Breaking the Silence: Voices of the British Children of Refugees from Nazism 1783482966, 9781783482962

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BR E A KING THE S ILENC E

BR E A KING THE S ILENC E

Voices of the British Children of Refugees from Nazism Merilyn Moos

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and London (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2015 by Merilyn Moos All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78348-295-5 ISBN: PB 978-1-78348-296-2 ISBN: EB 978-1-78348-297-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-78348-295-5 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-78348-296-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-78348-297-9 (electronic) TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

For all those who come after: the grandchildren and greatgrandchildren of the refugees who survived Nazism.

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

xi

I: SETTING THE SCENE 1 The Historical Background of the Countries of Origin of the Refugee Parents 2 Sociopolitical Responses to and by the Refugees 3 Methodological Issues

3 17 53

II: THE TESTIMONIALS Interview with Henry, June 2011 Interview with John, April 2011 Interview with Author by T.W., June 2011 Interview with Mike, June 2011 Interview with Robert, February 2011 Interview with Peter, May 2011 Interview with Sarah, January 2011 Interview with Tania, February 2011 Interview with Tom, May 2011

109 125 135 145 163 181 203 211 217

III: REFLECTIONS ON THE VOICES OF THE BRITISH SECOND GENERATION 4 Reflections on the Voices of the British Second Generation

237

Conclusion

277 vii

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CONTENTS

A Note about the Author and Her Family

323

Bibliography

325

Index

331

About the Author

335

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

When my novel, The Language of Silence, was published in 2011, so many people from the ‘second generation’ started to pour out how Nazism had affected them that I decided to record what people were saying and to discover how far my own story was exceptional or one of many. My impression was that these children of refugees from Nazism, the British ‘second generation’, had rarely opened up about such issues before—as one participant told me, she had waited much of her life to talk as she did to me. I almost stumbled into writing this book. Far from planning a book on the second generation, I found anything to do with Nazi persecution, the Holocaust and displacement acutely distressing. Yet as people began telling me about their ‘unmourned’ grandparents and wider kin, murdered by the Nazis, the past kept seeping into the present and I would lie awake haunted by their stories. I am not surprised that so little has been told about the British second generation because to do so is to live on the sharp point of pain and to seek to commune with ghosts. This book is a commemoration of the dead, as well as a working through of the influence of the dead on my life and on other people like me.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My first thanks go to all the British second generation people who talked to me about their lives, especially those who were willing to take part in long and, at times, difficult interviews and who gave their generous permission for their voices and thoughts to be included in this book. You ix

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P REFA CE A ND A CKNOW LEDGEMENTS

shall remain anonymous, but you know who you are. My thanks also to Tom Wengraf, who generously discussed many methodological issues with me and helped me see myself when he interviewed me for the book, to Howard Feather for his informed interest and unstinting encouragement, and to Sue Vice for her many useful suggestions and her reassurance throughout. I am indebted to Richard Kirkwood for his invaluable insights into European history between the two world wars and his help in contextualizing the British second generation and their families, and to Hugh Brody, whose unfailingly sympathetic ear in part assuaged my difficulties in approaching the Holocaust. Thanks also to Lucie Kinchin, who smoothed and edited my prose, and to Annie Duarte-Potter for her final touches. My thanks to Ian Birchall, Charmian Brinson, Tim Chambers, Robin Cranmer, Steve Cushion, Irene Fick, Gerry Lander, Sue Robertson and Richard Ross who all, in different ways, supported and encouraged me. I want to also thank Julia Loy for her grand work copyediting the text; Stephanie Scuiletti, associate production editor at Rowman & Littlefield, for smoothly orchestrating the production process; and finally, my gratitude to Martina O’Sullivan, the senior commissioning editor, cultural studies, at Rowman & Littlefield International, who provided all the guidance and support any writer could desire.

