‘Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.’
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
But even for Jews, and for a brief moment, there were a few other trains.
Eighty-five years ago, and for the nine months from 1 December 1938, the evacuation scheme known as the Kindertransport (‘children’s transport’) brought just under 10,000 Jewish children out of Nazi Germany to foster homes in the UK. A mix of Government intransigence and caution - logistics, economics, fear of exacerbating English anti-semitism - would not permit them to be accompanied by their parents, many of whom would be murdered in the death camps. In July 1989 for my oral history of immigration, Them (1990), I interviewed one of them: the psycho-analyst Bianca Gordon, then living in Hampstead and an important figure in both the analytic and Jewish communities. It was, naturally, edited in the book, this is the raw text. That text suggests that she must have been born around 1923; I do know not know when she died, but I must assume that, sadly, such must be the case.
PS I have always been fascinated by the Jewish name ‘Gordon’. It is not, one might agree, obviously ‘semitic’, no -berg’ or -stein’. It is also that of my maternal grandmother. For those who might share my interest, I offer this: http://www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/kurenets/k_pages/gordon.html.
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I was born in Berlin. My parents were of Polish-Jewish extraction. They had left Poland in 1911 and settled in Berlin because of conditions in Poland and anti-semitism in Poland. They were very orthodox. My father had a small and not terribly successful business, but his main interest was learning. He was a scholar and loved his scholarly occupations. We lived in a Jewish neighbourhood in Berlin, a very close community. Life was progressing well in that we felt reasonably settled; my father, in spite of being a very orthodox Jew who lived in his own small community, appreciated the Germans, to the best of my knowledge, unless he changed his mind at a very late stage, after he was taken away from home. I never detected any change in his attitude to them and he always maintained that the German people as a people were less anti-semitic than the Polish non-Jewish community had been. He was a pious Jew, he belonged to a Hassidic group, who never missed right up to the time he was taken away going to the synagogue twice a day, and was never molested or attacked in any way, although he was quite clearly a Jew for everyone to see. This was a very very different community from the assimilated Jews in Germany. There was never any question about our roots, I knew where my roots were and that was of tremendous support to me later after my life had been very disturbed by external circumstances. If I allow myself to generalise, generally speaking the adjustment to what was happening in Nazi Germany was much much harder for people who were assimilated.
I went first of all to a Jewish school, then at the age of 11 to a German high school, a lycee. Half the girls in my class were Jewish. With the advent of the Nazi regime things changed very abruptly. We had to start each lesson with the Heil Hitler salute and in no time my father decided that this was not the right place for me to be. I was subsequently sent to a Jewish school, with a very very fine tradition, where predominantly German Jewish children went. It was called after Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. The school was remarkable in that it succeeded in creating I would say almost an oasis of peace and hopefulness at a time when life outside was disintegrating. This was a very important feature of our time, that the parents obviously felt the impact of what was going on, but the school was trying to compensate for some of the losses of freedom which we felt. It created a sort of serene atmosphere for us, which is a tremendous credit to our teachers and the person who was in charge.
My parents, great believers, simply saw what was going on, and heard what was being propounded on the outside. They heard the vulgar Nazi songs sung in the streets of Berlin by marching columns of brownshirts, but nevertheless their belief, their trust in God was such that they felt quite protected and that nothing terribly untoward could ever happen to us.
My family background was Hassidic in the best sense: of service, that the spoken word, the prayers are less important than what you actually do for your neighbour. That has laid the foundations of my life and my interests. I then had the marvellous fortune of being educated in a very fine school.
