Issue 57, Spring 2009

Selective memory

Romanticising the Kindertransport while neglecting the history of other child refugees undermines the battle for a humane asylum policy today, says Tony Kushner

In a recent article in The Guardian (4th November 2008), Canon Paul Oestreicher, whose father had Jewish parents, recalled the terror of Kristallnacht and the desperate attempt of his family in Germany to find a place of refuge. Oestreicher does not hold back in his criticism of the world's responses at that time to the desperate search for asylum. Britain, Australia and the United States do not escape his criticism and he says, 'Antisemitism was not just a German aberration.' Yet there is a partial exemption to Oestreicher's critique in the case of Britain which, 'thanks to a group of persistent lobbyists, at the last moment agreed to take a substantial number of Jewish children'. Whilst most were 'never to see their parents again', their 'contribution to British life was significant now that the stories of the Kindertransport are being told'.

Oestreicher is explicit in making contemporary connections, saying that the responses of the 1930s bring 'into sharp focus the far from humane attitude of Britain, the European Union and many other rich countries to the asylum seekers of today'. In implied contrast to the Kindertransport, now 'We lock up children, separated from their parents, hold detainees for indefinite periods, and many are made ill by the experience.' Oestreicher particularly singles out the right wing Labour MP Frank Field and the organisation he is connected with, Migration Watch, for the toughening of attitudes that leads to such inhumane treatment of asylum seekers in Britain, saying: 'This is not quite our 1938, but the parallels are deeply disquieting.'

Not surprisingly, Frank Field was robust in his response (7th November 2008). The Guardian gave it the remarkable headline, 'Immigration controls will prevent a British Kristallnacht', which is only mildly adjusted in the text: 'The aim must be to prevent a mini Kristallnacht in this country.' Field seems genuinely confused as to why Paul Oestreicher links 'immigration with the issue of asylum'. In what is hardly the most convincing advocacy of those seeking entry to Britain through claims of persecution, Field clarifies that whilst he has 'some very clear views about controlling immigration', it is a 'separate issue from failed asylum status'.

Such debates and polemics are not new. 'History' has been used to defend and attack the entry of aliens into Britain since at least the late 19th century. At the time of mass East European Jewish immigration, opponents and supporters of the newcomers either likened or distanced them from the previous large scale movement of refugees into Britain, the Huguenots. For the pro-aliens, the Jews were equally deserving of asylum and could make a contribution in the future equal to that of their illustrious refugee forebears. To the anti-alienists, such comparisons simply proved that the East European Jews were of inferior stock and would weaken the nation. Moreover, they were not true refugees and, indeed, argued figures such as William Evans Gordon MP, were more exploiters than victims in the Czarist empire. In the end, neither side could claim full victory. The right of free entry was lost through the 1905 Aliens Act but the right of asylum was enshrined in its clauses.

By the 1930s, the so-called 'asylum clause' was dead and buried by the 1919 Aliens Restriction Act and subsequent aliens orders. Individual refugees, of the right 'race' and politics might be granted asylum but, as Louise London has so brilliantly illustrated in Whitehall and the Jews (2000), Britain in the 1930s pursued an immigration policy, not a refugee policy. At times, this policy was modified, and the Kindertransport scheme was part of that process (even if, as will be shown shortly, this most celebrated movement possessed many limitations). Yet neither must it be forgotten that the debates of the 1900s - as to whether or not the refugees were deserving (or in today's terminology, 'genuine') and whether they would be assets or liabilities - ran through contemporary discussions. As I have tried to illustrate in Remembering Refugees - Then and Now (2006), 'history' was again used to defend and attack the refugees from Nazism who, in the eyes of many contemporaries, were distrusted and feared.

It was for this reason that the British Government, embarrassed after the Kristallnacht pogrom because of the moral failure of appeasement that it had exposed, and also concerned about its own international reputation as the doors to Palestine became ever more closed, agreed to the scheme suggested to it by a group of Jewish and pro-Jewish activists: to let in refugee children from the Third Reich. To departicularise it, non-Jewish children were also allowed in and formed close to 10% of the eventual total of just under 10,000 allowed entry. In fact, no upper limit was initially placed on numbers, a reflection of the positive aspects of the scheme.

In the climate of today, it now seems like common sense that it was only the children who were allowed in. This is a necessary ingredient in constructing the narrative of British generosity (and later refugee contribution and gratitude) that dominates the story of the Kindertransport. It is perhaps the fastest growing story relating to Britain and the Holocaust - a usable past for all concerned and marked by official plaques in Parliament and a memorial in Liverpool Street station. In this respect, the memory of the Kindertransport matters - it is becoming increasingly difficult to strip away the mythology of this movement and show the fundamental ambivalence, and the specific history, that was behind it.

It is undoubtedly the case that the British Government thought that the humanitarian emphasis of rescuing only children would make the scheme popular in the public's mind and this (largely) proved to be the case. It required all concerned - then and now - to forget about the children's parents; to assume that they were, in essence, beyond reach. This was not the case in November 1938. It is also forgotten that the children came to Britain on temporary, transit permits, which again reflected the emphasis that Britain was not a place of permanent immigration and the hope that the children would eventually either move back or go elsewhere. Whilst few would return, many did indeed leave Britain either during the war or afterwards.

The temporary aspect also reflected recent historical precedent - help given to Belgian and other refugee children in the First World War and then to refugees from Nazism in the very early days of the Third Reich by the Save the Children Fund and then more dramatically in 1937 to the Basque children fleeing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Outside Southampton Civic Centre, a masterpiece of 1930s architecture, is one of the rare public acknowledgments of the Spanish children. Marking the 70th anniversary of the children's reception in the port of Southampton (they would then be placed in what became a tented town, five miles away near Eastleigh), it commemorates the arrival aboard the Habana of 4,000 refugee children from the Basque region of Spain in May 1937 following the destruction of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War and to thank the people of Southampton and Britain who volunteered to care for them.

But why do we increasingly remember the Kindertransportees but hardly recognise, outside specific locations such as Southampton (and then somewhat belatedly), those 4,000 Spanish refugee children? Is it because the narrative of the latter movement is too political and is less easily placed within a comforting narrative? Most of the Spanish children returned or moved on elsewhere and, without the horror of the Holocaust as a later context, the necessity of this refugee movement is less certain or easy to communicate to a generation for whom Guernica means far less than Auschwitz. Yet, as the plaque relates, many people were involved in the care of the Spanish children and many grassroots organisations - from right wing Catholics through to left wing socialists - helped with their care. In fact, there was much in common between both movements: the difficulties of separation from parents and treatment that varied from deep love and care through to sexual and physical abuse.
To conclude, the subject of children, and especially vulnerable children such as refugees, often leads to sentimentality. There is no problem in this per se, unless, as campaigners such as Eleanor Rathbone pointed out in the 1930s, it leads to other refugees, including the elderly, being left without supporters or means of entry.

Today there are more unaccompanied child refugees and asylum seekers in Britain than ever before. Their specific needs require all the expertise we have gained in dealing with the psychological and emotional, as well as the material, problems they face. Their cause, however, and that of refugees and asylum seekers more generally, is not served by romanticising earlier movements such as the Kindertransport or neglecting other past refugees such as the Basque children. Yet to argue for a more self-critical engagement with the British past is as much an uphill struggle in the cultural realm as is the political battle to preserve some vestiges of a decent and humane asylum policy as demanded by Paul Oestreicher. It is one, however, that needs to be fought - in this case in the archives, in the libraries, in the art galleries and museums, in the media, in education, and in our public memorial spaces.

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