INTRODUCTION

I am history, you are the postscript. —Lotte Moos to her daughter, Merilyn Moos (the author) 1

PURPOSE

I am the child of exiles and have an interest in the effects of exile. Much has now been written on the effects of the Holocaust and on the children of Holocaust survivors. 2 But there is almost nothing written on the effects on the children of parents who fled Nazism’s ethnic or political persecution for the UK before the Holocaust, particularly those who were born in the UK, often in the 1940s, and whose grandparents or other kin often had been murdered in the Holocaust. Breaking the Silence is a unique study of the ‘second generation’ in the UK, which brings to the fore the second generation’s testimonial material. The participants open up about what being ‘second generation’ means for them. This study makes visible the different discourses and experiences of a group whose varied voices have not often been heard. This book’s remit is not to explore the British second generation’s understanding of the lives of their parents, which has been done to a limited extent. (The various connotations of British, English and UK are explored in the endnote. 3) It is also not about the experience of the British second generation’s refugee parents, which has been variously studied from a variety of shifting perspectives. 4 Instead, I wanted to explore how the British second generation’s parents’ forced dislocation can itself give rise to a sense, for their children, of the subjectivity of rupture and of being haunted by an unreachable past xi

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and memories that are not their own. I was interested in how far the British second generation had a sense, which they would not necessarily have always understood or articulated, of loss, of the grasping for ‘realities’ among the shadows of silence, dislocation and being ‘outsiders’. What does it mean for the second-generation grandchild to try to find their murdered grandparents, whom Nazism had wanted turned into ‘nonbeings’, whom parents did not talk about, and of whom the child knew little. What is also distinctive about the British second generation is that not only were their parents not directly caught up in the Holocaust, but the British second generation were not ‘spectators’ either. Indeed at one level, it is rather the opposite—that the British second generation have to struggle to even achieve a faraway ‘sighting’ or to break the silence that surrounds them. Being such latecomers to the site of their own stories or fables carries drawbacks that I explore. There is a debate about how far ‘relocation’ in itself can create trauma or displacement, independent of the direct effects of the Holocaust or Nazism, though the impact of relocation is difficult to separate out and quantify and still needs academic investigation. I wanted to explore how the British second generation were affected by their parents’ dislocation. The specificity of exile in the UK also cannot be ignored, though there is no systematic comparison here with the character of exile elsewhere. The second generation grew up at a time and in a society where there was a strong and self-righteous anti-German sentiment after the end of World War II, which, arguably, fused with a long-standing and less visible antiSemitism, less likely to occur in the US and certainly not in Israel. So the suggestions and conclusions reached here will to a degree apply elsewhere, but there will also be significant differences. I saw as central the issue of silence: how far the relocated British second generation’s parents kept silent about losses of murdered relatives and the effects of their silence on their British second-generation children. Did the British second generation experience their parents’ silence as rupturing access to their past? Although none of the British secondgeneration participants knew grandparents from their country of origin, as the testimonials reveal, there was an unexpectedly profound emotional legacy from the murders of the British second generation’s forebears, including a frequent difficulty in acknowledging loss. What slowly emerged during this study is the salience of silence and how deeply affected the second generation has been by parental silence about the past. Having grown up with parents who never spoke of the past, I was interested in the difficulty for the British second generation in speaking— or writing—about something that had not been spoken of, and that, on occasions, may not even have been recognized as a loss or disjuncture.