The three pillars of my background were my home, my school and my youth movement, a socialist Zionist youth movement, Ha Shomer Ha Za’ir. I am very proud to be able to say that Mordecai Anielowicz, the person in charge of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, was a member of the my youth movement. It was a very fine movement which made great demands on its members. We had a religion of work, people were extremely dedicated, it wasn't a movement that aimed to be particularly large, the emphasis was very much on the quality of its members, on the readiness of its members to live up to certain basic standards of civilised behaviour and universal human values. Obviously this did not exactly agree with my father's orthodoxy, but while he was a very pious Jew, he was also a very tolerant one. He thought it was a tremendous miracle that young, German, assimilated boys and girls who had no roots in Jewish culture, in a Jewish way of life, should still want to learn Hebrew, should want to go to Palestine to build up the country; he thought that was a miracle. Many of my friends and youth leaders would love talking to him in order to learn about his background, it was a mutual admiration. There was never any question of dictating how they should live their lives. As far as I personally was concerned people in the community used to say to him, `How can you allow your daughter to join this kind of movement?' which they understood was atheist, certainly not religious, and he sort of joked about it and said, ‘The child plays.’ But what really predominated was his admiration for the seriousness of the youth movement, the fact that we learned the Bible, the tenach. They really were not religious people but they tried so hard, through the philosophies of Martin Buber, to get back to these roots. We learned Hebrew songs. There was so much identification with the past, an attempt to get back to something that they had never had. That was up to 1938. My membership did not cause me any problems; it didn’t clash with home life, but was an important extension of it.
There was no sense in the youth movement that one should resist the Nazis by force. That idea did not exist. It was quite clear to us that the ideas and the aims of this youth movement, just as much as my school, were very very opposed to everything that the Nazis stood for, and I valued both in that youth leaders not much older than myself (though when you're younger three or four years is an enormous gap) were tremendously courageous. They prepared cultural meetings. We had two programmes. One was officially registered with the Gestapo; this indicated that we spent our time on Jewish history, on the geography of Palestine, whatever, all dealing with totally neutral topics. In fact very different subjects were discussed, including socialism. We would have people standing on guard outside the youth movement premises in order to see whether the Gestapo were coming. If they were coming the person who was talking would change to the official subject. In that sense there was resistance. We sang songs which were banned, we read books which were banned, we were very conscious of the fact that we were not part of what was going on outside. Before 1938 we were able to carry on with most aspects of Jewish life, as long as we didn't attempt to influence the outer world.
My late husband came very much from the other end of the spectrum. He came from a very assimilated family and felt himself to be very German, was baptised as a child as many German and Austrian Jews chose as the way out of the problems that existed before Hitler. Hitler did not recognise those baptisms, for him a Jew was a Jew, so that put an end to that. People like my husband found their way into the youth movement through friends, or through a Jewish school. These assimilated Jews found a much greater difficulty than people like my family, They were thrown out of German society, declared not to be German after having been deeply steeped in German culture, and did not consider themselves Jews. So they had to find their way in some way or another into the Jewish group. There the youth movements were a particularly important link, restoring confidence, restoring hope, restoring self-esteem to people who had been deprived of it by the external world, or at least the external world had attempted to deprive them of these qualities.
It was an extraordinarily conflicted situation. I trusted my parents and I liked to hang on to their reassurance that nothing terribly bad would happen to us. They believed this on two grounds: first of all they trusted their Maker, He would not let it happen. I knew the sort of people my parents were and I derived strength from this belief of theirs. In second place people like my parents always looked towards the Ausland, the other countries beyond Germany. ‘The Ausland will not allow it to happen, the Ausland will not tolerate it, the Ausland will step in, Hitler will be stopped.’ So right up to the end there was always this double confidence, in God and in the ‘others’, who surely were as aware as we were of what was going on and would surely not allow it to happen and would step in. So although we were inside Germany, and we realised that if there was intervention we might still have gone under, but that was preferred to the idea of the Ausland remaining passive and doing nothing.
I think in my father's case that he really did trust the German people. We didn't have bad experiences with our neighbours and as an orthodox Jew he felt more secure in Germany than he had in Poland. He did not believe that the situation would endure. When he heard Hitler shouting on the radio, this madman screaming, people would have their windows open, it was summertime, and you would hear the radios blaring from all the windows (I still hear it), my father would say, ‘Do you hear, he's got cancer in his throat. Listen to him.’ He really believed it, it wasn't a joke, he really believed that this would not last and the man is mad and the man is sick and the man won't last. This whole belief that it would not be allowed to happen persisted right up as long as I knew him. That trust and that belief was maintained. So on the one hand as a child I wanted this reassurance to be justified I wanted to hold onto the same belief, but on the other hand I heard the storm troopers marching through the streets in large columns, marching and singing dreadful songs: ‘When Jewish blood flows from the knife, things will so much better’. A vulgar, obscene, horrid song, can you imagine people singing that in any city in the world. And this was Berlin, a city of culture, a fantastic city to live in, full of life, full of wonderful theatres, concert halls, the best. Then you're sitting in your room and you hear these voices singing, marching along the streets and singing these songs. Now we can't have been the only people to hear it. I was frightened of them. On the one hand I hung on to my parents beliefs, but on the other I was quite frightened of this manifestation of hatred and incitement to murder, which was what it really was. Looking back, even after I had come here in 1938, I would tell myself, they all know it. This wasn’t done secretly. These songs weren't done in the beer-cellars of Nuremburg, they were sung in the streets of Berlin. There were journalists there, there were embassies there, they could all hear. And this is an aspect of my experience which has given me a lot of heartache. The fact that the world knew and the people of the world both allowed it to happen, and didn't open their homes to the majority of our people.
