|
Bill Swainson introduces Lord Richard Attenborough’s preface to Into the Arms of Strangers by Deborah Oppenheimer and Mark Jonathan Harris. The book was published by Bloomsbury to coincide with the Warner Bros. Pictures documentary feature film of the same name.
For nine months before the outbreak of World War II, Britain conducted an extraordinary rescue mission. It opened its doors to 10,000 children at risk from the Nazi regime — ninety per cent of them Jewish — from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. These children were brought by train and boat from the continent and taken into foster homes and hostels in Britain, expecting eventually to be reunited with their parents. Most of them never saw their families again.
Into the Arms of Strangers recounts the remarkable operation, known informally as the Kindertransport, and its dramatic impact on the lives of the children who were saved. It is introduced by the historian David Cesarani, Professor of Holocaust Studies at Southampton University, who makes the essential connections between the broad sweep of history and the individuals whose dramatic stories are revealed in the book. And it is told in the words of the child survivors, rescuers, parents and foster-parents themselves, showing in detail the effects of the Nazis' reign of terror, the agonizing decision by the parents to send their children away, the chaotic and desperate journey, the difficulties of adjustment in Britain, the outbreak of war, and the children's tragic discovery afterwards that most of their parents had perished in concentration camps.
The rescue was carried out by people like Norbert Wollheim, a Berlin social worker whose family was held hostage to ensure he came back after each trip to England, and Nicholas Winton, a British stockbroker who found himself in Prague and felt impelled to do what he could. The Kinder were girls and boys aged from a few months to seventeen, like Deborah Oppenheimer's mother, who could never afterwards talk about her experiences, and to whom the remarkable Warner Bros. Pictures documentary feature film and this companion book are dedicated. And the families that received the children into their homes were like those of the British film director Richard Attenborough, whose parents adopted the two German girls who were staying with them when war broke out. As Lord Attenborough describes in his moving preface, it was an act of common humanity that would change his life and help to shape the film director he would become.
A Preface: London, April 2000
Lord Richard Attenborough
Like many people who speak in this book, my life was transformed by the outbreak of the Second World War.
My parents were radicals. My father was a very early member of the Labour Party. My mother campaigned for women’s rights. In the late 1930s, my father was principal of Leicester University College, where he also chaired a committee devoted to bringing Jewish refugees out of Hitler’s Germany. In most of the cases it meant housing them for a few days while their papers were put in order to go to relatives in the United States or Canada.
One day my mother went up to London to fetch two German girls, Irene, aged twelve, and Helga, nine. I said hello and expected them to leave within the next few days, like the other children who had passed through the house. But while they were with us, war broke out, ending all transport to America.
I was fourteen, my brother David was three years younger, and my brother Johnny a couple of years younger than that. We all came back from school one day and were told to see my father in his study. This was unusual — it was rather formal and not like our household. We went in, and my mother and father were there. My father explained that Irene and Helga had been planning to go to America, but now they were stranded and there was nowhere for them to go. Their mother was in a concentration camp, and their father likely to be.
My father said, ’Mother and I have decided that what we ought to do is adopt them — not in terms of calling us “Mother“ and “Father“, of course, but “Aunt“ and “Uncle“ because we hope their parents will come out.’ Since being the principal of University College was not exactly a highly paid position, however, we had a problem. What we had been able to do as a family of five, we could not afford as a family of seven. That meant that holidays, outings all had to be reduced.
My parents both said, ’This is what we would like. We think it is the correct thing to do, but we won’t do it without the agreement of you boys, because they are going to become your sisters, and in every sense that they are your sisters, this must be your new family.’
We all said we thought it was a marvellous idea: for three boys suddenly to have two sisters in the family was very good luck. But the remark that I always remember more than any other was my mother’s. She said, ’The problem, darlings, is this: your father and I love the three of you so much, but we are going to have to give perhaps even more love to these two girls than we give to you at this time, because of course, they have none.’ This remark has affected my whole life in terms of attitude towards those who are not as fortunate as my brothers and I have been.
For eight years Irene and Helga were our sisters. We did everything together. There were little jealousies, little quarrels, as with any kids, but we came to love each other very much. I am sure my brothers would agree it was one of the best decisions we ever made. After the war, which Helga and Irene’s parents did not survive, the girls went to America. Irene, sadly, has died of cancer. Helga is still alive. She has children, grandchildren. We still keep in touch and always see them when we go to America. And they quite often come here.
My parents’ generosity represents only one of the many acts of kindness of the British people in those dark days. Others are movingly recounted in this book. Although ours is a reserved nation, we do feel things very deeply. At a time when other countries were unwilling to alter their immigration quotas, Britain alone agreed to provide sanctuary for children fleeing from Hitler. Unfortunately, no other nation matched this act of mercy, and nearly 1,500,000 children perished in the Holocaust.
My parents’ attitude to life was always that there is such a thing as ’society’, and that it involves obligations of concern, tolerance and compassion for those less fortunate than we are. Taking Helga and Irene into our family as sisters wasn’t theory. It was first-hand experience. They were human beings whom we came to love. From the age of fourteen on, I have always believed that no man can live as an island. And I feel that very strongly. I know that in the movies I direct, I want to make statements. I want to make a cry for compassion and a plea for tolerance. I suppose the most obvious example is Cry Freedom, an anti-apartheid movie about South Africa. If I had not had the beginning I did, if I had not known Irene and Helga, I doubt that I would have had the passion and the determination to demonstrate these feelings through my work.
As I read the compelling and inspiring accounts of the Kindertransport in this book, I am again grateful for the experience of taking two refugee children into our family. It certainly shaped my attitudes and development, much in the way it has shaped the lives of those who so eloquently reflect on that period on these pages. More than sixty years later, their stories of escape and exile, of kindness and cruelty, remind us that even in the worst of times people can still act with foresight and charity. In a world of Kosovos and Rwandas, it is a lesson that is still relevant to us all.
Visit the Into the Arms of Strangers film site
|