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Not all refugees from Nazism were Jewish. A key motive behind this study was to consider whether the children of parents who had become refugees at least in part for political reasons, some also Jewish, viewed their own lives differently from those whose parents escaped entirely because of the Nazis’ anti-Semitism. Political refugees also fled for their lives, often five or six years earlier than the ‘Jewish’ exodus. 5 Political refugees were less likely to lose their parents, unless they were Jewish, though they did suffer dislocation. Was Ruth Kitchen’s analysis that resistance allows the anti-Nazi to maintain a less fractured self and a greater ability to reassemble the pieces useful in understanding the impact on their children? 6 The parents who had been ‘politicals’ had made the choice to confront Nazism. This could encourage a willingness to talk; on the other hand, a culture of silence had been embedded in many of the European antifascist movements, especially those with a revolutionary character (Gradvohl 2013a), which could act as a countervailing factor. I here use ‘politicals’ loosely to refer to anybody who actively opposed the Nazi regime, many of whom consequently fled, irrespective of the exact colour of their political allegiances. (After this I do not use quotation marks around the word politicals.) On the other hand, those principally fleeing anti-Semitism prior to the outbreak of war generally had not actively resisted Nazism, and this potentially could be associated with a legacy of a greater sense of shame or guilt about the fate of those left behind, which could also discourage speech. Another aspect of British second-generation heterogeneity I wanted to look at was the differences in effect upon the children of parents who had fled Germany, the occupier, and those who had fled, for example, Czechoslovakia or Hungary, the occupied. Would it be the case that people from a German background would have more difficulty in identifying with their parents’ country of origin or language than people who were less likely to feel their country of origin carried responsibility for horrific crimes of violence? Though this is not the place to look in detail at the differences between nations in the impact of Nazi state repression, it is its existence that lies behind all that followed, and I was curious how or whether the different states’ failure to protect the British second generation’s parents would have an impact. 7 Yet another motivation was that as a result of my involvement with the Second Generation Network (2GN), a group that meets in London and elsewhere, I understood that many in the second generation have little interest in understanding themselves within a broader historical or political context and instead could slip into seeing themselves as simply ‘traumatized’ individuals and victims. One current idea is of ‘transferred trauma’—trauma that has been transferred from those who experienced Nazism firsthand to their children, the second generation.

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Concepts develop their own momentum. A label such as ‘second generation’ is adopted, which then is given such emphasis in one’s life that it generates its own meaning. It may be adopted almost ‘in honour’ of those who were murdered in one’s family, or to recognize the significance of Nazism in one’s own past. But the term carries ideological baggage. I became intrigued as to how far the transference of trauma could be a useful concept to explain the second-generation experience. The adoption of an identity as ‘second generation’ can give rise to a near acceptance of the inevitability of suffering. Being traumatized becomes something of value, a state that is perceived as self-validating: this particular attribute is not one I understand as an inevitable part of being second generation. But there were also broader reasons for doing this study. Memory gets standardized. The Holocaust and its traumatic consequences now create certain set images that too often obscure the significant differences in experiences. This book is an attempt to differentiate as well as to show similarities in second-generation experience. A further underlying reason for this study is that too much history memorializes the rich and famous and, interesting though many of these studies are, I wanted to look at second-generation people who were not in the limelight. Indeed, unless illustrious for other reasons, the second generation in the UK is unnoted. These case studies attempt to show how ordinary people have experienced the long-distance shadow of Nazism in their own lives.

I shall refer to the children of the refugees as the ‘British second generation’ to distinguish them from the use of the term second generation in American, Israeli or other contexts, where it is generally taken to mean ‘the children of Holocaust survivors’. While the use of the term second generation in the extensive research in the US and Israel carries this different meaning, I have kept to it in this UK study because it is a term that emerged from this layer of people who use it to talk about themselves and their experiences. It is also used by British second-generation organizations, and it is these organizations that provided me with the starting point for this research. Theoretically, there are four subcategories within the second generation, hence the importance of labelling the second generation in the UK as the ‘British second generation’. First, there are those whose grown-up parents escaped and were able to enter the UK before the outbreak of war, many of whose grandparents were murdered. This is the group exclusively studied here. My position is that the experience of a child of refugees