On 28 October 1938 very early in the morning, the police came and asked for my father. They asked him to get dressed, which he did. They didn't say where they were heading for, they’d didn't say why they had come. No reasons were given. They had a sort of roll of paper, some kind of warrant for his arrest. My father looked quite pale and asked the officer, ‘Where do you want to take me? I can pack my suitcase and go myself.’ They said, ‘No, no.’ They weren't rude or impolite, just doing their duty. I asked where my father was going and received a similarly evasive answer. Very soon afterwards another policeman came to call for my brother, who was ten years older than myself. Now the irony of this was that my brother had received only the day before a valid passport to go to Rhodesia, where we had relations. This was a time, by the way, when all the time one studied the globe, looking for far away places to which one might escape. Cuba, Bulawayo, places one had hardly heard of before. Any place in the world. But the world by and large was not very open to us. My brother had a received a visa and it didn't seem possible that the police would take him too, but they did.
Later that day we learned that from all over Germany, from the small towns, they removed whole Jewish Polish families. From large towns they couldn't manage it, so they only took the male members. They put them on trains and shipped them to the frontier between Germany and Poland. It was called the Polnaktion, the ‘action’ against Poles. The big idea was to get rid of Polish Jews. The Poles guarded their frontiers with bayonets and wouldn’t let them in; the Germans wouldn’t let them back. So they were landed in the no man’s land, swamplands between the two countries. Eventually they went into disused factories, barns and so on. Thousands and thousands of them. As far as I and many other Polish Jews are concerned, that was the moment that marked the real breakdown of Jewish family life.
We had hardly recovered from the shock of my father's being taken away and the breakup of our family, when on the 9th and 10th November 1938 Kristallnacht occurred. This time it was the turn of all Jews. Many were killed, many taken to concentration camps. Really it was after Kristallnacht that it became quite clear to even the most trusting and even the most optimistic that organized Jewish life had come to an end in Nazi Germany and Austria. According the Germans these demonstrations were a spontaneous reaction to the assassination by a Jew of the second secretary at the Nazi embassy in Paris. Having lived through it I remember it very very vividly. These were not at all spontaneous demonstrations. They were planned, they happened at much the same time in much the same fashion everywhere. Burning of synagogues, the demolition of Jewish property, the burning of books - a vulgar outbreak. But it was not a spontaneous demonstration by the German people. These events were well rehearsed and well carried out by the SA, the storm troopers and by the Hitler Youth. Following that event the House of Commons in Britain debated the Jewish situation in Nazi-occupied countries and not without opposition the majority decided to admit 10,000 children, unaccompanied by their parents, to the United Kingdom. Immediately various organizations began selecting those children who would come over. The first transport left on December 2, the second, on the 13th December 1938. I was on the second
My father died in Buchenwald in 1941. He went back to Berlin from the border for a short time just before the outbreak of war, then he was taken away again, this time to Buchenwald. My mother was in Berlin until 1943, when she was deported to Auschwitz, to the best of my knowledge on the 43rd transport from Berlin. Prior to that she was doing compulsory labour in a factory. I learnt about my mother only after the war, although I knew about during the war, because my mother was still able to communicate. A few days before America entered the war she was able to write and tell me that my father was no longer alive.
