3 min read
ByGloria Tessler, Gloria Tessler
I could have been born a Hungarian if my father’s family had not upped and left for Grimsby many years ago. I could have been born in Russia if my mother’s family had not done likewise. And had that immigration into Britain not taken place, I could have been murdered, like so many others, by Hitler’s death machine.
In the mid 20th century this country reached out its hand to European Jews. Not, of course, to all of them. And not always kindly, as we know from the internment camps on the Isle of Man and elsewhere to which refugees from the Nazis were sent in the mistaken belief that they were German spies. But Britain did reach out to the children who came here via Kindertransport, and to those, like my second mother Gina, who left her Czech homeland and her family just as Hitler entered it. This country reached out in the very teeth of Nazi totalitarianism, and that hand of friendship was possibly the first glimmer of kindness on a bleak horizon.
The refugees became the new Britons in the wake of the Second World War. And it wasn’t easy – not for them and not for British communities that had to accept them. Our new countrymen and women had to find it in their hearts to absorb a people so different from themselves, yet divided from the continent by a mere 20 mile stretch of English Channel. Perhaps they feared that absorbing these Europeans brought the idea of the feared Nazi invasion closer. Or perhaps they had no imagination to feel or sense it. We can never know, as many of us were not born. The British had to accept the stranger in their midst, and for many, just as in our present times, to accept that stranger is no easy thing.
There are reports that even Jewish families treated young Jewish refugee girls, who had arrived without friends, family, or a knowledge of English, as servants. Gina had the guts to leave the strict Scottish school where she thought she would be a teacher but worked as a domestic, and was treated as a nobody.
I had no experience of the Second World War. From Gina I discovered the perfidy of schoolgirls turning Nazi in the twinkle of an eye – the girl who scratched her arm with barbed wire when she learned she was Jewish. I could empathise, but in the England I grew up in I could not feel it on my skin the way she felt it on hers and in her memory.
But England had a heart. Some shift happened in its consciousness. The shift eventually gave rise to the European Union, with the support of Winston Churchill, one of a group of visionary leaders who dreamed up the concept of peace, unity and prosperity to follow the Armageddon of the Second World War. The 1957 Treaty of Rome generated the European Economic Community or the Common Market, and in 1975 Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath took us into the EEC following a British referendum. And as we know, the single market was born.
Much of the rest will now be history. For we are leaving the EU in the most significant political change of our lifetime.
How can we forget, even those who voted for Brexit – some, again, out of fear of the stranger in our midst – that this was the great continental dream that would end all wars through trade, commerce, and cultural interchange of ideas? For some this dream has already killed itself through too much bureaucracy. And there is fallout in the fears of the millions of immigrants, who now feel unwanted aliens in a country that seems to be growing smaller. I have European friends who have lived here for years, and now fear being sent home. Do they feel something of the tremors that we Jews felt when we came here as refugees from terror?
I love my country. I am an English European Jew. But England to me must mean more than metropolitan London, more than the potential break up of this green and pleasant land – “this precious stone set in a silver sea” – into miniscule fragments.
But my fear is that petty nationalism could take over and splinter our own country and the Europe to which we essentially belong, and shatter some larger sense of self that is aspirational, open-hearted, creative, full of largesse – and yet so, so fragile.