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from Nazism has to be distinguished from a child of any Holocaust survivor. Second, there are the children of the ‘precautionary’ exiles, whose parents, the second generation’s grandparents, got away, generally before the outbreak of war, because they had the awareness, money and ability to get out. A few came to the UK, but they mostly ended up in the US and Palestine/Israel. I do not study this group because this is a study based in the UK, because of the specificity of migrant experiences in different countries and because these were three-generational refugee families. Third, there are the children of those who had not left their countries of origin and were sent to concentration or death camps, ghettoes or ‘homes’, went into hiding underground or were threatened with one form or another of deportation, but who survived. Though this is not the place to develop on this, the children of these different categories need to be understood as having had different experiences, rather than being simply labelled under a ‘Holocaust survivor’ umbrella. But I do not focus on these responses; this is not a study of the Holocaust, nor of its immediate effects. People who had a direct connection with the Holocaust will have had contrasting experiences from those who got out earlier. Moreover, studies on the children of Holocaust survivors already exist, though some of this work informed mine. There is a final group: the second generation whose grandparents did not survive and whose parents fled to and lived in countries other than the UK. Theoretically the closest in experience to the British second generation, this group has also not received much academic attention. I do not include it here as this is a study exclusively of the second generation in the UK. There has to be a question as to whether the concept of second generation carries enough independent conceptual weight to merit a distinct category. However the term is defined, it is inherently a term that will have loose edges. Is the young child who came to Britain on the Kindertransport first or second generation? Can a person who was born in the UK, whose parents returned to Germany after the war but who then came back when young be considered British second generation? What if one parent is British? What are the implications of temporal disparity since the British second generation was born from the mid-1930s to the mid1960s? As a reader of this book will quickly observe, such is the nature of refugeedom that no precise definition is possible. I am looking at instances of the lived experiences of the British second generation, and not its etymology. I have also been struck by how few people turn up at second-generation meetings. Tens of thousands of people fleeing Nazism arrived in the UK, and many will have had children, which suggests that most who

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could do not actively pursue this identification. But I do not consider that self-identification is a precondition for being called second generation. While this is a study of people who do to some degree identify themselves as second generation, I use the term as a descriptor for all children of refugees from Nazism in the UK. The reasons for nonidentification merit a further study. However, some suggestions include the second generation’s primary identification being with Jewishness or with Britishness or with a political allegiance, or maybe because this is a concept they have never encountered or do not consider important to their own sense of self. Maybe it is because of the desire of their parents to integrate, even assimilate into a postwar Britain where certainly being German or a German speaker was hardly popular, and being a Communist or Jewish—of course, not the same thing, though it was clearly sometimes felt to be—was even less so. Moreover, one feature of the British second generation appears to be the degree to which many are not aware or even do not want to be aware of the murderous past that it is so hard to walk away from. Another ‘specificity’ of the period when many in the British second generation were growing up—the Cold War—was that the discussion of difference, both political and nonpolitical, was curtailed, a common factor across Europe and the US. Though this is not developed, I suggest that one underlying explanation for the emphasis the British second generation’s parents put on integration, and their avoidance of ‘coming out’ as Jews or as ‘foreigners’, may have to do with the opprobrium attached to the ‘outsider’ in the late 1940s and the 1950s, a pattern most associated with McCarthyism. As the testimonials reveal, whatever the reason, many of the British second generation’s parents did not want to speak about what had happened to their families. Some in the British second generation learned from them to also keep silent. The silence has permeated into the British second generation’s lives. It is curious that the British second generation, many one sort of professional or another, have, with very few exceptions, so little to say about themselves. They have not produced a single analytic study of themselves in the UK. This is even more remarkable when compared to the many studies and accounts of the first generation. There has to be a reason.

The study allows some of the British second generation to consider who they are in relation to their family histories within the context of the effects of Nazism and to explore the experience of being second generation in the UK. The approach used here is that of the case study, or ‘life

