by Ian Buruma
This last line was thought up by the producer of the movie, Alexander Korda. He reckoned it was sure to get applause. He was right. The picture was a great hit for his company, London Film Productions. Korda was being calculating, but only up to a point. Leslie Howard’s words are a statement of pure Anglophilia, not patriotism, but Anglophilia. For Korda was still a Hungarian (he naturalized later). He had always admired the dashing English hero whose courage and guile were disguised by the foppish mannerisms of an aristocratic dandy. The original story of the Scarlet Pimpernel was written by Baroness Orczy, another Hungarian. The script was written by yet another Hungarian, Lajos Biro, together with two Americans. And Leslie Howard, that most typical of slim, blond, blue-eyed English gentleman heroes? His real name was Steiner, and his parents were from Hungary too.
The film was made one year after Hitler came to power, too soon for the horror of Nazism to have sunk in. But Korda, the Jewish showman in his Savile Row suits, his chauffeur-driven Rolls, and his suites at the Dorchester Hotel, knew what he was doing. He once said that “all Hungarians love the English. It is their snobbism, and I am a snob.” But that is not all there was to it. He had lived in Berlin. He understood the threat of Hitler’s regime, not least to himself (he was on the Gestapo hit list). And he admired the British “way of life,” by which he meant that old combination of deference to privilege and respect for civil liberties. Like Theodor Herzl, he saw the British Empire as an example of gentlemanly administration. A year after The Scarlet Pimpernel, Korda made Sanders of the River in praise of that “handful of white men” whose governance of the empire “is an unsung saga of courage and efficiency.” These are the opening titles of the movie, which no doubt were greeted with much applause, at least in Britain. But Korda sincerely believed in the idea of England as a safe haven from European tyranny—for good reasons. And this made him the ideal propagandist for the Allied war effort. It was in that role that he was happiest. As he put it: “I felt during those terrible days, that I ‘belonged.’ ”
I have a relative, now in his seventies, who could not be more British, in manner, dress, habits, and speech. His name is Ashley, as in Ashley Wilkes, Leslie Howard’s most famous role. If one were to draw a caricature of the perfect English gentleman, he would come out looking like Ashley. He came to England from his native Germany some time between Sanders of the River and Dunkirk. He was a teenager then, who decided to shed his German skin and become an Englishman. He succeeded. And without overacting; not the exaggerated drawl, or the splashy tweeds that often mark the immigrant. Ashley’s remarkable effort to reinvent himself as an Englishman cannot be understood simply as an act of conformism. To understand Ashley’s generation of Anglicized Europeans, one must understand where they came from.
• • •
I HAD ALWAYS been aware of refugees in my family. Dick came to England as a child in 1939 and lived with my mother’s family during the war. He was still called Hans then, a name that was later dropped—too German. Hans expressed his obvious distress about being forced to flee into the arms of strangers by being a secretive, difficult boy. I first met Dick before he moved to the United States, where he became a distinguished scientist. I have seen him several times since, a small, dark, animated man whose accent became increasingly American over the years. Dick is an American now, whose Anglophilia was always tempered by memories of bullying at his school in a small English town. He had escaped from almost certain death in the Third Reich, but to his British classmates he remained a bloody foreigner, or worse, a German spy.
Then there were the “rented children.” The hostel was a large Victorian house in Highgate, rented by my grandfather to shelter twelve Jewish children rescued from Germany at the last minute on the so-called children transports. The British government did not exactly welcome refugees at that time. The 1905 Aliens Act still had been generous enough: persecuted persons would not be refused entry just because they lacked the means to support themselves. But this was changed when it really mattered, in the 1930s. To find refuge in Britain you had to have either a job lined up or a British guarantor prepared to support you. Otherwise you were trapped. After the ghastly events on Kristallnacht in 1938, when Jewish shops were ransacked, Jewish men arrested and killed, and synagogues set on fire, an exception was made: ten thousand Jewish children would be allowed to come to Britain, as long as they came without their parents, a condition of dubious magnanimity that traumatized many children for life. But still, they lived. My grandparents took in twelve.