My getting selected for the kindertransporte was simply luck. That is important to stress, because people may have the idea that because the people they know who came on those transports appear reasonable people, and many of them appear to have done something with their lives, they were in some way special. This was not so. It was sheer luck. This certainly put quite a burden on the older children, teenagers like myself, because we were very well aware that it wasn't merit that made them choose you and not the others and it was with great pain that we learned what is not generally known, that over a million children were murdered in the Holocaust. The quota wasn't quite reached, only 9,732 actually got out by the time war broke out. It was simply luck that either gave you a number on the list or did not. My brother was still with my father, until almost the outbreak of war. Then through luck, again, he managed to win the race against time and get out. he visited me in England a week before war broke out, then went on to southern Rhodesia. So he survived, but my parents did not, nor did the parents and families of the majority of those children who came out.
The departure from our families and from Berlin was done very rapidly; I had about a week to get ready. We were allowed to take hand luggage - a rucksack, a small case. Very early in the morning we gathered at one of the important railway stations in Berlin - they liked to do these kind of things either very early or at night, so that people by and large shouldn’t see what was going on. We gathered there and suddenly we were told to proceed to the platform, without even saying goodbye to our mothers. It was one last demonstration of their cruelty. So the platforms were empty and the train started without anyone waving goodbye or any sort of farewell. No-one could be there, either to comfort or to be comforted. That was the way right through Germany. I think we picked up more children on the way, always the empty platforms, farewells forbidden. This went on until we got to the Dutch frontier and that was something that comes out so very warmly in so many letters I've read about the journey: how marvellously warm-hearted the welcome was on practically every station in Holland. Women and children with hot drinks - it was very cold - and chocolate and cakes and sweets. One had come out of this inferno into a civilised world, where there were kind faces and smiling people. We did know where we were going. We were accompanied by some Jewish welfare workers or teachers who were allowed to accompany us to the border, then had to go back again. Not far from the Dutch border one particular person who was accompanying us came into our compartment and said that we should all open our luggage. I opened mine and he noticed that I had quite a few letters, which I had taken because they were from very dear friends who had emigrated and I just clung to them. He said it would be wise to tear them up because he was afraid that if the Gestapo or the SS saw them they might delay our departure because they would check to see if they were secret documents. So I sat by the window tearing them up. It was very sad. Then we proceeded into Holland and then to England.
The first transports went to a reception camp, a sort of holiday camp, a bit like Butlins, in Dovercourt on the east coast, not far from Harwich which was where we had landed. The BBC and newspapers asked the English people to offer us homes and people responded in quite a remarkable way. I was very fortunate in having had a vicar and his wife from Norwich. They felt that it was the Christian thing to do, to offer a home to a Jewish child. I went to them. They were wonderful people who did what they did as if it was the most natural thing to have done. I was very fortunate, because I was of an age when I could have been used as a domestic help, but I wasn't. They sent me to school, because they imagined that that was what my parents would have wished me to do. They thought I should have a religious education and that I should go either to church or to synagogue. They preferred me to go to synagogue because that was what my parents would have liked. They were quite remarkable people. I even kept kashrut for a while. Unfortunately this all came to a rather sudden end in that a year after I arrived the Reverend Robins, having played golf all afternoon, suddenly had a heart attack and died. A vicarage is a tied cottage and his wife had to vacate it and so I became homeless. I did have other offers. The Quakers were very active in looking after the children, they played a very prominent role in these rescue operations, they really were wonderful, and I was offered other homes, but I felt that war had broken out and I was very worried, as were many of us, that the Germans might invade England. I felt that somehow it might be a good idea if I went to those members of my youth movement who had come subsequently to England. Which I did. I joined them immediately after the fall of France. We lived on the land in a kind of kibbutz. The first one was in Wiltshire, but there were various places. Most of us thought that an invasion was imminent: we were much more worried probably than were the majority of British people; they were very confident, but we knew the might the Germans had.
After the outbreak of war there was no regular communication with Berlin. Our letters had to go via Geneva, the Red Cross. Theoretically you were allowed to write one letter a month but in fact it didn't work out that way - it was very very slow. The letters had to be written on a form: five lines, five words on each line. So before you wrote them you did a few drafts, very much like writing a complicated telegram, and you had to think very carefully about what you put in, how much you put in, that you put in things that might give hope, might give pleasure, might help the people to whom you were writing to struggle on. Because we were very conscious of the terrible situation our families were in. Often separated, and awaiting a very uncertain fate.
