Author: Christopher Gilley

Hans Jackson: 17 February 1921 – 6 May 2012

Hans Hermann Josephy, or Hans Jackson as he was later known in Britain, was born in Berlin in 1921 to Richard Josephy and Klara (geboren Lachmann). His father owned two clothing shops (both called ‘Max Shöneberg’), running a successful business here until the National Socialists took power. On the day of the boycott of Jewish shops in April 1933, Hans returned home from school to find Brown Shirts shouting and displaying placards outside one of the family shops. They demanded protection payments over the next few years.

Then, in an all-too familiar pattern, in 1935, Hans was expelled from the Friedrichs Real Gymnasium under the anti-Jewish legislation of the 1930s. He began an apprenticeship in carpentry at a Jewish trade school run by the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden. Many of these trade schools were in operation across Germany at this time, as we have discussed elsewhere; the aim was to help young Jews find a job abroad, so that they would be able to emigrate.

For Hans, the scheme was successful: Poldi Kuh, director of the trade school, helped Hans to obtain a place at Kitchener camp in England in March 1939.

Hans was never to see his parents again, however; they were deported and killed in Riga.

In Britain, Hans initially helped with a BBC monitoring centre in Haig camp (adjacent to Kitchener), translating German short-wave radio signals for the War Office. He was working at this on the day German troops invaded the Netherlands in May 1940.

Nevertheless, despite his contribution, Hans was deemed an Enemy Alien and was interned, initially on the Isle of Man. His situation was soon to become very much worse, however, as he took what sounded like a better opportunity and volunteered to board a ship, with many others in a similar situation, bound for Australia.

That ship, however, was HMT Dunera.

Despite his treatment thus far, including further internment in Hay camp in Australia, along with many other Jewish refugees when given the chance, Hans volunteered to join the Pioneer Corps in October 1941. He was posted back to the UK, to Scotland, where he built stage sets for the Entertainment Corps, and around this time he also took courses in commercial art.

After the war, Hans gained British citizenship, married, and set up a successful graphic design business in Glasgow. By 1980, he was also studying fine art and painting.

Familiar to many Kitchener families, Hans did not really talk about the war years – in his case, until after his wife’s death in 1984. He then began to produce paintings of Glasgow, but also of his experiences before and during the war. He was commissioned for this work over time, and in 1987 moved to Golders Green, forming close ties with survivor communities and organisations such as the AJR.

On the 60th anniversary of the events of November 1938, the Beth Shalom Holocaust Memorial Centre established the Hans Jackson room, which exhibited his collection of work ‘Prelude to the Holocaust’.

A few weeks ago, Professor Clare Ungerson, whom many of you know as author of ‘the book’ on Kitchener camp (Four thousand lives: The rescue of German Jewish men to Britain in 1939), suggested that we should get in touch with Allen Sternstein. Allen is a nephew of Hans Jackson, and works hard with Holocaust education projects, loaning his uncle’s work out in order that a fuller understanding of the terrible events of the 1930s and 1940s might be gained.

On this weekend of Holocaust Remembrance, we are deeply honoured to announce that Allen has given permission for us to add his uncle’s work to this Kitchener camp collection.

Over the next few days and weeks, I will gradually add these images to this project, and I will also be carrying out further research on the life and work of Hans Jackson at the various archives where relevant materials are now held.

In remembrance of our families – the work of Hans Jackson

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References for this blog post:

The Jewish Chronicle, Harold Hans Jackson, 10 August 2012, by Allen Sternstein; Harold Jackson, Personal Papers, EHRI portal, for the Wiener Library; Obituary – In Memory, The Dunera Association, by Allen Sternstein (http://www.duneraassociation.com/files/2214/3184/2044/85-DuneraNews-Aug2012.pdf).

In New York, Ann Rollett has from the start been working hard to ‘get out the word’ there about this Kitchener camp project. She has also been carrying out research into specific aspects of it, which we will be sharing over the next few months.

For now, she has sent us a more personal piece about how she first became interested in and involved with this work, which we wanted to share with you, below.

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Back in the late 1970s, my boyfriend (now husband) and I visited Victor and Kitty Cohn in their new home in Leisure World, an over-55s community in Southern California. After a tour of the various clubhouses, over lunch in the restaurant by the golf course, Victor told us about coming to Berlin in 1945 with the British occupying force and finding my grandmother, mother (age 10), and uncle (age 8), who had survived the war in hiding. My grandfather had been killed just a few months earlier by the Russians when they liberated Berlin. Victor told us how he would take an army truck and fill a bag with as much food as he could find and bring it to my mother and her family. We were so touched by his story that, years later, we named our daughter, Victoria, after him.

Not long after, my boyfriend and I moved to the east coast. The next and only other time we saw Victor was at our wedding in 1983, one year before his death.

Back then, no one in my family talked much about what had happened during the war, so Victor’s openness had surprised me.

By the early 1990s, however, my mother had become more willing to talk. By this point, my grandmother was dying, and unfortunately, my mother was unable to answer many of my questions about the family that had been lost because she had been a young child, only 7 years old in 1942, when her grandparents and other relatives were deported and her family went into hiding.

My mother suggested that we interview Kitty, her only surviving first cousin. She was 17 years old when she left Germany, and would remember more. Plus, Kitty had family pictures. I audiotaped my conversation, with Kitty and my mother, the first time they discussed their family, the war, and the Holocaust. Kitty died in 2009, and my mother now has her photo albums.

I was busy in the 1990s working and raising children, so I didn’t listen to the tapes again until 2107. The audio quality is not great and I especially had difficulty in deciphering names. Kitty died in 2009, so I began researching online, trying to fill in some of the details.

During the interview, Kitty mentioned that she and Victor came to England in 1939 because Victor was accepted by a camp, which I eventually figured out was Kitchener camp. After Victor arrived at the end of April 1939, he found Kitty a job, so she was able to get a domestic worker visa. She followed him to Sandwich about three months later.

Through my searches about Kitchener, I came across Dr Clare Weissenberg’s blog, From Number to Names. On her site, she recommended Clare Ungerson’s book on Kitchener. She also listed web resources that I have found invaluable.

As Clare Ungerson describes, when England declared war on Germany, a large proportion of Kitchener men joined the British Pioneer force –a support organization made up of foreign-born men. At the end of the war, many Kitchener men were sent back to their native countries with the occupying forces.

My mother, who was 10 in 1945, told me how much it meant to them to see Victor – to see any family member – after two and a half years in hiding. On the audiotape, I can hear her enthusiasm as she talked about Victor’s visits, remembering him as charming and handsome, like the actor Victor Mature. My grandmother became quite ill when the war ended and my mother had to take responsibility for obtaining and preparing food for the family. She remembers how much Victor did for them, visiting and bringing food frequently. She said all the British soldiers collected food.

According to Kitty, when Victor returned to Berlin, he went searching for his family and hers. Victor had left behind his parents and two younger sisters, whom he had hoped to bring to England on domestic worker visas; according to Kitty, however, they had not wanted to work as maids. Kitty had left behind her parents and two older brothers, both of whom had applied to Kitchener, but had not been accepted.

