WALTER LAQUEUR
407
dren's transports," with which about ten thousand went to England in
1939, were even younger. They went without their parents; in a few cases
these very young children (some of them from orphanages) lost track of
their names and origins, and there were psychological problems of separa–
tion and adjustment. (As these lines are written, a moving documentary
about the
Kindertransport
called
My
Knees l-tere Jumping
is being shown in a
cinema in lower Manhattan).
The families who adopted these children for a certain time had diffi–
culties communicating with them, and
vice versa;
those who went to school
in Britain were often marked as outsiders. The story of Sylvia Rogers
(Red
Saint, Pink Daughter,
1996), the daughter of Polish Communists in Berlin
who had the good fortune to get a permit to go to London with her fam–
ily, describes her London school years as quite miserable-and her account
is by no means unique. In later life she became a political activist in her
own right and the wife of a Labor cabinet minister; not everyone remained
an outsider in that class-ridden English society.
As many of the memoirs were written by women as by men, and
apparently more in German than in any other language. This is a little sur–
prising because most of the authors do not (or did not) live in Germany
when they wrote. Since their German education was incomplete, their
mastery of the German language was not complete either, but they still
seem to have fel t more comfortable expressing themselves in what was
after all their native language.
It
is interesting that there was a strong link
to the German language and German culture even among the very young,
where one should have least expected it. The British historian of
Communist persuasion Eric Hobsbawm, who grew up in Vienna and
Berlin, holder of a British passport, relates that he was far more steeped in
German literature than in English and that he found London culturally
much more boring than the Berlin which he had known. In some
instances this might have been simply the resistance against learning a new
language, but in most cases the reasons probably went deeper. Even in
England, even in Palestine, there were circles of young friends of progres–
sive German culture which continued to exist throughout the war.
There are some further obvious subdivisions.Those who did not
make it but perished in extermination camps did not leave memoirs,
except perhaps in a very few cases fragments of diaries. But there are
autobiographies by those who survived inside Germany. They include
Anita Wallfisch, the author of a particularly poignant account. She was
arrested by the Gestapo in the middle of the war, having helped French
prisoners to escape. At the time of the arrest she swallowed the prussic
acid pill which a friend had provided,
only
to find that it contained not
poison but some sweet substance. She had the good fortune to survive,
