Children who escaped

Press, 22 July 1989, Page 24

Children who escaped

We Came As Children: A Collective Autobiography of Refugees. Edited by Karen Gershon. Macmillan, 1989. 178 pp. $19.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Ralf Unger) Eleven thousand children came on transports from Europe to England just before the beginning of the Second World War. It was both a triumph and a tragedy — the former because lives were saved from the abyss of disaster, and a tragedy because most of the families had to be left behind to perish in death camps. The author was one of those children and has interviewed or gained information from 234 of the group. She herself admits to feeling estranged from her own children and has a constant struggle against the feeling that people do not really matter, because her parents were enslaved and killed as if they did not. She does not feel at home in any country and mentally is still a refugee. The children, mainly from Germany, were about 90 per cent Jewish and were selected by the organisations of those communities in 1938, when the pogroms made it clearer what was to happen to Jews. The British people responded with the “World Movement for the Care of Children” and the frantic resettlement began, with numerous volunteer foster families. The reactions of the children to

separation and the poignant final farewells with parents, a new country with a foreign culture and language, and the attempts to make links with foster parents, are described in the words of the participants with mostly one paragraph per person. As there are many variations on the themes the contradictions of reaction become apparent in this, as in education, sojourn in drafting institutions, being classified as an “enemy alien,” the dilemma of serving in the army and being posted as part of a “peace-keeping” force to Israel, and so often the loneliness of the outsider in England and, on return, in an attempt to find roots in Germany or Austria. The pathos is there in many of the short paragraphs, such as when one girl is told that her whole family with all its extensions has been killed, she said: “all my family? My mother and my father and my brother and my grandmother and my cousins and my aunties — everybody?” And I said: “Yes Felicia, I’m afraid so.” She said: “Oh, now I can stay with you” ... and then she said: "I don’t want you to die.” She was then nine years old. The lack of structure in the analysis of such a large group exodus and its consequences makes the book unsatisfying and rather more an emotionally-moving documentation than one to learn from.