Victor found only five survivors, all from Kitty’s family – my mother, uncle, and grandmother; Hardy Kupferberg (Putti), Kitty’s first cousin from her father’s family, who had managed to hide until 1944 when she was caught and put into Ravensbrück, the women’s work camp near Berlin; and one other distant cousin, Berthold Rahfeld. According to Kitty, “Victor did not have a soul left in the world.” My mother remembers that, as the British and American soldiers came to Berlin, word got out about what they had found and they began to realize that “nobody could have survived.”

I don’t know much about the Kitchener men who returned to Europe with the occupying forces and whether any of the others found family. It must have been heartbreaking to realize that virtually everyone they loved was gone. For the few who survived, the Kitchener men and the British and American troops brought hope and help. My mother says about British and American occupying forces that “they were human.”

How much that must have meant – after the cruelty, suffering, and deprivation of the war.

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Letters such as the one shown (translated) below will have been written in their tens of thousands among our family members who were trying to find a safe country to which they could emigrate from Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Translation below by Helga Brown, BA Dip. Ed., née Steinhardt. Original at www.fromnumberstonames.com. Copyright Clare Weissenberg

The addresses you want, my dear son, you will find amongst the enclosed papers; one address will be sent to you by Aunt Hedel. I don’t have your cousin’s address, as sister Recha didn’t reply to my letter. I asked your cousin Recha to let you have the address of her sister by writing; she has another sister, the eldest one – Edith – there in New York. I hope she will do this. I expect you will write to her direct quite soon and thank her for her previous correspondence. You will find in one of the letters that she went in your interest from Pontius to Pilate and that came about because your father wanted to load you on a ship to Shanghai, but I didn’t want that. When I mentioned this to Dr Honegbaum – a rep. of the Aid Association – she advised me to write to London to the Chinese authorities about a visa. But I wrote to Reha in Berlin about this request and begged her to fetch the visa personally to speed up this arrangement, but Dr Honegbaum advised me to contact London because the visa there is free of charge. You will see the result from your letter. He should have said that in the first place. Too many people are waiting, as a result of this advice, in queues for hours. I also asked Myst in a letter to give you the address of Frieda’s relations, who if they didn’t want to sponsor you themselves could, perhaps, inform their friends about your predicament and ask them for advice.

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Adreßbuch

While Kitchener camp eventually provided a route out for around 4,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, and ‘the Sudetenland’ (now part of the Czech Republic), in order to more fully understand the context in which this rescue took place, we have started to look at what other options were available to people trying to escape in the late 1930s.

A Kitchener descendant got in touch recently to discuss the Shanghai option, in part because he has found the name of a relative in a Shanghai address book from November 1939.

For anyone interested in pre-War family history who has not yet discovered the ‘institution’ of the Adressbuch, I would strongly recommend them as a source of much useful information.

The history of Jews in Shanghai

While the favoured options for those seeking refuge tended to be Palestine, the USA, and the UK, the numbers of people being accepted by those countries were extremely limited by quotas. Many did find refuge in other areas of the world, and in particular in other parts of the British empire. However, it tends to be little known that many Jewish refugees saw out the war in Japan and China, where thousands survived the Holocaust years.

There had long been a small Jewish community in Shanghai, which had settled here for business and trade purposes during the nineteenth century. They were often referred to as Baghdadi Jews, who “made a notable contribution to the development of Shanghai as an international trading city” (Brinson and Kaczynski, p. 88). As part of an “International Settlement” area, this Jewish community was not subject to Chinese law.

In the early twentieth century the Baghdadi Jews were joined by another wave of Jewish settlers, this time fleeing first Russian pogroms and then the 1917 Russian Revolution. Many settled in the north, but others joined the Shanghai community, particularly following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.

Thus, by the time we are concerned with here, Shanghai had three synagogues, two cemeteries, a school, shops, and a hospital, for example – in other words, it was a settled and established Jewish community.

Because it was a Treaty Port, Shanghai was one of the few places in the world that did not require paperwork from immigrants to the country. However, the Japanese held the real power in Shanghai from 1937, and when they entered the World War in 1941 on the side of the Axis powers, Japanese forces finally entered the International Settlement Zone and confined the Jewish population to a ghetto.

Arrival in Shanghai

Because Shanghai did not require the same reams of paperwork as other countries, large numbers of Jewish refugees made their way here, often by boat from Trieste or Genoa; some travelled on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Those who initially travelled to Japan – mainly to Kobe, where they were well looked after – were soon to be moved again, just prior to Pearl Harbor, when Japanese forces moved any remaining Jewish refugees from Kobe to Shanghai. Once there, they were placed with the approximately 18,000 refugees who had already moved here from 1938 onwards.

Many were housed in a refugee camp, with provisions paid for by ‘the Joint’ (the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee). Some established small businesses, including Viennese coffee houses, and the various Adreßbuch editions from these years (see example below) give the addresses, names, towns, and professions of the many thousands of Austrian and German refugees who were now living here, with their business information, where applicable.

Before Pearl Harbor, Jewish life flourished in Shanghai, despite often poor conditions and inadequate food supplies. There were three German-language newspapers, as well as journals; there were concerts, plays, and exhibitions, decent healthcare, and good educational opportunities.

After Pearl Harbor, conditions deteriorated quickly, not least because the community was now cut off from US assistance. The original Baghdadi Jews were mostly interned, because they were British subjects, and although the refugees were not interned, at least to start with, because they were stateless, by May 1943 they were placed in a ‘Designated Area for Stateless Refugees,’ or ghetto, which extended for around one square mile. This area included a large Chinese population, and the residents were allowed to move in and out of the area by means of passes. Conditions were very poor indeed, but this was not a European Jewish ghetto: religious, cultural, and educational activities continued, although disease was rife and food extremely scarce. The German government exerted pressure on the Japanese to create a ‘Final Solution’ in this context, but this did not succeed: most of the refugees survived the war years, although around 31 were killed in a US air raid in July 1945.

According to UN Relief and Rehabilitation records, when the war in the Pacific ended in August 1945, 13,496 Jewish refugees were accounted for in Shanghai. Because local conditions remained poor, most left fairly soon afterwards. A few returned to Germany and Austria, but most headed for the USA, Australia, Canada, and Palestine.

Source: The material for this post has been drawn from Charmian Brinson and William Kaczynski, Fleeing from the Führer: A postal history of refugees from the Nazis, The History Press, 2011.

Finally, there is a Facebook page about the Shanghai Jewish refugees Museum, for anyone who is interested in, or has links to, this part of our shared history. A couple of years ago the museum was asking families to add information to their database of Shanghai Jewish refugees, so it would be worth following up on this if some of your family were here, or if you think they might have been.

And there is an interesting blog post with photographs on the subject here:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/shanghais-jewish-quarter-hongkou

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Next year, we will be carrying out research into other options that were available to Jewish refugee families during the 1930s, but for now I am signing off until January 2018.

May I take this opportunity to thank all the families who have placed their trust in this project and who have got in touch with their family materials and information. It has been humbling and an honour to be entrusted with these family stories and histories, and to help gather together these early weeks of Kitchener materials.