I was aware of camps inside Germany, but not of the concentration camps. I can't remember when we first heard about them, although news started seeping out quite early. People would come from the Polish underground and so on, and quite early on we began hearing about the concentration of Jews in Polish ghettoes. It was very frightening, and one trembled. I knew that my father was in Buchenwald from the time that war broke out. It was a very tortured time. Every night I wondered if it was colder in the camp than where I was; I always felt that it would be that much harder to survive. Was he cold, was he hungry, was he starving. It was very tormenting, for all of us, though some talked about it more than others. It was interesting in that the majority of us were young, many younger than I was, yet there was very little in the way of psychological support. I know there was a war on, and there were many reasons for why things were not laid on that might in normal times have existed, but it was pretty tough for so many young people to have to struggle with their thoughts and their fears and their anxieties about their parents, without any sort of support.
I knew English before I came. We had learned French and English and Hebrew at school in Berlin. This helped enormously. I went straight to school in England and there was no problem with lessons. In fact we had very good tuition. My literature teacher was terribly surprised to find that we had done much more Shakespeare in schools in Berlin than they had done in Norwich. I was asked, did the school specialise in Shakespeare and I said no. So language was not a problem.
People at the school were extremely kind; teachers who would not normally fraternize with pupils made an exception for me, because I had no family. I was invited to spend Easter Week 1939 with my head mistress. A rather frightening figure, a formidable woman, who had a beautiful house on the Norfolk coast. She could not have been kinder, she taught me how to knit, took me around, showed me places. My art teacher, who lived with her, was also there. One day we were having lunch when the 1 o’clock news came on. Italy had marched into Albania. My reaction to that was the same as I had always heard at home when the Nazis had taken over another country: if only the free countries would stop them. A discussion ensued between the two women, which got rather heated and culminated in the art mistress saying, ‘We should stop them, we should go to war.’ My headmistress said very angrily, ‘Why?’ The art mistress replied, ‘Look what they are doing to the Jews.’ ‘I'd rather sacrifice all the Jews,’ said my headmistress, ‘for one English child.’ There I sat and if the earth could have opened up I would have been swallowed and if someone had given me a ticket to return to my mother in Berlin I would have gone. I had never heard such a remark in my presence in Nazi Germany. I got up and went out the room, went up to my bedroom, threw myself on the bed and I must have cried all the tears I had not cried for a very long time. After a while the arts mistress knocked on the door and called me down for tea, though I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t swallow. The head mistress started to explain things. ‘Let me explain. I used to be the head mistress of a large girl’s school in the east end of London. The majority of girls were Jewish. And do you know, almost every year, it was the Jewish girls who went off with the scholarships.’
I felt very very upset, because I couldn't deal with it. It was a ghastly experience, but it taught me a lot. I had come out of Nazi Germany where I had personally never encountered anything as personal as this in my life. I knew what was going on and I knew what the Nazis were aiming at, but here I was in a free country which I had associated with democracy, with equality, all the things I treasured - then out come these remarks. I have never experienced any direct anti-semitism since then, although I have no illusions about any country in the world. There is no doubt that you will always find evil, or racial prejudice in certain sections of any community.
I hope that a lot of our people who came over on the kindertransporte have learnt to be more sensitive to prejudice, to injustice, to racial prejudice or any prejudice against minorities. I would like to think so.
Many of my friends had wanted to go to Palestine, but couldn't go, because there were restrictions. Quite a number had gone before the war and were there, mainly in kibbutzim. I had thought of going myself, that had been my original plan after I arrived in England and before I started studying here. I intended to go when the war was over. But when in early March 1942 I received the news that my father was no longer alive, it was a crisis for me. Extraordinarily enough my English teacher, a very kind person to whom I was very attached, sent me a cheque for £16.00, a lot of money at the time. In her letter she said that she felt that she knew my father because I had so often talked about him, and that she would like to send this cheque and would suggest that I should do something in memory of my father with the money. I thought very very deeply about it and decided that I would leave my group, which was a hard decision, and use the money as a down-payment for my social science training at Birmingham University. My intention was to become a social worker. Which I did, and from there my career has moved on to psycho-therapy and psycho-analysis.