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history’. My intention was for the second generation to speak for themselves, to consider their own lives and to reflect upon Nazism’s and the Holocaust’s effects on them. I use the term Holocaust and not Shoah throughout because although Holocaust also has a variety of meanings, Shoah has a cultural specificity I prefer to avoid. I have an interdisciplinary approach in this study. My hope is that I provide a context for the British second-generation testimonials that suggest some of the links between the ‘traumatizing’ impact of their families’ dislocation and loss and the specificity of the historical and cultural context. Some of the interpretations and conclusions, particularly in the section on the Holocaust, are controversial, and readers should be aware that my argument might not be accepted by many researchers. However, this is not an attempt to develop grand theories, but rather to listen to the testimonials themselves. I also have chosen to leave myself as a part player in this narrative, drawing on my own experiences as part of a family who fled Nazism and their effects on me. The reader will therefore encounter the use of ‘I’ in three different contexts: ‘I’ as the narrator of this study, the ‘I’ in my interview and the ‘I’ when I refer to my own experiences in the main text. The book comes in three main parts: ‘Setting the Scene’, the nine testimonials, and my ‘Reflections’. In ‘Setting the Scene’, I first present a variety of contextualizing historical, political and cultural cameos. These will situate the telling of the life stories and aid in understanding the world in which the second generation grew up, so often feeling like strangers in the country of their birth. Then in the second section of ‘Setting the Scene’, I raise a variety of methodological issues as well as my approach to ‘Holocaust’ and ‘trauma’. In ‘Reflections’, I reflect on the testimonials, and various extrapolations are suggested.

LITERATURE ON THE SECOND GENERATION To a significant degree, the existing literature on the second generation comes from the US and Israel, though there is also work coming out of Australia and elsewhere; but my supposition is that the experience of exile in the UK differs from that in the US or in Israel. The US and Israel can be seen as the lands of immigrants more than the UK. Though its effects are contentious, the destruction of Native American societies and the relatively recent history of slavery in the US impacts an understanding of racism and the position of the refugee in the US. Clearly, Israel is, notwithstanding the large minority of Arab Israelis, a society where most people are the children of Jewish immigrants, with a significant shared

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experience. I suggest the other particularity, explored further in subsequent sections, was that the UK has a history of not welcoming immigrants to a greater degree than the US and, obviously, Israel. Britain’s historical attitude towards Jewish immigrants is examined subsequently. There are a few important books written in the UK about the second generation, but they approach the subject from distinctly different angles than mine. First, there are the memoirs, although they do not all neatly fall into that category. Lisa Appignanesi, who was not born in the UK, wrote Losing the Dead, but this is a personal account of one person trying to find out the truth about her mother. However, some of her themes, such as the power of silence and how the past and its losses can permeate one’s being, also appear in my work. Anne Karpf’s personal The War After is in part a memoir, in part an account of her parents’ lives, both presented within a historical and psycho-social context and how far her own life and self are entangled with what her parents went through. Eva Hoffman’s After Such Knowledge looks at the impact of the Holocaust on the second generation but not from a case-study approach and also not distinguishing between different second generations. There are also a few UK secondgeneration novels about being second generation, often autobiographically based, including my book, The Language of Silence, and Appignanesi’s Memory Man. But while these novels cast light on similar psychological-historical waters, they are ultimately fiction. In terms of psychotherapy, in the UK, Gaby Glassman has specialized in counselling members of the second generation and has written articles on this. 8 There is significant literature on the second generation in Israel and much debate about transference of trauma; see, for example, Natan Kellermann’s work, referred to in more detail elsewhere. Rachel Yehuda’s work on the process of transference is also discussed later. Helen Epstein’s insightful Children of the Holocaust draws on interviews of the children of Holocaust survivors in Israel. The classic and influential study by Dina Wardi, Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust, does indeed look at the impact of the Holocaust on subsequent generations, but her book is written from a therapeutic perspective, which mine has no pretensions to do. The intellectual coherence of the concept ‘second generation’ is disputed in Israel. Again, this is not the place to enter this debate, but it may be that the concept of ‘second generation’ has more pertinence outside Israel where being a refugee or the child of a refugee is not the norm. In the US, most relevant literature is either essentially written as memoir, such as Julie Salamon’s Net of Dreams, or within an academic psychological paradigm that looks at psychological issues relating to the second generation, in particular the issue of the transference of trauma and what different forms it may or may not take. Helen Fremont’s After

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Long Silence, written in the US, is a memoir that addresses the issue of the second generation’s recovery of memory, describing how she had to confront her parents’ armour of silence about their Jewish ancestry. Thus, the concern of this study is specifically not with the children of Holocaust survivors of any form but with a group that has rarely been studied in the UK: the children of parents who left their countries of birth before the outbreak of the Second World War. It aims to cast light on the specificities of this British second-generation group, a group whose significance is often not acknowledged, partly because of the importance given to the children of Holocaust survivors. This study is, moreover, based on testimonial evidence, which allows the participants their own voices and allows readers to hear divergences but also congruences and to reach their own conclusions.