My grandmother sometimes mentioned the names of former hostel children to me: Steffie Birnbaum, Lore Feig, Ilse Salomon, Michael Maybaum … She had kept in touch with them, and their children, wherever they were, in England, the United States, or Israel. Birthdays were never forgotten, help was offered with careers and personal matters, and—a typical Anglo-German touch—Christmas cards were always sent. But I never quite realized how much my grandparents, Bernard and Win Schlesinger, meant to the hostel children. I had never before met people whose eyes filled with tears at the mere mention of their names.
Walter placed a dark gray box on the table in front of me. It was the size of a portable typewriter and was marked, in ball-point pen, HOSTEL. He opened the box. Inside was a stack of large brown envelopes. One of them had an address typed on it, which I recognized with a sense of excitement: St. Mary Woodlands House, Nr. Newbury, Berks. My grandparents’ old house, the one with the huge garden, my childhood Arcadia. The handwriting on the envelopes looked familiar too. It was my grandfather’s. One envelope was marked ADMIN. Another said LETTERS PRIOR TO OPENING OF HOSTEL. Yet another: DETAILS OF ALL 12 CHILDREN. And: RE: TRUNKS, LISTS OF CLOTHES.
We were sitting in a comfortable two-story house in Highgate. The furnishing was mid-twentieth-century modern, the international style I grew up with in Holland, a wooden sofa, glass tables, a floor lamp with a long conical shade. Walter’s wife, Linda, came in with coffee and cakes and protested that I was not eating enough of them. Walter smiled, tapped the brown envelopes, and said with only a trace of a German accent: “You could write a whole book about these files.”
The documents inside the brown envelopes were, at first sight, mundane: questionnaires, lists of one sort or another, vaccination papers, and letters of recommendation from schoolteachers and welfare organizations. On closer inspection, however, they were anything but mundane. These official forms, dating from 1938 and 1939, were bureaucratic lifeboats. These pieces of paper, now somewhat brittle to the touch, kept twelve children from being murdered.
From the beginning, the German destruction of the Jews was a matter of selection, of numbers and lists. The first and often cruelest choice began at home: which child should be put up for selection, to be removed to Britain, out of danger, but also out of sight, quite likely forever? Tens of thousands of panic-stricken parents tried to get their children on the lists. The twelve hostel children, whose personal details were preserved in the gray box file, were selected by a small Jewish committee in Berlin on behalf of Bloomsbury House, a Jewish refugee organization in London. The Schlesingers wanted the children to be not older than twelve, in good health, well educated, and from liberal Jewish families: no kosher food would be provided at the hostel. One boy, Michael Maybaum, son of Rabbi Ignaz Maybaum, almost didn’t make it on to the list, because the Schlesingers were worried that he might be too Orthodox, and thus not “fit in.” When nine-year-old Michael was finally selected, he wrote a letter from Berlin, asking whether he could bring his electric train. He signed the letter, dated 12 January 1939, “Meikel,” which sounded more English to him than Michael.
The information contained in the questionnaires prepared in Germany for the Schlesingers was necessarily brief. The escalating persecution since 1933—the racial laws, the loss of jobs, the violence of Kristallnacht—are referred to as “present circumstances” or simply “events.” The discretion is painful to read. One mother writing to the Schlesingers in perfect English on beautifully embo
ssed letter paper apologized that, due to events, she was a little “preoccupied.”
Here is Ilse Salomon, aged ten, from Uhlandstrasse 15, Berlin, her circumstances described in bureaucratic shorthand.
FATHER: Richard Salomon.
PROFESSION: formerly solicitor, now nervous disease, no income—savings are being used up.
ARE PARENTS OR RELATIVES RESPECTIVELY IN A POSITION TO SUPPORT AN IMPECUNIOUS JEWISH CHILD IN GERMANY?: No.
