Their Promised Land

by Ian Buruma

  Glucose was Frieda Glucksmann. She had come over from Berlin, where she had worked at a convalescent home for Jewish children. Bernard managed to get permission for her and three young German Jewish women to work at the hostel in Highgate, not far from where Hitler’s nephew was living at the time. (But they surely didn’t know that.) Glucksmann was to be the matron. Just how Bernard and Win thought of getting the children out of Germany when the British government was still barring refugees is unclear.

  Correspondence with the Jewish Agency in Berlin about the logistics of rescuing children began in the first days of November 1938. Their contact person, Edith Kaufmann, thanks Bernard and Win for sending clothes and offering to take refugee children into their charge. Frau Kaufmann wonders whether they could find other benefactors in Britain who might “make it possible for us to send more children to your country.” Apologizing for any “inefficiencies” on her side, she remarks—one week after Kristallnacht—that “at present we are a little preoccupied.”

  It is difficult since the Jewish genocide to use the word “selection” in a neutral manner. Men, women, and children were “selected” on the ramps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, to determine the order of their murder. But there is no other word to describe what Bernard and Win had to do. In a letter from Bernard to the borough council of Hornsey, he explains that “for some months my wife and I have been planning to take into this country, as our guests, a small number of German refugee children between the ages of six and fourteen, and to be responsible for their welfare and education. They are to be children specially chosen from the professional classes about whom we have either personal or reliable knowledge.”

  They selected, in other words, children from families much like their own. Some of the fathers of the children had been successful lawyers, until they were unable to work due to “circumstances.” Walter Bluh’s father had owned a factory, which was taken away from him by the state. Ilse Salomon’s father was a former classmate of Walter Benjamin. Like Walter Bluh’s father, Mr. Salomon too was killed in Auschwitz. There was one exception to the similar makeup of the families. When Michael Maybaum, the son of Ignaz Maybaum, an Orthodox rabbi, appeared on the list, Bernard expressed concern that the rabbi “may not like the way his son will be educated as we intend to conduct this hostel on ‘Liberal’ lines. No Kosher food, etc.”

  In the end, Michael was accepted. Selecting human beings to be saved is of course a wretched business. But Win and Bernard wished to treat the children as family. In effect, they became their foster parents, concerned with their fortunes for the rest of their lives. They wanted them to “fit in.” By rescuing these twelve children, Win and Bernard made it heroically clear where they stood. With all their efforts to be conventionally British, here was an affirmation of solidarity when it mattered most. But their allegiance was to class as much as to ethnicity.

  For the Kindertransport to succeed, the British government first had to be convinced. After the shocking jolt to British public opinion of Kristallnacht, a delegation of Jews and Quakers pleaded with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to let at least some children come. In late November the government decided to allow an unspecified number of children up to the age of seventeen to live in Britain, as long as they left their parents behind and would not be “a burden” on the state. Not only did they have to come as orphans, but all the money to take care of them had to come from private benefactors.

  The BBC asked for volunteers to open their homes. Networks were set up in Germany and Austria, coordinated in London by an institution named Bloomsbury House. Since the Nazi government refused to clutter German ports with refugees, the children had to travel by train through Holland, from where, until the last minute, when the country was overrun by German troops, more than ten thousand children were shipped to Harwich, and thence to Liverpool Street station, where the Kinder were met by their foster parents, many of them people with immense goodwill, often Jewish, but not always. Some of the foster parents couldn’t disguise their disappointment when their allotted refugees failed to come up to their expectations. Pale with fatigue and apprehension, the children may not always have looked as sweet as the photographs sent by their frantic parents had suggested. Some foster parents used the children as unpaid servants. Some tried to convert them into Christians. But many lives were saved.

  The first child to be met at Liverpool Street station by Win was named Hans Levy. He was not one of the twelve hostel children, but a distant relative—Win’s mother was his grandfather’s cousin and a close friend. Bernard and Win agreed to let Hans come to England and live with the family. A small, timid nine-year-old boy from Leipzig, who spoke no English, and had never met either Bernard or Win, Hans was taken to Templewood Avenue, where he was scrutinized by Hilary and Susan, his new stepsisters, through the banisters of the sweeping staircase. Within a year or two he spoke better English than German.