I didn't have the time to observe England at first. I was too busy living here. But thinking recently about the 50 years I have been in England, in my own professional work I have carried out what I so strongly came to believe I should do. Firstly to carry on the tradition of my own home, which was one in which religion and prayers expressed themselves in service and in doing something, not talking about it very much. That was deeply ingrained in my parents' way of life. I tried to live accordingly, particularly when I realised that neither of my parents had survived. In my own work I was very involved in prevention and in applied work to do with mothers and children and families and sick children and dying children and their families. All of which are obviously interwoven. I do have the impression that of the children who came over with me, a lot of them have gone into the helping professions. I find that very very interesting.
I don't feel British. I have a British passport but it's very difficult to say what ‘feeling British’ means. When I lecture abroad I might say, ‘In England we do it this way’, but I could not bring myself to say ‘We British do it this way.’ But my home is here and my friends are here. This is where my late husband and I struck roots, where we reinstated the home that both of us lost rather suddenly in Nazi Germany. I’ve worked very hard in this country; I hope that some of us have been of some service to Britain. I've worked very hard in my own little corner helping to build up the NHS, and I’m very proud of that. I am very identified with it. I have helped to train generations of medical students, of paediatricians, of doctors and I am very happy with having had the chance to do that. This is where my roots are, in the services in which I have engaged. The best this country stands for, which does have to do with giving rights to refugees and so on - not enough but more than any European country. That is important to say. This country offered more than any other. Yes, it was a drop in the ocean, because we know now what happened to so many others, but, and this has to be said, more than any other European country. Though one cannot simply say, Thank you Britain. Because there is too much sorrow mixed up with the thanks: that our parents could not be saved, that Palestine was not open to refugees, that ships were turned back.
When I went to Israel after the Six-Day war with my husband we toured the north. A friend showed us round and he knew the positions very well and he would say where the tanks were and so on. Suddenly I pointed in a certain direction and asked, ‘Is that ours?’ and he said, ‘yes’ or ‘no’, I forget which. And suddenly I had such a twinge, it wasn’t a pain, but it was something. And I realised that I had never ever said about a landscape, ‘Is that ours’. I had never felt that a landscape might be mine or ours, I'd never thought that way. What was interesting was that not only had I said it and not felt that it was out of turn, he did not think it was odd either. He just answered quite naturally. It made me a bit sad, because I realised that in Germany I had loved the country, it is very beautiful, but it wasn’t mine. I love England, I love the Lakes, I love Sussex, but I have never thought of it as mine. Make of that what you like, but I think it says quite a lot.
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What is important is that here in England, under certain circumstances, the same things could happen again. Under certain kinds of conditions this sort of thing can breed and unfortunately can take off. I don't think it would be as well organized as the Germans did it. Their extermination had a German characteristic, whatever they do they do efficiently, they even could kill efficiently. Two weeks ago Louis Jacobs' synagogue in St John's Wood had a big swastika painted on the wall and ‘Kill the Jews’. A swastika. In 1989. If you had told me when the war was over in 1945 that in 1989 there would be a neo-Nazi party anywhere in Europe, that there would be a resurgence in Germany, that there would be swastikas outside a synagogue in St John's Wood, I would have been very distressed and I would have said, ‘Was our journey from Berlin really necessary?’ That is terribly distressing to me and it is a fact of life and I think it is important to know. When I arranged the event to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the kindertransporte in 1989 and there was a short piece in a paper, I received one short note, nothing personal, which said that it was not at all true that only 9,732 had escaped, there were many more, and that it was time we went back. That, it transpired, came from a well-known member of the National Front. The same mail brought me a letter from an OAP in Dorset who sent £10.00 and said she had always admired the Jews. That was very touching. But the first letter didn't shock me. I just felt sorry that at this stage in our lives these things still exist. And since they do they should be taken seriously, they shouldn't just be dismissed as crackpots.
Thank you, Bianca and Jonathan. We will never forget.
Thank you Bianca Gordon. I had forgotten, honestly, what a fascinating interview I was lucky enough to have been given. What I find it amazing is, to my search at least, her complete absence on line.