NOTES 1. Lotte Moos was a German refugee from the Nazis who settled in Britain in 1933. 2. See the subsequent subsection on the Holocaust for a detailed discussion of how I use the word in this study. Though this is only one possible use of the term, briefly I use the word Holocaust here to apply to Nazi policy about the time and subsequent to the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 when systematic extermination by the state was planned and executed. 3. There is no one universally accepted label to refer to the UK and its component parts. When I am referring to the country as a whole, I generally use UK, rather than Britain or, indeed, England/English. For a variety of reasons, I only wanted to draw participants from England, and most participants, when discussing identity, referred to ‘Englishness’. Although I speak of the British second generation for reasons explored in the text, when I am referring to the participants’ testimony, I therefore usually use English. I am aware of the nationalist and cultural connotations of using ‘English’ rather than ‘British’, but this is not the place for this debate. 4. Only a few of the many helpful studies or analyses of the first generation in the UK can be mentioned here, but many others are also of interest. If these studies have not been referred to elsewhere in this study, they will not reappear in the bibliography. Anthony Grenville, ‘Introducing the Refugees: Family Backgrounds before Emigration’, in Changing Countries: The Experience and Achievement of German-Speaking Exiles from Hitler in Britain from 1933 to Today, ed. Marian Malet and Anthony Grenville (London: Libris, 2002), 5–17; Anthony Grenville, ‘Listening to Refugee Voices: The Association of Jewish Refugees: Information and Research on the Refugees from Hitler in Britain’, in Political Exile and Exile Politics in Britain after 1933, Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies 12, ed. Anthony Grenville and Andrea Reiter (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011): 199–211; Antony Kushner, ‘Finding

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Refugee Voices’, in Political Exile and Exile Politics in Britain after 1933, Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies 12, ed. Anthony Grenville and Andrea Reiter (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 121–40; Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews, 1933–1948: British Immigration Policy, Jewish Refugees and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Still worth considering are Yvonne Kapp and Margaret Mynatt, British Policy and the Refugees, 1933–1941 (London: Frank Cass, 1997), originally written in the early 1940s and focusing on political refugees, and Norman Bentwich’s The Refugees from Germany, April 1933 to December 1935 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1936), covering the first wave of arrivals, which he followed up in 1956 with They Found Refuge: An Account of British Jewry’s Work for Victim of Nazi Oppression (London: The Cresset Press, 1956). Norman Angell and Dorothy Thompson’s You and the Refugee, a Penguin Special in 1939, is critical of the government handling of the refugee crisis, as is François Lafitte’s The Internment of Aliens (London: Libris, 1990). Colin Holmes covered the rise of political anti-Semitism in his Anti-Semitism in British Society, 1876–1939 (London: Edward Arnold, 1979). Although not a study in the UK, a good place to start is with Dina Wardi’s Children of the Holocaust, referred to subsequently. The studies of the British first generation that people in the UK are most aware of are about the Kindertransport, for example, Bertha and Samuel Lowensohn, eds., I Came Alone: The Stories of the Kindertransport (Sussex: Book Guild, 1990). 5. I occasionally place single quotation marks around the words Jew and Jewish when I wish to include both those for whom Jewishness was an important part of their identity and those who considered that the definition of them as Jewish was one that had been imposed on them by the Nazi’s biological categorization, though some have acknowledged a Jewish heritage. Moreover, the Nazi’s definition of Juden shifts significantly between 1933 and 1943 to include more and more people in that category. Those interviewed used the terms Jew and Jewish to cover a wide spectrum of meanings; see parts 2 and 3. 6. See Ruth Kitchen, ‘Revenir—the Shame of Return in French Cultural Memory’ (paper presented at Writing Auschwitz: Testimony, Representation and Prose in the Work of Charlotte Delbo, Primo Levi and Holocaust Writers, University of Westminster in partnership with the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and Birkbeck, University of London, 18 March 2013). Kitchen has developed on her position in A Legacy of Shame—French Narratives of War and Occupation (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013). 7. I am aware of and regret that there were other strata within the British second generation, such as the children of Orthodox Jewish families, who may be underrepresented in my study. I hope that future researchers may remedy any such deficit. 8. For example, Gaby Glassman, ‘The Impact of Intergenerational Protection on the Second Generation’s Other Relationships’, in Beyond Camps and Forced Labour—Current International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution, proceedings of the first international multidisciplinary conference, Imperial War Museum, London, 29–31 January 2003, ed. Johannes-Dieter Steinert and

