quakers, tried to help Jewish children escape from Germany on the so-called Kindertransport, Bernard and Win had already decided to do so. For most people, the shock of Kristallnacht was the spur to action. My grandparents were planning to take in twelve young refugees several months before the pogrom of November 9, 1938.

  The surviving members of the twelve are now in their eighties and spread around the world, in Berkeley, California; Long Island; London; Wales; Jerusalem; and in a retirement home near Tel Aviv. I have visited most of them on several occasions, and met their children and grandchildren at regular reunions. There is usually a photograph of Bernard and Win displayed somewhere in their homes, and tears well up at the mention of their names.

  For six months the children lived in a hostel in Highgate, North London, set up by Bernard and Win to house them until they were evacuated from the Blitz and sent to various schools around England in the summer of 1939. Lilly Zimet, now well into her nineties, is the widow of Erwin Zimet, a Liberal rabbi asked to take care of the refugee children’s spiritual needs. Lilly now lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, where I visited her on a warm Sunday afternoon in 2014. She pulled a photograph of her late husband from a manila folder. Rabbi Zimet, looking very young, freshly arrived from a camp in Poland for deported German Jews, is sitting on the porch of the hostel, strumming a mandolin and singing a song with the twelve boys and girls. Lilly offered me tea and cake, and talked about her memories of Bernard and Win, the strangeness of England when she first got there, the way she was teased about her German accent. After a moment of stillness, as I contemplated some more photos from the manila folder of my grandparents at various birthdays and reunions of the “hostel children,” she whispered, more to herself than to me, “They were angels.”

  Hostel children with Rabbi Zimet in Highgate

  Ilse Salomon, Ilse Jacobsohn, Kurt Selig, Walter Bluh, Steffi Birnbaum, Irene Birnbaum, Lore Feig, Wolfgang Kohorn, Peter Hecht, Marianne Mamlok, Michael Maybaum, Vera Baer. Almost all of them were born in Berlin. Their parents had tried to shield them as much as they could from the daily humiliations that pulled a noose around their lives, little by little, ever tighter, until Jews were left bereft and utterly defenseless: the exclusion from public swimming pools and schools, the boycott of Jewish businesses, the ban on Jews in government service, the race laws, the confiscation of passports, and then the murderous assault on Jews and their properties all over Germany in November 1938, the night of broken glass when the synagogues went up in flames.

  Walter Bluh, twelve in 1939, and the eldest of the hostel children, remembers how his uncle was taken away to a concentration camp on Kristallnacht and returned a broken man. He remembers how his parents, old-fashioned German patriots, realized that they were trapped, but tried everything to save their son. (They were murdered in Auschwitz.) He can still remember the horror of an SA storm trooper ruffling his hair, which happened to be blond—the difference between a friendly pat and a severe beating could simply come down to that.

  What made the cruel treatment of Jews, the taunts in the streets, the bans in public places, the hateful caricatures in school textbooks, and the horrifying violence of Kristallnacht so baffling to most of the children rescued by Bernard and Win is that they had little or no idea why they were being singled out for persecution. Their parents thought of themselves as normal Germans, and were proud to be so, just as Bernard and Win were proud to be British. For some, perhaps, this torment was their first experience of being different, of being defined in the hostile eyes of others.

  Walter remembers arriving at Liverpool Street station on March 16, 1939, on a train filled with refugee children, scared and bewildered by the cacophony of voices, public announcements in a language he didn’t understand, lost children on the platform with nametags around their necks, whimpering with fear of the unknown, and then being whisked away by Win, welcoming him to England in fluent German.

  After the death of Win and Bernard, a box was found filled with documents about the twelve children, mostly letters written by Bernard to get permission for this or that from various officials, but also German documents with the meticulous answers to questionnaires written by parents begging to let their children get away with their lives. The bureaucracy of persecution was extensive, lashing already broken lives with another layer of humiliation. What strikes the reader now are the ghastly euphemisms: fathers are suffering from “ill health” due to “circumstances”; parents have run out of means to keep their children properly fed, because the breadwinner is “unable to carry out his professional activities.” Testimonies are included from former schoolteachers, praising the children for their obedience and sweet tempers. A letter from Michael Maybaum is signed “Meikel,” which sounded more English. Perhaps he thought this was a recommendation. (Parents often spent their last cash to dress the children “in the English style,” which meant that some boys arrived in London looking a bit like Sherlock Holmes in little deerstalkers.)

  There is a drawing in the box, done in colored crayons, on the way to England, perhaps, by Marianne Mamlok. It shows a train pulling out of a station. The train is marked with the words “Berlin-London.” Children peer through the window at two adults waving at them with white handkerchiefs.

  The question is not so much why Bernard and Win decided to help the children escape, for this was typical of their sense of decency, and a sign of their outrage about what was happening in Germany. Less obvious is why they decided on this venture already before November 1938. One of the earliest letters in the box of documents about the hostel is a surveyor’s report on the property in Highgate,
dated October 17, 1938.

  I searched for answers in the letters, and found only hints, some of them written years later, when Bernard was stationed in India.

  On March 24, 1943, when the Nazi death camps in Poland were operating at their full capacity, Bernard wrote from his billet in Agra, “What a blessing we managed to rescue twelve youngsters anyway from those fiends. Failing to get into St. Thomas’s had a share in that.” He doesn’t explain exactly why, because he obviously didn’t have to, since Win must have known. Was it because his own problems had sharpened his awareness of the lethal dangers faced by Jews abroad? It may be. There is, however, another reference, also written in Agra, a year later on October 24, where he tells Win about some money he is putting in a bank “for our protégés.” He will ask the bank to “call it the ‘St. Thomas’s account,’ for it was failure to get there which gave us time in the first place.”

  In 1938, Britain had pretty much closed its borders to adults trying to escape from the Nazis, unless they had sponsors or were prominent figures like Sigmund Freud, who arrived in May of that year, but even in his case the home secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, had to be persuaded to issue a special permit. The only way some adults still managed to squeeze into Britain was to get a job as a domestic worker. There is mention in Bernard’s letters in early 1939 of a German woman staying at Templewood Avenue going back and forth to the Home Office “concerning a new emigration scheme for Jewish domestics.” Bernard mentions her once more on February 2, 1939: “I had a chat with ‘Glucose’ last night & worked the conversation round the English customs & thence to dressing gowns in the morning. She took it all in very good part—it had been ignorance on her part—and this morning we duly breakfasted together fully clad.”