GIVE A DETAILED REPORT OF THE FAMILY LIFE: Father ill, has been in a sanatorium for nearly two years, as a result of the events since 1933. Parents are very cultured people—now very sad conditions.
Ilse is in good health, testified to by Dr. Werner Solnitz. A Star of David is stamped in blue under his signature. Next to the star: “Only permitted to give medical treatment to Jews” (Zur ärtzlichen Behandlung ausschliesslich von Juden berechtigt.)
Inside the file is a letter, written in English, from Mrs. Salomon to my grandmother:
Dear Mrs. Schlesinger,
Only some days ago I received your address and I beg to thank you and your husband very heartily for my daughter’s invitation. As you can think I am very sorry to be compelled to separate from my daughter, but otherwise I am very thankful that my girl will find at yours a new peaceful and happy home …
There is also a note by Ilse herself, written in German, in the first edition of the Hostel Newspaper at Highgate:
I am an only child and always have wanted a little sister or brother … When you are alone, you have everything to yourself and are neither favoured nor disadvantaged. But you are always alone and friends are never as good as sisters. Now that I’m away from home, I realize how much I belong with my parents.
Ilse’s mother finally got out of Germany alive. She was granted a visa to work as a “domestic” in England. Ilse never said good-bye to her father. The doctors thought it would put too much strain on his nerves. He was murdered in 1944.
Attached to another file is a drawing of a train pulling out of a station. It is a third-class carriage with the words BERLIN-LONDON written on the side. Children peer through the windows at two adults waving handkerchiefs. The train and the children are in black pencil. The adults are in color, their faces smudged with bright red lips. The drawing is by Marianne Mamlok. Her photograph is clipped to her birth certificate, stamped with the Prussian eagle of the Berlin registry office: a smiling girl with long pigtails. Her teacher, Alice Pach, recommends her highly: “M. loves walks and open-air games. M. is sociable and companionable. Her companions love and respect her for her team-spirit, helpfulness and gay disposition. The atmosphere of her home has favoured the development of her personal gifts and social feelings.” The questionnaire tells the story of how that same home had become a trap. Her father, a solicitor, “is soon going to lose his profession. No prospect of earning a living in Germany. Owing to his physical state, it will be difficult for him to emigrate.”
It is almost impossible to imagine the anguish of parents who could hope to save their children only by losing them. They would call the selection committee every day, sometimes several times a day, to ask whether their children were on the lists. Most of them had only the haziest idea about English life, gleaned from the cinema and books. Some spent their last savings on “English-style” outfits for their sons, so they would fit in. Boys would arrive at Harwich looking like fancy-dress versions of Sherlock Holmes, with name tags hung around their necks.
Walter was the eldest boy in his group. Aged twelve and a half, he had a pretty good idea what was going on. He knew why he was being persecuted, unlike some of the younger children, who were utterly bewildered. They had never thought of themselves as being anything but German. Lore Feig, who was a year younger, told me she suffers from a kind of traumatic amnesia. She can’t remember much about her early childhood in Berlin. Her parents had tried to shield her from the “events.” All she remembers is a sinister atmosphere of whispering adults at home and strangers shouting insults as she walked to school, as rapidly as she could, trying hard to be inconspicuous. But she didn’t really know why. According to her questionnaire, she came from “a refined, cultured home, an affectionate family life, entirely carefree till a short time ago.” It goes on to say: “Present events have affected her very much.”
Walter can remember the Kristallnacht, when his father stayed away from home and his uncles disappeared. One of them came back months later from a concentration camp, broken and emaciated and silent about what had been done to him. Walter also remembers how one day he was patted on the head by a friendly SA man. Because he had fair hair, he was praised for being a beautiful little Aryan boy.
It was early evening when Walter told me his story. He fiddled with the conical lamp, which wouldn’t switch on properly and flickered in the dusk. I felt that I was asking too many questions. There was much he simply couldn’t remember. But he had vivid memories of his parents. He dabbed at his eyes as he spoke about them. His father lost his factory to a Nazi in 1935. His mother taught at the Theodor Herzl School in Berlin. “My father and mother,” Walter said, “thought of themselves as good Germans.” We both pondered this for a moment. “They never expected to see us again. They didn’t realize quite what was coming … Well, they did know really. They told me after Kristallnacht that they probably wouldn’t make it, but they would make sure that we did …” His parents were killed at Auschwitz.