We are looking forward to working with many more families in the new year, when we will begin the second phase of our ‘get the word out’ campaign to reach as many Kitchener camp descendants as we can.

If over these holiday weeks you meet up with anyone who had a relative in Kitchener transit camp, please do encourage them to get in touch. They are welcome to share as much or as little information as they feel comfortable with: for some, it might just be a name and a date of birth; others may wish to share much more with the project. Both are valuable, and we are always happy to hear from anyone with a connection to Kitchener camp in Kent.

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And as we gather with our families to light the candles, or to decorate the tree, we remember our fathers and our grandfathers, our uncles and our cousins – and many of us will reflect on what this extraordinary rescue has meant, perhaps especially as we engage with the children in our families today.

For those still lighting the evening candles, Chag Sameach!

And for those with Christmas approaching, Happy Christmas!

See you all in 2018.

And I hope you have a happy and prosperous new year.

Many of you, like me, are probably starting to receive emails and letters about events connected to Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) 2018 – either requests to volunteer, or invitations to attend.

This year’s theme is ‘The power of words’: Words can make a difference – both for good and evil.

HMD began in the UK in 2001, and over 7,000 activities now take place across the country on or around 27 January each year in commemoration of the Shoah.

Many of these events are connected to Holocaust educational projects in schools, but they also include events in workplaces, prisons, museums, and of course, a large state event in London to which survivors and dignitaries are invited each year.

This Kitchener project has been asked to provide materials to two HMD events on the south coast of England, in Dover and Deal, which feels very appropriate to our Kitchener context.

To anyone who has offered materials to the website project: if you would be happy to have copies of your documents and / or photographs considered for inclusion in these exhibitions for Holocaust Memorial Day, please would you sign the letter linked to below and email it to us as soon as possible.

We are also being given opportunities to exhibit materials and information about Kitchener by a number of other museums and events, which I will write about further as soon as we have received fuller details, but they include – a nationwide commemoration of the contribution of Jewish refugees to the UK, a temporary exhibition in a national holocaust museum, and, of course, the exhibition we intend to hold for the handover of this archive to an established holocaust educational institution in 2019.

The permission letter below will enable us to put together writing and images that explain the events surrounding Kitchener camp – in the kinds of terms we put forward on this website.

No family should feel under any obligation whatsoever to agree to have their materials in exhibitions if they are not comfortable with the idea.

For those who do like the idea – please could you let me have the permission letter back by 28 December 2017.

Many thanks!

(Update – link now removed – 2023) Permission letter for exhibitions

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The Association of Jewish Refugees

I had a very good meeting on behalf of the Kitchener project this week with the Chief Executive of the Association of Jewish Refugees, which took place in their bright, busy offices in North London.

I have long turned to the journal archives of the AJR when I have needed some information on Holocaust-related subjects – and it is perhaps especially fascinating to look through the early copies of the journal from the postwar period (they are all available online). Intriguingly, I once found a search notice for my dad from this time, although sadly, it didn’t say who had posted it!

Michael Newman, who is the Association’s current CE, recently highlighted that membership of the AJR is open to all Jewish victims of Nazi oppression, but also to the spouses, children, and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and refugees to the UK.

The main purpose of the AJR is the provision of social welfare and care services to Jewish victims of Nazi oppression in the UK, but it also plays a significant role in Holocaust educational projects.

Thus, the AJR supports research and commemorative projects, as well as educational events.

A further significant contribution of the AJR is the archive Refugee Voices, launched at the Wiener Library in 2009, which constitutes a collection of over 150 interviews with refugees from Nazism who now live in the UK.

Apparently a new website format is imminent, but for now, they may be found here: http://www.ajr.org.uk

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And for those currently celebrating Hanukkah – Chag sameach!

“I don’t know if you can help me. We are delivering an HLF-supported project about Warth Mills internment camp in Bury, Greater Manchester. Many notable Jewish refugees were interned here in atrocious conditions. I wondered if you’d discovered any connections in your research into the Kitchener Camp.”

If anyone knows anything about Warth Mills, and especially if their relative was interned here, please do get in touch – either here in the usual way, or directly, by contacting Richard Shaw, Director at Unity House | Edwin St Creative Hub, The Met, Market St, Bury, Greater Manchester, BL9 0BW, or at [email protected]

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Warth Mills was a disused cotton factory near Manchester. I gather that over the course of the Second World War over 100,000 internees and POWs passed through here.

Interestingly, the Manchester Evening News has just run an article about the project to gather information on the camp at Warth Mill:

http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/grisly-history-britains-biggest-worst-14008786

The Imperial War Museum also holds some records about the camp, if you are interested in following this up and think your family might have some connection here: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/37506

The Association of Jewish Refugees has also published articles over a number of years on Warth Mills, if you would like to check their online archive: https://ajr.org.uk/ajr-journal/

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While we’re helping our friends running projects on related matters, a quick reminder here that we have also been asked to assist as follows, below.

One of our descendant families in Australia is also interested in the research into the Niederschoenhausen, because he has a family link there, as well as to Kitchener camp

As part of a research project, Dr Verena Buser is searching for witnesses or relatives of those who lived and worked in the Hachshara and retraining schemes in Berlin-Niederschoenhausen (Berufsumschichtung und Tagesschule für Berufsvorlehre) in the 1930s

Young Jews were trained in carpentry, as locksmiths, in gardening and in other practical skills. Some managed to escape via Kitchener camp to Australia and other destinations

Verena is also interested in similar training sites in Nazi Germany, such as the groups in Neuendorf, Schiebinchen, and Groß Breesen

Any contact or information is welcome. Please email Dr Verena Buser directly: [email protected]

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the one remaining Jewish newspaper in Germany by 1939 – the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt – was full of articles about how to leave Germany for other countries, including Brazil, Palestine, the USA, Britain, China, and so on. News items include articles on  related topics, such as matters arising from the Evian conference.

The ‘personal ads’ are full of English lesson courses, removals, and notices that people are leaving (see below).

Another feature of the paper was a regular page of English language lessons, an example of which can be seen in the extract below, courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute (please just click on the image to see a larger version).

We’ve been starting to take a look at some of the varied outcomes for Kitchener men when war broke out.

I particularly wanted to get some information uploaded about the Dunera voyage, which has now been started. We’ve had a few Australian families in touch, so this has been an important area to get underway.

We’ve also just had our first Canada descendant contact, so at some point soon we will add that to the research too.

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In late September 1939, after Britain had declared war on Germany, Clare Ungerson (2014) reports that “six senior lawyers proceeded to Sandwich to investigate the men’s loyalty and decide, under the Aliens Act of 1919, whether they were ‘friendly’ or ‘enemy aliens’. The lawyers were provided with special offices at the camp to undertake the interviews and they seemed very well informed about the structure of each of these men’s previous lives” (Ungerson, p. 144). She goes on to observe, “The Kitchener men understood that their loyalty to Britain was being investigated, and, as a consequence many of them told these lawyers, in graphic detail, the terrible ordeals to which they had been subject in their countries of origin” (p. 144).