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Inge Weber-Newth (Osnabrück, Ger.: Secoloverlag, 2005), 491–97. A more recent article addresses a different though overlapping issue: Gaby Glassman, ‘Survivor Mothers and Their Daughters: The Hidden Legacy of the Holocaust’, in Different Horrors/Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust: Perspectives and Interpretations, ed. Myrna Goldenberg and Amy Shapiro (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2013), 218–38.

I

Setting the Scene

1 THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE COUNTRIES OF ORIGIN OF THE REFUGEE PARENTS

The geopolitical circumstances that precipitated the British second generation’s parents’ exile continue to reverberate strongly in the lives of their children, the British second generation. The British second generation’s present perceptions of who they are and the current debate on the character of silence is better comprehended within a historical/cultural background. But this is not a history book about the causes or consequences of Nazism and its march through much of Europe, precipitating the flight of the participants’ parents. Many fine academic books have already been published around these topics, which I draw upon to provide background but do not dwell on. Here I will consider the background situation in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary as it contributed to the parents’ flight and subsequent arrival in the UK; these were the ‘countries of origin’ of the British second-generation participants. This section is not intended to be a comprehensive review of patterns of exile from these countries. While Nazism was obviously the immediate cause, it was also the development of the nation-state across much of Middle Europe after World War I that had emphasized the importance of the nation-state and nationhood and had therefore created minorities of those who were not of that nation. Indeed, though Germany was something of an exception, the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I left significant minorities in the newly formed nation-states of ‘Eastern’ Europe, especially in Poland and Czechoslovakia, most of whom had been forced or encouraged to leave their country of origin or had been 3

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exterminated by the end of World War II (Mazower 1998, 41–43). 1 To draw from Mark Mazower (1998, 41–48), the earlier forms of ‘solving’ the ‘problem’ of minorities, which had been accentuated by the creation of the nation-state, were no longer seen as viable: neither population swaps such as those between Turkey and Greece after World War I nor migration, particularly to the US, which was essentially controlled from 1921. This is not to diminish the Jewish experience. Anti-Semitism was experienced in the great empires of the nineteenth century, but it was accentuated with their demise just before and after World War I. The new types of regime had different types of anti-Semitism within them. While the Nazi’s attempt to annihilate all Jews was distinct from more piecemeal efforts at ‘ethnic cleansing’, the testimonials included here could be the stories of many who went into some form of exile during the 1920s and 1930s. Though it has not proven possible to establish all the refugee numbers, I attempt to give some indication of the difference in the numbers of those who fled from each country of origin in the 1930s, which is itself linked to the history of each country. This is a study of the children of those who fled before the outbreak of war, not of those who stayed.

GERMANY Refugees from Germany constituted the largest group to come to the UK. 2 As events in Germany bestrode Europe and much of the rest of the world between 1933 and 1945, it is worth going into some limited detail on the background to the exodus of refugees from Germany. The Nazis took power in January 1933 and rapidly set out on the road to dictatorship. Following the Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933, they banned the German Communist Party (KPD), the largest Communist Party outside the USSR. A few months later, in June, they banned the German Social Democrats (SPD), the biggest opposition party, and the trade unions. From the time of the Reichstag fire, significant numbers of activists were rounded up and sent to the early concentration camps. 3 It was at this early point that many political activists fled, increasingly so as the repression tightened. One to two thousand came to the UK, but many more, at least initially, went to Czechoslovakia and some to France. Although the exact number is not known, between about two thousand and four thousand German Communists went to the USSR, frequently with tragic results as many were killed in the purges (Pike 1982, 60, 61, 315–33). Yet others