  I only know him as Richard “Dick” Levy, now a distinguished professor emeritus of biochemistry at Syracuse University. Hans, as he was known all through the war, lived with the family at Mount Pleasant in Kintbury, before boarding at a local grammar school. Unaware of any difference between Jews and other Germans, the other boys taunted him for being a filthy little Hun.

  Some of the twelve hostel children had similar experiences. Lore Feig recalls how the teacher of religion at her school in London would make a point of saying that “the Jews had killed our Lord.” Lore was also accused of being a German spy, supposedly sending signals to Nazi airmen flying their bombers over Richmond Park, where she liked to go for walks.

  With the arrival of the twelve children, the family became an extended one. Bernard took possession of the hostel in Highgate on Christmas Day 1938, and the children started living there three months later. The girls slept on the second floor, and the boys in a large room downstairs. The home was furnished and equipped with donations elicited through an ad in the Jewish Chronicle. Some of the boys joined the local Boy Scouts. Schools had to be found for all of them. A “Hostel Newspaper” was devised. Questions were put to the children in English for their edification, such as “Who are the Mohammedans?” or “How did nations come to be?” or “To what extent do Jews often make themselves unpopular?”

  Ilse Salomon (ten years old) wrote a piece for the newspaper about being an only child. She was always given everything she wanted, she wrote, but it was hard facing life all alone. Friends were not the same as sisters. And now that she was far from home, she realized how much she missed her parents.

  Marianne Mamlok (eleven years old) also wrote about leaving her parents behind: “I couldn’t imagine what my future would be like, as I had never lived together with so many children. I like it very much here and we get along well. I already have a friend here. But I would like it even better, if my parents were here too.”

  Walter Bluh wrote, “When we Jews go to another country these days, groups find each other within a short time and play music together.”

  Rabbi Zimet contributed a piece about the hardships he had suffered in the camp in Poland, the freezing weather, the terrible food, the dirt. It would seem a strange thing to write for a paper meant for traumatized young children who had just been wrenched away from their families. But he meant to encourage them, perhaps, by showing that things could be worse.

  Early references to the hostel children in the letters of Bernard and Win are mostly practical: shopping lists, bureaucratic hurdles to be overcome, staff difficulties (often to do with “Glucose”), financial dealings with Bloomsbury House, schools to be chosen, and so on. Staying at the Haven Hotel in Bournemouth in February 1939, Win complains of migraine attacks, but “the complete rest from ‘refugees,’ broken English & telephone calls will work wonders in a week.”

  Bernard mentions taking the children to the swimming pool on a Saturday morning in June 1939. The day before, he attended the evening service at the St. John’s Wood Liberal Jewish Synagogue
with Maria and Ernst Stern, Win’s relatives from Berlin, the ones with the lovely car, who now had to seek refuge in Templewood Avenue. Bernard mentions meeting “a rather nice Aryan German lady” at the service, who “travels to and from Germany with emigrants. She is one of the Pastor Niemöller* group and certainly against the régime. I found her rather pessimistic about the future.”

  Hotel Alpenruhe, Hohfluh

  And so Bernard and Win found themselves on the edge of the European abyss. The old life still went on, of course. Bernard tells Win about a concert at the Queen’s Hall by the great cellist Emanuel Feuermann, who moved to London in 1933 after being dismissed by the Nazis from his job at the Berlin Conservatory.