These alien tribunals were established to ascertain which Germans living in Britain were to be categorised as ‘friendly’ and which were to be deemed ‘enemy aliens’. Around Britain, approximately 65,000 were initially categorised as ‘friendly’.

When France fell in the middle of 1940, however, the government became nervous about invasion, and many Germans, Italians, and Austrians came under suspicion. The decision was made to intern in the UK, or to deport (for  internment) to Canada and Australia.

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By the end of the tribunal process, all but two of the Kitchener men were deemed to be ‘friendly aliens’. Approximately 1,500 attempted to join the Auxiliary Pioneer Corps, although some did not pass the medical, and some were too young, or too elderly.

In the end, six companies were formed here, between January and May 1940, of three hundred men each, and Kitchener became a PC training camp, in the main.

Most of the men training here had been in the camp to start with, although some were sent from other parts of the UK, and not all were Jews or refugees. Quite a large number of the German and Austrian Jews changed their names to something more English sounding around this time, being persuaded that it would be better for them should they be captured.

The men who did not join up for many and varied reasons – religion, being too young or too elderly, fears for their family, poor health, or, for around 700 men, being in possession of a visa for immediate departure, for example – were also kept busy. They assisted in the running of the military side of the camp, with many undertaking catering and repair duties as before.

There was a considerable amount of tension through these months because the remaining men who had not enlisted expected to be able leave the camp, but the camp authorities had decided that in such a context, for the time being at least, they needed to stay where they were. When good relationships between the organisers and the men broke down for a while, Julian Layton was brought back to run things, and matters quietened down again into May and June 1940.

Of course, in the wider world at this time, the British Expeditionary Force was suffering catastrophic defeat in France, which the Pioneer Corps men were caught up in. Consequently, at the end of May 1940, as Ungerson reports (p. 164), the military and civilian camps at Kitchener were closed. A wide area along the east coast was now a protected area and all aliens were to be removed from it.  Many were interned on the Isle of Man and elsewhere.

In August 1940, the Kitchener men who had been internees were given a second chance to enlist, which quite a number took up. However, the large numbers marked for continued internment meant that the government sought other places to put people, and they came to arrangements with Canada and Australia that many thousands would be sent for internment overseas.

After all these men had been through, often since 1933, in their home countries, and through their months as refugees in a foreign country, stateless and kept far from their endangered families, some of the Kitchener men were now to set sail on what was to be the Arandora Star’s final voyage.

Heading for Canada, the Arandora Star carried Italian and German POWs as well as internees. Around 734 interned Italian men, 479 interned German men, 86 German prisoners of war, and 200 military guards boarded the ship between 27–30 June, 1940; there were also 174 crew members.

On 2 July the ship was torpedoed by a U-boat, and 805 people were killed (source: Wikipedia).

Among the survivors were some Kitchener men, some of whom continued to experience yet further – for most of us, unimaginably – dreadful outcomes.

Some of them were next put on HMT Dunera, bound for Australia.

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The project is currently receiving some extraordinary materials from a descendant family that had a relative on HMT Dunera. His remarkably measured accounts of Kitchener, internment on the Isle of Man, the Dunera voyage, and internet again in Hay in Australia are recommended reading for anyone with an interest in this area.

I made my way up to London yesterday, taking the Northern line on arrival, through to Golders Green. In an unexpected location among suburban housing, I located the London offices of World Jewish Relief, only running slightly late (apologies again!) for what I thought was to be a quiet meeting with their digital communications manager.

What seemed a fairly small office frontage opened into a long bright room, full of some of the sweetest, friendliest people you could ever hope to encounter. My slight nervousness about the meeting was soon assuaged by the warmth of the welcome, and by people standing up and smiling and saying hello as I passed by their desks to reach the meeting room.

I don’t know who organises their recruitment, but the people here are impressive – the choice of staff presumably reflecting a similarly warm, open management culture.

So far, so good!

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I’m trying to remember when I first heard of WJR: it can’t have been more than two years ago – if that. And it took even longer for me to put it all together that WJR is the present form of the organisation that saved our fathers’ and grandfathers’ lives by giving them an escape route out of Nazi Germany and the annexed lands of Austria and the ‘Sudentenland’ (the present-day Czech Republic).

I suppose it’s not surprising that it has taken me these long years to work it out, given that it’s only relatively recently that I started to put together what Kitchener camp was (via Clare Ungerson’s book), how it was funded and organised, and how it saved my father’s life – his being the only life saved among his close family members in Poland and Germany. Many of you reading this will have experienced similar levels of loss among those who had to be left behind.

Now that a better understanding of these events is starting to form among descendants of the Kitchener men, however, there have been a number of people getting in touch to ask whether there is some way in which we can say thank you to the Central British Fund, as was – or to World Jewish Relief, as it is today. This is something we are thinking about, and if anyone has any thoughts they would like to add to the mix, please get in touch.

Perhaps there is something we could do around the time we hand over this archive of material in 2019 – for the 80th anniversary of the opening of Kitchener camp? Anyway, please do have a think about it.

In the same way that we descendants are here today, to bring together our small parts of this larger history, so too will those men and women who worked so hard for our families have descendants who are alive today. They should know what their families did in this remarkable rescue of so many lives, and they should know that their families are remembered with gratitude.

It also seems important to mark these events on a broader level. This small part of our larger and terrible history speaks to the potential for a deep well of generosity among men and women – to the better side of who we can be. And even in this context of so much loss among our families, it is important to acknowledge that in these moments, great good was also done among us – and for us.

The Kitchener rescue was an important reminder, then and now, that we can – and should – consider the humanity of others, with compassion.

And in the 1930s, how much stronger this was, as a symbolic action: as well as the physical action taken to help, these events must have spoken volumes to our families, when their very humanity was being denied throughout their homelands.

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Yesterday’s visit was almost overwhelming in the end – in the nicest possible way. It was very touching that so many staff came to say hello and to ask questions about the project we are undertaking among all of us descendants here. Their enthusiastic interest is a testament to the willingness of descendant families to be involved in this together, adding to the sum of knowledge about these significant events.

I have said it elsewhere, but it bears repeating here: were it not for the CBF, our fathers and grandfathers would very probably not have survived the Shoah, and we would not be here today to commemorate these events.

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As I understand it, the organisational archives of the CBF are now housed in paper form at the Metropolitan archives in London, and on microfiche at the Wiener Holocaust Library. World Jewish Relief itself has around half the records for individual people that were created during the 1930s, and into the late 1940s in some cases.

After the war, apparently, the records were supposed to be destroyed, but for various reasons only around half were disposed of, meaning that approximately 35,000 refugee records still exist, out of the original 65,000. Clearly, then, this is not just an archive of records pertaining to Kitchener camp residents, but includes records of the many tens of thousands who were helped to leave ‘Greater Germany’ by the CBF and others throughout those years, including, of course, the children of the Kindertransport.

In many cases the records include the small white ‘entry cards’ you may have noticed on these pages, and the green and the red German Jewish Aid forms, as well as some social work and school records, and in some cases, records of ongoing financial assistance.

