In 1938, you would have needed to steel yourself before turning to the Personal Ads section of the Jewish Chronicle. Advert after advert from terrified and traumatised Jews in Germany and Austria desperate to get a visa for themselves and for their families: Begging for a chance to work, their pride and dignity long rendered unimportant. When I first came across these, researching for my novel, I cried. I had been looking for something that might plausibly turn my protagonist from a political ingenue, happy to cavort with Nazis during her stay in Germany, into someone who would do whatever was in her power to help the victims of those Nazis. It is the moment when she reads those terrible ads in the Jewish Chronicle that moves her. Her tears are mine.
For me there was a personal angle, for I knew Miriam Eris, née Keller who was the child of people like those sending ads to a Jewish newspaper many hundreds of miles away. Her parents put their savings into getting documents for her, their eldest daughter, so that she, at least, could leave Germany. That wouldn’t have been enough to save her though, if her father hadn’t scrambled through a back window when the Gestapo knocked on their door, in Leipzig, on the night of October 27 1938. In what the Nazis call the ‘Polenaktion’ (the Polish Action), it was decided that all Jews of Polish origin would be expelled to Poland and that night, Miriam, her mother and her two siblings, were pushed over the border. It made no difference that the parents had come to Germany as teenagers and their children were all German.
Because her father had escaped the round up, he was able to return to their home and from there he found someone who could smuggle Miriam back into Germany, as her documents to leave the country were only valid from there.
Britain is proud of having saved 10,000 children from the Nazis via what later became known as the Kindertransport, but as I recount in my novel, it was less clear cut than that. At an international conference at Evian that summer, the nations discussed what could be done to help the Jews, but then did nothing. Hitler openly mocked their hypocrisy. Britain with a mandate from the League of Nations to create a national home for the Jews in Palestine, had a special responsibility but ensured that this option would not even be discussed at Evian. Hitler felt emboldened to now increase the persecution and the planning of the big pogrom that would be called the Kristallnacht began after Evian.
Miriam’s family was among 17,000 Jews of Polish origin who were expelled from Germany and refused entry by Poland until the Poles finally relented. Miriam’s family, exhausted and hungry, was permitted to enter the little village of Sbazsyn where a large refugee camp was established. The Polish Jewish historian, Emanuel Ringelblum, wrote this eyewitness account:“I do not think any Jewish community has ever experienced so cruel and merciless an expulsion as this one. The future is envisaged in desperate terms. People in the camp have received notices that they have lost their Polish citizenship […] Sbaszyn has become a symbol for the defencelessness of Polish Jews. Jews have been humiliated to the level of lepers”.
Ringelblum of course could not know how much worse it would yet get. He was incarcerated in the Warsaw Ghetto and did not survive the war. The above account was found after the war, buried in the Ghetto ruins. But Miriam was an eyewitness to Sbazsyn who survived. She later described how they were supported by the Jews of Kattowice who brought them hot food.
Others expelled to Sbazsyn that week included the Grynszpan family from Hanover. Their son Herschel was living a precarious existence as an illegal immigrant in Paris, afraid to return to Germany. He received a postcard from Sbazsyn on November 3 describing their dire situation. Herschel bought a gun and three days later entered the German Embassy and shot and killed a Nazi official. This gave the Nazis the pretext to launch their planned attack on Germany’s Jews. The Kristsallnacht was unleashed against them on November 9. It was the revulsion felt in Britain at this government-sponsored violence, with hundreds murdered and 30,000 men arrested and sent to concentration camps, that led to renewed calls on the British Government to act. This led directly to the decision to let Jewish children — but not their parents — into Britain later that month.
And always, the British government was anxious to distract the Americans, in particular, from pointing out that Palestine was the obvious place to take in large numbers of Jews. Prime Minister Chamberlain and his Colonial Secretary were already drawing up their new White Paper policy, to be released in May 1939, that would ensure that the doors of Palestine would remain tightly shut. If a war was coming in Europe then they hoped by such an act to gain the loyalty of the Arabs. As Chamberlain said in Cabinet ,‘If we must offend one side, let it be the Jews.’ After all, they assumed, their loyalty could be taken for granted.
The little children who made new lives for themselves in Britain were understandably grateful to Britain. But what I wanted to explore was what those parents left behind would have felt towards the country that would take only their children — forcing them into making the most terrible of choices. I chose the format of a novel because we cannot know now for sure what those parents thought of Britain, the world’s most powerful nation, and its ignoble actions at Evian and again when betraying the Czechs at Munich that September. They cannot give their thoughts but I have, I hope, expressed their fears and confusion. At least they did not know what was to come. But well might they have seen Neville Chamberlain as a latter-day Pied Piper, splitting families and taking their children from them.
In this case, Herman and Ester Keller decided their 14-year-old would have a better chance alone in a strange land than her 12-year-old sister, Leni, and brother, Bubi, eight, so these four innocents would be consumed in the Holocaust.
At first Miriam did not thrive. One day in early 1940, my grandmother, Lily, received a phone call from a cousin who was involved with organising the Kindertransports in Britain. They had a 15-year-old girl who was not being treated well where she was. Could Lily and her husband, Geoffrey, help? It couldn’t have been an easy decision. My grandparents were living with their two young sons aged seven and 12 in a three bedroom flat in Brampton Court, Hendon, there was a war on and rationing was now in place. Miriam was Orthodox and my grandparents didn’t keep kosher. And she didn’t speak good English. Many years later I asked my grandmother about it. She seemed unable to understand the awe with which the question had been asked. ‘We just did what needed to be done,’ she said. And true heroism lay in her lack of comprehension.
Wartime London might not have been the best time to make your kitchen kosher and to not use your ration stamps for perfectly good food that could no longer be eaten in their home. But my grandparents did that. And Dad gave up his bedroom and moved in with his big brother.
The last time Miriam saw her father was when he thrust her nearly forgotten sandwiches through the train window as it left Berlin. That too is in the novel.
Without Let or Hindrance is published by The Book Guild. It will be reviewed in next week’s JC