  In June 1939, just months before the German invasion of Poland, Win and her mother are in Switzerland for a short holiday. The tiny Alpine village of Hohfluh, where the local farmers in the foothills of the Wetterhorn blew their antique horns and carved fine pastoral scenes out of wood, had been Bernard and Win’s Arcadian haven outside England. Family holidays were spent there since 1934. Win had long since overcome her skepticism about the grandeur of Continental landscapes. Here she is, on the eve of World War II, at the Hotel Alpenruhe (Alpine Rest), writing to Bernard: “How far from the cares & worries of the world we are here. At this moment I am sitting on the terrace just seeing my precious mountain simmering white through the clean blackness of the night, the only sound coming from the dance band in the dining room.”

  There was no mention yet of the greatest horror of all, the moment when even England would no longer be safe.

  On August 31, 1939, the last night before war is declared on Germany, Win is at Mount Pleasant with her children, helped by Laura, the cook who had already served Win’s parents, and Bailey, the gardener and handyman. “Old Bailey,” Win writes, “is being very decent. He said I was not to worry—if anything happened ‘down here,’ he would be with us very quickly. ‘After all I was a special constable in the last war,’ he said!!”

  But Win does worry, of course. For she is on her own once more. Bernard, although past the age of active service, had enlisted in July and received a commission as a lieutenant in the Supplementary Reserve on the recommendation of Colonel Gordon Clark, his battalion commander in the last war. On September 3, he was mobilized as a major to a casualty clearing station in Hampshire.

  Win writes to “My own darling Bun”:

  I wonder how you are tonight. So far away from me! I hope that you will be able to sleep peacefully on your little camp bed. I shall be thinking of you all the time with the most loving wishes & praying for your safety now that this ghastly business has really begun. My darling, how I miss your cheery, comforting presence. Anyhow, I am holding the fort for you, & having all our children to care for and protect, makes me feel braver. They have all gone to bed with their gas masks beside them, poor darlings. Luckily our black curtains were just finished in time, so we have managed to comply with all regulations.

  Five

  THE BEGINNING

  The so-called phony war, the lull before the storm, lasted from September 1939 till May 1940. Bernard, posted in various casualty clearing stations in England waiting for the wounded to arrive, and Win, now having to cope alone with all family affairs, try to sound stoically optimistic to reassure one another and no doubt themselves that things would turn out all right.

  It was one of the coldest winters on record. Win, on January 29, 1940, feels “like a lost and forlorn little girl in the cold confusion of Paddington Station,” the place of so many sad farewells. Arriving in Kintbury, she is overwhelmed by the “majestic beauty” of the wintry landscape: “It was simply breath-taking, like some colossal modern décor staged for an exhibition—a world of glass . . . A gale was howling, trees were snapping, the great icy wires clanked rhythmically . . . All the time the snow was falling softly, softly . . . There is no telephone or telegraph or electric light or wireless anywhere in the district, we are utterly cut off in a closed community. The children can’t go out because of the falling trees, but it is all very beautiful. Everyone you meet takes it with a smile and a joke, in the truly admirable British manner.”

  Bernard and Win at Mount Pleasant, 1940

  The words are oddly prophetic of times to come, or at least the times as they would be experienced (and remembered, partly as myth) by the British at war, more or less cut off, the children sheltered from the wreckage, taking pride in the British spirit.

  What was most distressing to Bernard and Win in those early days of the war was having to part from one another. Bernard writes on March 14 that “it is very hard to go off into the blue with the knowledge that it may be months before we shall be together again. That is the principal reason why this adventure is not quite the carefree show the other one was twenty years ago.”

  The phrase “carefree show” is an odd way of describing the mass slaughter in Flanders. But it shows how much Bernard loathed having to leave Win, and the wording is typical of the stiff upper lip that was expected at the time: “Still it’s a job that’s got to be done & the sooner it’s over the better. Now keep cheery, fit & don’t worry too much—no frowns my darling. I shall be back soon & we will settle down to a peaceful life again.”

  One month later, Bernard was on a Royal Navy ship outside Narvik, up near the icy tip of Norway, where the British and Norwegians, with help from French and Polish troops, were trying to stop the Germans from occupying the country. His last letter, sent from London, dated April 10, begins, “Just a farewell line wishing you and the family all the very best. I felt very sad as your dear face vanished further and further into the distance yesterday & I shed an inward tear . . . Darling you have been such a splendid wife & the future is going to be very hard without you, my dear. Keep the flag flying & don’t worry too much.”