The second time I saw Walter visibly moved was when he described his arrival at Liverpool Street Station. The slums of the East End, glimpsed through the window of the boat train from Harwich, had been a shock. And then there was pandemonium. Announcements came through loudspeakers in a language he barely understood; strangers craned their necks at the barrier; frightened children were lined up with tags around their necks, like dogs or prize vegetables. Some foster parents openly expressed disappointment when the children did not match the charm of their photographs. Others were unable to recognize their charges. There was shouting and crying. And there, in the midst of this crushing strangeness was the small figure of my grandmother, welcoming Walter and the others to England in fluent German.
One year later, she would be faced with the question herself of whether to send her children to strangers, in Canada. My grandfather was in favor. She decided against it. She hadn’t been able to bear the thought of losing them. Only God knows what she would have done if she had been a German, living in Germany.
Thinking of my very British grandmother put the horror of what happened to the very German Feigs, or Salomons, or Mamloks into even sharper focus. The idea of becoming a refugee was almost unthinkable to her. It would have turned her world upside down. The humiliation would have been intolerable. In a letter to her husband, Bernard, in May 1940, when he was with the army at Narvik, she told him she had had lunch with a close friend of theirs, a Scottish aristocrat. He had reassured her: “He said I might be dead, but I should never be a refugee, & for that I was truly thankful.” It was a sign that she still fitted in.
Her expressions of British patriotism, and even her occasional comments on foreigners, are in the spirit of the time. Nevertheless, reading her letters now, I am taken aback by the total absence of irony. You would never know she was the daughter of German immigrants. After Dunkirk, she wrote to Bernard: “What a brilliant retreat our [British forces] have made from the very jaws of death. I keep thinking of the Charge of the Light Brigade. What terrific reverses we always have in every century, & what undaunted courage & tenacity is shown by our men in every generation. It makes you prouder and prouder to be British.” And the foreigners? “Even the nicest of foreign bohunks,” she wrote, “have a totally different point of view, and are naturally more defeatist than the tough British.” Not a hint of irony. But her patriotism was not just sentimental. In May 1940, her “beloved England” was the one thing that shielded her and her children from almost certain death.
Looking through the files of Walter’s black box, at the bills,
requests for help placed in The Jewish Chronicle, and letters sent to scoutmasters and organizers of summer camps, I find aspects of my grandparents that I recognize, while others catch me by surprise. I recognize their concern for education, manners, and fresh air and exercise. This was all in my grandfather’s public school spirit. The question of religion is less familiar, perhaps because it never came up when I knew them.
The Schlesingers made sure the children were given religious instruction. It was the only continuity some of the children would have, after leaving everything they knew behind. Synagogues were frequented, rabbis approached. Yet I never saw any sign of religion in my grandparents. Their own children never received a Jewish education. They went to boarding schools and took part in Christian services, not out of any religious conviction but because that was the done thing, the way to fit in. My earliest memories of my grandparents are associated with Christmas.
There are a few signs of religious feeling in their wartime correspondence. In April 1941, when war news was so bad that my grandmother could only hope for a miracle to “save our beloved England,” she also wrote: “I just can’t see by the light of cold reason how we can come out of this on top, and yet I know that we must, and that all this horror is meant in some way to serve the divine purpose. I feel a great longing lately for St. John’s Wood.” St. John’s Wood is the Liberal Jewish synagogue they sometimes frequented. They would do so more often toward the end of their lives. But in my grandmother’s case, even attending services at St. John’s Wood was perhaps more a patriotic than a religious act. She was responding to the king’s radio speech on “the gravest and most dangerous” hours in British history. He urged all British people to go to church the next day and pray.