There are in fact hundreds of thousands of records here – tragically including many cards made for people who never made it out to safety before war broke out.

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World Jewish Relief spent two years digitising this archive of family materials, and if you would like to know more about your family history it is certainly worth getting in touch to see if your records survived. There is no charge made to access your materials, and these lovely people are very keen to share the information they hold with you, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch with them.

There is a page on their website to fill in, which will go to some of the people I met yesterday – a number of whom volunteer their own time to do this for us: https://www.worldjewishrelief.org/about-us/your-family-history

Please do get in touch with WJR if you haven’t already done so – they would love to hear from you.

For now, on behalf of all of us – many thanks indeed, World Jewish Relief

Having received an ‘Exemption from Internment’ card with some copyright information along the bottom, I realised that these images were not owned by descendants, sadly, although families presumably think they own them.

I checked with the National Archives and there would be a cost attached to posting them, which we cannot cover because this is not a funded project.

We are allowed to transcribe the information off the images onto the site, so if you have any documentation received from the National Archives (and this includes the Exemption from Internment cards), you may send us a written version of the information on it, but not the actual image for upload.

It seems a shame, because so far every other institution that has been contacted has given permission for their images to be reproduced here without charge, because of the nature of the project.

Oh well – it couldn’t last forever – apparently!

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The Association of Jewish Ex-servicemen & Women

It was a glorious, sunny autumn day for the AJEX Annual Remembrance Ceremony and Parade at the Cenotaph in London yesterday

The skies were deep blue, and the air was cold and crisp: it couldn’t have been a better setting or a more beautiful day

Since writing about it the other week, I have heard from a number of our descendants who have been very involved with AJEX parades in the past, but I hadn’t ever been to one myself. It was incredibly moving – and perhaps especially so in the context of all this work going on for the Kitchener camp project

Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis presided over prayers, including the beautiful Psalm 23, a prayer for the safety of the Armed Forces, and a memorial prayer. Those attending were asked to remember the fallen in war, and those killed in the Holocaust

As the sound of Kaddish arose around us, I couldn’t think of a public ceremony that has been more moving, or more heartfelt

The wreaths were laid as people were enjoined to remember those who served their country and gave their lives for us all

For many descendants reading this page today, this was a ceremony that honoured the war service of our fathers and grandfathers, fighting against the Nationalist Socialists, at a time when others in our families were being slaughtered

We will remember them

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Later, as I looked through the memorial book of service, my eye was drawn to a particular piece of text, shown below

I like to think that I have a reasonable level of knowledge about this subject area, but I had no idea that one and a half million Jews fought for the Allied Forces in World War Two. I had never really given any thought to numbers in this context, but that seems huge, given the overall Jewish population at the time, and given that many lived in places where fighting wasn’t an option. It seemed extraordinary

On further reflection today, what seems perhaps more extraordinary is the fact that I didn’t know that number. Did you?

And if I’ve never heard that figure – when I have worked on and off in this area all my life – what are the chances that Joe Public hasn’t a clue that this is a significant part of our history during the war?

Perhaps, like Kitchener, it is time that more on this subject is known – and discussed – and honoured

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I have been trying to find out a bit more about these figures. Yad Vashem has something here, for example: http://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about/combat-resistance/jewish-soldiers

There is also an article by Tamar Ketko, ‘Not victims: The image of Jews in World War Two’, published by Taylor & Francis. I can’t access it, because it’s behind a rather expensive pay wall, but for anyone who can, the abstract suggests it addresses precisely this issue of perceptions versus reality.

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A nice write-up about the AJEX parade in Jewish News on 20th November 2017: http://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/hundreds-of-jewish-ex-servicemen-pay-respects-to-the-fallen-at-ajex-parade/

A descendant family in the USA has made an interesting suggestion and I wonder if we can ask people to consider following it up in a similar way:

“I just sent this letter out to the president of my community’s Jewish organization. You may want to recommend other Kitchenerites to promote the site within their Jewish groups”

The family have then gone on to write a piece about the purpose of the Kitchener project, with a little bit on their personal involvement with it, and then asked if the information could be disseminated to help “get out the word” that we are trying to reach Kitchener descendants globally

This kind of action is incredibly kind and helpful, and a number of our descendants have said they are doing similar things

People only recently finding the site may not realise this, but we’ve only been going about six weeks, so do please keep telling others about it. It’s really appreciated

We do have some digital information all ready to go if anyone has somewhere appropriate they’d like to send it. Just ask and I can send you a copy. It has a couple of my family pictures on it, and information about the project

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On that note, we wish to emphasise that all materials on the site are under copyright

This is made clear elsewhere on the site, but as our first concern is our families, we are emphasising this matter again here, and drawing attention to the terms of use of the website

To be clear, we have granted no permission to anyone for use of images and materials on this website, and neither will we do so in future. Such permission may only be granted by the families who own the images. All other materials are the property of the website, unless otherwise indicated

To descendants who are kindly publicising our project together, this means you must only use your own images, if asked for one

For those who may have seen materials I’ve sent out, you’ll note, for example, that I only use my father’s photographs and other materials. We don’t use other people’s items in this way, and neither should other descendants

Not least, it’s against the law, but it’s also very bad form!

Let’s look after each other

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It’s been good to realise that we’ve had a lot of success reaching a first wave of descendants, and we will need to think of ways to make a second wave of ‘get out the word’ successful in the new year. If you have any thoughts on this, as usual, do please get in touch

We always appreciate your thoughts and ideas

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Our big missing piece of the Kitchener jigsaw is Latin America – so anyone with contacts there, especially, please do think about how you could help us out

We also need a lot more ‘get out the word’ work in Australia. Because of the horrific experience of the Dunera, and other deportations and later emigrations of our refugee families – there is clearly quite a large contingent of Australian Kitchener descendants to be contacted. And to a level I’d not realised when we set out to coordinate this project. It’s proving to be a steep learning curve, as they say.

So, why do I keep mentioning the Wiener Holocaust Library?

What is it – and what is its relevance to this project?

A personal perspective

Many years ago, I took a side-step away from my usual research area and attended my first academic conference on the Holocaust – at which a holocaust survivor and theorist was to be the keynote speaker.

The conference was run from the Wiener’s previous location, rather than the present Russell Square townhouse, but the foundation stone of my interest in the Wiener Library was laid there and then.

I suppose it was a combination of things, not just my encounter with the keynote speaker and delegates. It was also to do with being in the midst of the collection rescued by Alfred Wiener, and in the midst of the silent researchers, working away, who took this subject seriously.

It was also to do with the small brass memorial plaques (now in the Reading Room at Russell Square) – a discreet and moving testament to people’s loss in the Shoah; at the time, I’d never seen anything like that before. And it was to do with my strong sense that this was the beginning of something – although it was to be many years before that ‘something’ would be realised.

When it was realised, it was to be a journey into our family’s loss that would always be framed from time to time by my encounters with the Wiener Library and its modest, dedicated staff.

Who was Wiener?