  There are obviously no details of the battles at sea or land in Bernard’s letters, for they would have been snipped out by the military censors. Often, all he could send from “H.M. ships” were Field Service Postcards printed with messages such as “I am quite well” or “Letter follows at first opportunity.” These letters, which often took weeks to reach the other side, if they ever did, include accounts of skiing expeditions around the fjords, his reading of Tristram Shandy or Punch magazine, sent by Win, and of sleeping in tents aside the deep blue channels, making new friends such as a Scottish surgeon named Benedict (Ben) Wevill, taking lessons in Norwegian, entirely without success, and such plucky sentiments as this, on April 17: “I think the good old British Navy & the allies have got this whole war well in hand &, who knows, I may be back for the children’s summer holidays with the wretched business finished.”

  In the first weeks of April, it is true, the Royal Navy did well enough, despite U-boat attacks, which were not yet as lethal as they would later become. Ten German destroyers were sunk, and so was the first U-boat in this war, bombed by a plane taking off from HMS Warspite.

  Win heard about these feats in the local cinema in Newbury, after a show of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca. An announcement was made by a man “with a very white face,” she writes on April 15, that “Narvik was in the hands of the Allies. The theatre rocked with applause.”

  Tougher were the land battles fought against crack German mountain brigades and improvised battalions of marines who had survived the clashes at sea. The British had little or no experience fighting in Arctic conditions, nor were they properly equipped. But they still managed to hold on until the end of May, when the situation in France became so dire that the Allies decided to withdraw from Narvik and abandon Norway to its fate. It was during this retreat that Bernard had a lucky escape when a British aircraft carrier, HMS Glorious, was sunk along with two British destroyers, with the loss of fifteen hundred men.

  Again, none of this is mentioned in the letters. But even Bernard, with all his optimism, can’t disguise a sense of disquiet. On May 30, he reports, “We all listen to the news in the
evening & try to cheer ourselves up with any bright bits which seem to be in our favour. It’s often difficult to find them & we comb through it repeatedly in order to add something to the credit side. I can imagine you in England attempting the same thing. We must never despair, darling. Keep a stout heart. I still feel it will all come right in the end, but I am naturally anxious about you and the children.”

  Win’s mood, especially when weeks go by without hearing from Bernard, is more brittle. Without him there is no one she can talk to. Surrounded by family, she still feels utterly bereft. To “Bun, my own darling,” from Mount Pleasant, January 31, 1940: “Now that I’m thrown in so much on myself I find myself going back to a practice of my childhood; I hold long imaginary conversations with this person and that & I am really inhabiting a world that isn’t real at all.” On February 2: “Forgive me for being so downhearted, it is selfish & cowardly of me. I’ll try and be worthy of you.” March 3: “I am afraid you rather despise me for being weak-kneed, but we are as we are made, and I honestly try hard to conquer my rather feeble self.”

  And yet it was Win who took care of their five children, Hans Levy, two grandmothers evacuated from London, and the twelve hostel children. Hans, and Susan, the youngest of the Schlesinger children, were living in Kintbury, even as the older children were sent off to boarding schools. After the hostel was evacuated at the end of 1939 to avoid possible German bomb attacks, Win made sure all the children were properly dressed, received pocket money, found suitable places to stay and schools to attend. Every birthday was remembered, and all their personal needs met. In their memories, Win was unfailingly cheerful, a motherly center to their lives, someone they could always rely upon. And aside from all this, she also applied to work several days a week as a nurse for the Voluntary Aid Detachment. None of her worries appeared on the surface. My aunt Hilary, recalling that terrible time, insists that Win shielded her dependents from any sense of fear. They didn’t notice a thing. On April 10, Win writes, “I am trying to keep up appearances, darling, and I won’t let you down. Only inwardly I have gone dead.”