Alfred Wiener was a German Jew who recognised early on the dangers of the right-wing turn in German political life; by the time Mein Kampf was published in 1925, his understanding of the risk was already heightened. In response, Wiener began to collect information in an effort to counteract the growth of the far right, although his activities put him and his family at risk when the National Socialists gained power in 1933.

Thus, the Wiener family left Germany and settled in Amsterdam for a time, where Wiener continued his work. Establishing the Jewish Central Information Office (JCIO), Wiener’s collection of books and materials continued to grow: by 1938 there was in excess of 8,000 books and other materials, and a staff of ten assistants.

As conditions deteriorated further with the events of November 1938, Wiener prepared to move his now substantial archive to London, which was finally achieved in summer 1939. However, although Wiener managed to leave in time, his wife and daughters did not, and his wife Margarethe died shortly after liberation from Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

After the war, the Wiener Library (as it was now known) assisted with the War Crimes trials at Nuremberg, collected Holocaust testimonies, and was a key shaper of Holocaust studies.

Today the library is recognised as the world’s oldest institution for the study of the causes, processes, and legacies of the Shoah. It houses “over one million items includes published and unpublished works, press cuttings, photographs and eyewitness testimony” (Wiener Holocaust Library – About us).

And how does this relate to Kitchener camp?

From the offices of the JCIO in Amsterdam, Wiener and his colleagues also collected over 350 eyewitness accounts of the events of November 1938, from throughout Germany and Austria. The accounts were collected in the form of reports, interviews, letters, and newspaper articles. In 2013, in an extraordinary undertaking, Ruth Levitt began a project to translate these hundreds of testimonies into English, and they are now available online and in book form.

The immediacy with which these testimonies were collected in the weeks and months following the November 1938 events makes this a unique undertaking, and it is a significant achievement by any measure, as are the translations, the book, and the searchable website.

But I like to think, too, of this important collection being brought out of Europe by Wiener and his colleagues via one of the routes that our fathers and grandfathers took on their way from ‘Greater Germany’ to Britain during that same summer of 1939 – when so many Kitchener men were travelling this way.

Imagine – a Kitchener descendant’s father or grandfather may well have been on the same train as Wiener and his collection, and some Kitchener man’s testimony of November ’38 may now be translated and housed in the Wiener library collection.

And if all that isn’t enough to start to understand why I keep mentioning the Wiener Library, then may I return, briefly, to my more recent personal experience of it – and to an account that I have written elsewhere.

Because this library is where the uncovering of my own family history eventually began. And that is also the story of how we’ve all ended up here – on this webpage.

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In 2014, while paying a first visit in many years to the Wiener Library, London, I was looking at their website when I got my first intimation that the International Tracing Service existed (https://fromnumberstonames.com/holocaust-research/arolsen-archives/) at Bad Arolsen.

With what little information I had at that stage, I emailed off some search forms. I can’t describe what this meant – the thought that I might finally get some information about my family.

However, in one of life’s frustrating moments of irony, my longed-for encounter with history was delayed by technology, and an auto-reply ping-back stating that there was a backlog of search requests. They would respond to me as soon as they could … which might take a few weeks or months.

I then discovered by chance that a copy of the vast ITS database was held at the Wiener Library. It transpired that I could submit a request for tracing with the Wiener, but it was also possible sign up to a session to learn how to search the database myself.

Being of a somewhat impatient nature, I opted for the latter, although if I thought that this would be a speedy resolution to my ‘need to know’, I was to be was sorely mistaken …

The ITS database (ITSD) is vast and rather unwieldy to use – and many of the records are still to be uploaded at Bad Arolsen, Germany, let alone at the Wiener, which gets tranches of records to upload some time after Arolsen has uploaded at their end of things.

And then there’s the ITSD itself, which is something of a challenge to use, shall we say.

Having said that, the ITSD is also extraordinary. Every search starts with the Central Name Index – the key to the documents that are buried here. At the time of writing, the database includes around 50 million reference cards concerning the fate of around 17.5 million people.

Now read that last sentence again …

Once the initial record cards have been located, the tricky part starts – trying to understand the ancient file references that can be found on the cards, and then trying to find the documents that the file numbers refer to …

I shouldn’t complain, though: many will find nothing here to satisfy their need to know, despite the size of the database. As we know only too well from this Kitchener work, so many records were destroyed during and after the war. With the ITSD, whether family members appear in the database rather grimly depends on how they died (or indeed, if they survived).

Anyway, in our family context, I was able to find some documented information.

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My own feeling towards the ITSD has been one of both gratitude and, at the same time, of frustration and disbelief that any database still functions like this: it feels like it was built 20 years ago. Still, without it, I wouldn’t have got nearly so far with our search.

And I must admit that part of the appeal, as time has gone by, has been a sense that it’s a bit like being involved in the world’s slowest detective story.

The world slows down, as the ITSD boots up, and history unwinds before my eyes and searching fingers.

There’s an appeal in that too, it seems.

In the end, I decided that after all these years I could afford for it to take a little longer.

And perhaps this long, slow, complex search is the appropriate mode in which to search through our long, slow, complex history.

UPDATE: The International Tracing Service has been renamed since I wrote this post. It is now known as Arolsen Archives. A vast number of its documents have been digitised and are now available to search and view online, from here: https://arolsen-archives.org/en/ 

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So, having found my first family records via the ITS, with the patient, quietly compassionate help of Dr Christine Schmidt, who was then running the Tracing Service at the Wiener, I went on to spend the next two to three years immersed in ‘the search’ at a broader level.

It was to be a search that would take us on journeys to tiny, one-cow villages, as well as to towns and fascinating cities in Poland and Germany – to places that I had never imagined I would visit. I’ve climbed into locked cemeteries, beaten down long grass and stinging nettles to try to read gravestones, and stood in front of freezing cold tombstones, knowing that I was the first family member to stand there in many, many decades. And I’ve paid quiet tribute to family members at the camp where they died.

More recently – somehow liberated by, while also immersed in, the past, I’ve even started to learn German …

I’ve met almost everywhere an unexpected generosity and kindness towards my ‘need to know’, which in itself has been quite a journey. And I have been recording it all on a website, which I learned to build specifically to be able to keep the family up to date with what I’d found.

Anyway, the family website grew, and people started to get in touch from all over the world: this one had family in the town my grandmother was deported from; this one had family with a shop on the same square that my family had a shop… And so we met up, and had coffee and cake, as our families probably did in the 1920s – in memory of our families’ connections. And this one – Stephen – well, his father was at the same university as mine, and was in the same Kartel-Convent fraternity too; and guess what? They were both at Kitchener camp in Kent …

We chatted a bit on email, and realised that Stephen’s father was mentioned in my father’s letters from all those years ago, and from here came the idea that we should see if any other ‘Kitchener descendants’ were out there too. Who knew? A few might even want to meet for a coffee …

Anyway, I’d reached a part of my father’s history that meant I needed to find out more about what Kitchener camp was, and what it did. And so, of course, I asked at the Wiener Holocaust Library.

And they said – have you read Clare Ungerson’s excellent book, Four thousand lives? Why don’t you get in touch with her …

So you see – none of us would be here today – me writing this and you reading it, were it not for the Wiener Library. Their facilities and responses were the trigger for the organisation of the first meeting of Kitchener descendants in summer 2017, which in turn led to the present project.

Since then, the Wiener has given us considerable help and advice behind the scenes, and they continue to support me in my efforts to further bring together the histories of our Kitchener camp families.

And one day, coming full circle, when I’ve finished my family research, my father’s archive of documents, photographs, and letters will go to the Wiener Holocaust Library. They will go into the care of their dedicated archivists, by whom I know they will be respected and kept safe for future generations of Holocaust researchers.

With thanks

Dr Clare Weissenberg, Designer and Editor, The Kitchener Camp Project

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Sources

The Wiener Holocaust Library

Holocaust Memorial Day Trust

EHRI

Wikipedia

Seeking information

As part of a research project, Dr Verena Buser is searching for witnesses or relatives of those who lived and worked in the Hachshara and retraining schemes in Berlin-Niederschoenhausen (Berufsumschichtung und Tagesschule für Berufsvorlehre) in the 1930s

Young Jews were trained in carpentry, as locksmiths, in gardening and in other practical skills. Some managed to escape via Kitchener camp to Australia and other destinations

Verena is also interested in similar training sites in Nazi Germany, such as the groups in Neuendorf, Schiebinchen, and Groß Breesen

Any contact or information is welcome. Please email Dr Verena Buser directly: [email protected]

At: Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences / Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg
Research associate Western Galilee College (Holocaust Studies Program), Akko/Israel

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I have already written (though much more is to come) about the Berlin ORT, and a Kitchener descendant in the USA kindly drew my attention over the summer to the larger scale of training camps in Germany in the 1930s. It’s something we will be writing much more about over the next few months

JewishGen has a link to search for relatives in some of these schemes, here: https://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Holocaust/0041_German_Training_Camps.html

Our descendant in New York, Ann Rolett, who is doing a huge amount of work for us quietly behind the scenes, explained that her relative trained at Gut Winkel (Good Angle): whereas originally his profession was ‘gardener’, it is assumed that the Gut Winkel training centre helped re-skill him to the more useful (in this context) profession as ‘farmer’, according to his records

Ann also very kindly pointed us towards photographs of some these camps, taken by Roman Vishniac – for example here: https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/objects/drawer-of-freshly-farmed-eggs-gut-winkel-a-training-farm-for-german-jewish-0; and here: https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/objects/morning-assembly-at-gut-winkel-a-training-farm-for-german-jewish-youth-hopi-0

This is the earliest article we have found on Kitchener camp – in the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt / ‘Jewish Newsletter’, which I believe was the only German-Jewish newspaper still allowed to be published by 1939

As far as I have been able to ascertain, this was the first public announcement about Kitchener camp, which was to save so many lives: it is likely that your father or other family member will have read this, and seen a first ray of hope since arrest and incarceration in November 1938

 

The above article, reproduced here with kind permission, courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, was very kindly translated by one of our Kitchener Descendant Group members in November 2017

The original image can be found in context at the outstanding Centre for Jewish History online: http://digital.cjh.org/R/6JGDQGURKNQHQKGXHFAUTHQFV8J11G7KS7PA3FJB8QLCQU7KUE-00653?func=dbin-jump-full&object%5Fid=1937181&local%5Fbase=GEN01&pds_handle=GUEST

Translation

Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, 20th January, 1939

The Reich Representation of German Jews in Germany (Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland) says:

Efforts of the Reichsvertretung for the promotion and acceleration of emigration have led to a transit camp being built in England for Jews from Germany, including Austria, provisionally for three thousand, finally reaching five thousand, on the site of a former barracks in Richborough (Kent). In principle, it should temporarily take in men aged between eighteen and thirty-five, and exceptionally aged up to forty-five, whose emigration is urgent  and whose immigration overseas, or to Palestine, but firstly whose final destination is to Palestine, is assured by the locally responsible branches of the Palestine Office.

These offices will hand over the required questionnaire to the applicants for the most accurate completion and instruct them about the further requirements. The applicants will be forwarded to the Reichsvertretung for a decision by a specially appointed commission. The applicants will be notified immediately of the decision, which will be taken as soon as possible, while at the same time receiving the necessary further information. To avoid avoidable disappointments and not burden the work of selection unnecessarily, all applications must be omitted for which the prerequisites for admission to the transit camp, as evidenced above, are not met, especially since, in the interest of equitable distribution from the individual districts, it is understandable that only a limited number of applications can be accepted.

Furthermore, the Reichsvertretung asks to refrain from any direct correspondence and from visits and calls; as the setting up work will be delayed through this, in principle such requests cannot be answered by them.

[Note from translator: The text in the sentence below is damaged in the original, and in parts unreadable, but broadly says:]

The places in the transit camp, which become free through onward travel, shall be taken up again and again for emigration from Germany by those who meet the conditions set out.

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Quite a number of descendants have been getting in touch to say they have found a photograph of, or other archival holdings about, Kitchener camp. It’s always great to get this information and to add it to our ever-growing accumulation of Kitchener detail. Thanks for getting in touch with these items – it’s really appreciated!

Over recent weeks and months we have been gradually working our way around archives to collate as many holdings on Kitchener as possible, although you’ll appreciate that this takes a bit of doing! I do have quite a lot of information at this point, however, and as soon as I have some time I will start to write it up.

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I was in the Wiener Holocaust Library in London yesterday, in fact, and have seen and made notes on some fascinating items that we will be writing about in depth soon.

The aim is to provide as definitive a list of all holdings on Kitchener as we have time to bring together while the project runs.

To start you off, you might want to take a look at the holdings at USHMM (the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), which has a large number of photographs and some family accounts. I deeply admire the work of the USHMM – and have always found their archivists to be fantastically kind and helpful people.

I collected together a note of the USHMM holdings as a PDF a while ago, but I don’t think many have spotted it yet, so we thought we’d bring it to the front for a few days … and it’s here: Kitchener holdings USHMM

There are some great pictures, including some images of the huts and other buildings. I know many descendants want to know more about what the camp was like, and these images help to build a picture.

I do now have a plan of the camp, courtesy of the Wiener Library, and am looking into how to bring this information to you – not least because it’s quite large! We also need to finalise some copyright issues, but hope to bring it to you in some form before too much longer.

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USHMM also have some good photographs of the refugees – on day trips to Ramsgate, for example, as well as of men in the camp itself (don’t forget to let us – and USHMM – know if you see anyone you recognise).

Contrary to some popular perceptions, the men were not ‘locked away’ at Kitchener. They did need a pass to go out and there was a 10pm curfew, but apart from that, they could and did go to local shops, to the cinema, to swim in the sea, for bike rides, and coastal walks. My father took trips to London, for example, and a friend of his from Germany simply absconded to work in the north of the country when he’d had enough of ‘communal living’.

The camp was crowded, and basic, and there was a lot of work to be done in creating what amounted to a small town in less than month, and then maintaining it as habitable. But when you’ve spent some time in the archives, as I have recently, and read detailed accounts from the time about what was happening in Germany and Austria, and read letters pleading for a way out from some of the many tens of thousands of Jews desperate to get away … Well, let’s just say it’s a salutary reminder that although the dormitory accommodation may not have been ideal, and the mass catering not great, Kitchener was a very far cry from what these men had escaped, and from what was still to occur across the Reich territories for years to come.

There was concern both at government levels and among the Jewish organisers that when they opened the camp a small group of mostly upper-class local fascists might cause trouble for the refugees, but by many accounts the local people of Sandwich were, on the whole, incredibly welcoming. Bear in mind, the town of Sandwich had a population of just over 3,000 at this time. Even today, when people are more used to traveling themselves, and to non-natives living among them, you’d expect some local concern at a refugee camp situated just outside a small town whose numbers would exceed that of the town itself.

Yet, local people invited these men who had lost everything into their homes and families – they asked them home for tea, in some cases, and sometimes gave them odd jobs to earn a bit of extra pocket money. (The British government had stipulated that the men were not allowed to work, to avoid friction in a country still suffering from the ’29 crash and high rates of unemployment.) While there would undoubtedly have been instances of the unpleasant anti-semitism of the time, and anti-German sentiment too, nevertheless, local people played sports and games with our fathers and grandfathers; local teachers gave them English lessons; families attended the camp theatre and concerts; and the local cafe that had once served indifferent ‘Camp’ coffee was persuaded by some of the German and Austrian refugees to make ‘proper’ coffee (see AJR extract below): the cafe soon became a hub for games of chess and Kaffee und Kuchen. Many locals and national dignitaries visited the camp, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, in October 1939.

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The USHMM photographs also include a picture of the huge tent used for the camp synagogue, which I know will be important to many families. Around 3,000 of the refugees observed Rosh Hashanah here in 1939 – nearly a year after so many synagogues had been burned to the ground across so much of Germany.

And as the anniversary of November 1938 is upon us again this week, let us not forget what this freedom to worship represented.

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Although many of these traumatised men would have struggled through these long days of hard work and the unimaginably dreadful uncertainty because of families stuck in Germany and Austria, Kitchener – without doubt and without question – saved many, many lives. And those who had been in Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau would have known that they were fortunate to be here, even on their darkest of days.

The men of Kitchener camp sent a carnival float to the Ramsgate summer festival, with ‘Our thanks to England!’ written along the side. And on another occasion, the Kitchener men made a large natural art work outside, constructed of stands of tall grass, that read simply ‘Thank you’.

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The Journal of the Association of Jewish Refugees, January 2010 (extract)

by Hilda Keen, a Sandwich resident

“... One day in 1939 I had got home from school, where I was learning German among other things, and mum called from the shop [Hilda’s parents owned the Golden Crust Bakery in the middle of Sandwich – CU]: ‘Hilda, you know some German, come and help me with these two chaps!’

Two young men who couldn’t speak much English wanted to know what was in some pies that were on sale. I just managed to say ‘Fleisch’ and my mother mooed like a cow! That was the first we knew about the Jewish refugees fleeing from Germany who had been given refuge in the old huts on the Ramsgate Road.

At the back of the shop were four small tables with a few chairs dotted around. In the summer months one or two people would come in for a cup of tea and gradually, in twos and threes, these quiet, polite men would congregate in the back of the shop, walking up from the Ramsgate Road. They didn’t want a pot of tea: they wanted coffee. So we made them coffee – Camp Coffee it was called, from a bottle.

‘Mrs Kimber,’ said Dr Laski, when he had introduced himself, ‘You should make proper coffee - the way we do in Austria. You must buy some ground coffee and put it in a linen bag and infuse it.’

Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained, as mum would say: she would try anything to help trade. So an urn was bought, the ground coffee sewn into a cotton bag, water poured on and brought to the boil. Success!

And word must have got around the Kitchener Camp because numbers increased and the tables at the back of the shop were crowded. Once or twice I trailed home from school at Dover getting home about half-past five, only to have to stand in the kitchen because the table in the living room was full of men drinking coffee and talking mostly in English but occasionally slipping in a foreign word.

We got to know some of them quite well and they became friends. Franz Mandl (we called him Frank) was a medical student who had escaped over the roof of his family home in Vienna and who brought some records with him in his suitcase. It was some of the popular music of that time: ‘Wir treffen uns in Hüttledorf am Samstag an der Wien’ and an aria from Pagliacci, ‘On with the Motley’ sung in a foreign language. When he played it on our new gramophone, I thought I had never heard anything so sad in all my life. It was the first piece of classical music I had ever heard. I still have that record. ‘Turn that row off!’, said my mother hurrying through from the shop to the bakery …”

Hilda’s article goes on to talk about a Mr and Mrs Rosenberg. Mr Rosenberg had a place at Kitchener, but when his wife arrived from Germany as a refugee, lugging a heavy suitcase, she had nowhere to live. Hilda’s parents gave up their bedroom for a time to Mr and Mrs Rosenberg, so they were indeed in a fortunate position in this context, in not only being safe, but together.

For any readers who are not familiar with the Journal of the AJR, please do look it up online. It is a fantastic resource, and one that our fathers and grandfathers would have been reading when they came to Britain. And many of them who stayed in the UK, at least, would have continued to read it throughout their lives: http://www.ajr.org.uk

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Harry Rossney (Helmut Rosettenstein), who was often interviewed about Kitchener camp, summarised his time there as follows:

"I don’t know who put me forward for the camp to this day. All I know is that they saved my life. The area had been acquired by the British Jewish community to house refugees and they had obtained permission to rebuild it. But they needed 200 tradesmen and I was a signwriter, so I was asked to come over. In fact I was number 196.

When I arrived I was given overalls and rubber boots and we all worked day and night to put up huts, level roads and instal such things as showers. Each hut could take 48 refugees and in the end we provided shelter for 3,600 Jews.

I came to England and I couldn’t speak a word of the language. But the people and the country were wonderful. Even when at school I had loved the idea of England as a sort of fairyland. England in German translates roughly as Angel-land and that is how I saw it. The land of angels.

I tried to fit in as quickly as I could. I loved everything about it, the freedom, the laughing faces, the relaxed atmosphere – all the opposite of Germany at the time” (Kent News, 19 January 2012).

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Before we sign off for the weekend, can I just offer a quick shout of HUGE thanks to the FED, Manchester.

The FED have been incredibly supportive of this project, adding us to their social media feed – here, for example: https://www.facebook.com/THEFEDManchester/posts/1514905591924160

I don’t have the time to work on social media as well as the website, so all the incredible ‘get the word out’ work being done on our behalf by other organisations is immensely generous. Everyone is pushed for time and resources, and we are very grateful indeed.

Do please visit the FED in return and show some Kitchener Descendant support for the brilliant work they do: https://www.thefed.org.uk

And if you ‘do’ social media – please consider finding them there and thanking them for all of us.

THE FED is the leading social care charity for the Jewish Community of North and South Manchester. We help over 1,000 people every month, from children with special needs to people with dementia.

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