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went to the ‘New World’: places such as Argentina, Mexico, Chile and the Dominican Republic. By July 1933, all other political parties had bowed to Nazi pressure and dissolved themselves, and on 14 July 1933, the government declared the Nazi Party the sole party in Germany. Many if not most of those who fled in 1933–1934 were anti-Nazis; many would never return to Germany. 4 A particular feature of the Nazi regime, like all true Fascist regimes, was the mass base of the Nazi Party, which included mass paramilitary organizations: the SA (Sturmabteilung) until 1934, and the SS (Schutzstaffel). After the Nazis took power, these organizations were partially incorporated into the state and, most importantly, given free rein by the state to carry out their terror against both political opponents and Jews. Though persecution between 1934 and 1936 was less severe than it became later, Jews were increasingly barred from professions, universities and aspects of business, which combined with state-sanctioned violence against individuals and groups. In January 1933 there were some 523,000 Jews in Germany, representing less than 1 percent of the total population (USHMM, ‘German Jewish Refugees’). 5 The severity of the anti-Jewish measures, and the—accurate—fear that the worst could be yet to come, is revealed in Martin Gilbert’s (1986, 47) calculation that seventy-five thousand German Jewish refugees had fled between 1933 and 1935 alone, the largest group, thirty thousand, to Palestine, nine thousand to the United States and a few thousand to the UK, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Denmark and elsewhere. The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 deprived Jews of German citizenship, banned marriage between Germans and Jews and barred the employment of Germans as servants by Jews. The accelerating policy of Aryanization meant that the Jews who were self-employed or entrepreneurs found it increasingly difficult to buy or sell, in other words remain solvent, and ‘German’ firms were able to purchase ‘Jewish’ firms at a highly advantageous rate, leading to the quickening of emigration (Sherman 1994, 22). According to Gilbert (1986, 64), by July 1938, 150,000 Jews had fled Germany, 8,000 to the UK, 40,000 to Palestine, 55,000 to the US, 6,000 to Brazil, 15,000 to France and 14,000 to Switzerland. This type of persecution reached its height on Kristallnacht, the November 1938 pogrom, which led to a dramatic increase in the numbers of people fleeing, specifically Jews, and which, along with the Anschluss— the incorporation of Austria into Greater Germany—also led to the birth of the Kindertransport. Although finding a country that would take in the refugees was proving increasingly difficult, about 36,000 Jews left Germany and Austria in 1938 and 77,000 in 1939 (USHMM, ‘German Jewish Refugees’). By September 1939, approximately 282,000 Jews had left

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Germany, out of the 523,000 who had lived there in 1933 (USHMM, ‘German Jewish Refugees’). 6 The estimates of how many German and Austrian Jews entered the UK vary significantly: from about 40,000 (USHMM, ‘German Jewish Refugees’) to nearer 70,000 for German Jews alone, a variation affected by which records are being used and how these records categorize country of origin (London 1991, 511). By the end of 1939, 202,000 Jews remained in Germany, mostly elderly, and by October 1941, 163,000 were left, at least for the time being. Any breakdown of figures for those escaping Germany will inevitably be open to question. The would-be refugee was not officially recorded as going into exile. As Yvonne Kapp and Margaret Mynatt (1997, 23) remind us, the political refugees who escaped from Germany and later from elsewhere could not obtain emigration papers, and therefore would not appear at all in the country of origin’s figures of ‘emigration’. Many of the early exiles—those who fled before the November 1938 pogrom— were escaping because they were political, whether they were Jewish or not, although there were also far-seeing business people and professionals. The following figures are for entry of all ‘aliens’ into the UK for 1933, not departures from Germany and not just refugees (Houses of Parliament, Cmd 4308, 4596-11); but I suggest that the impact of the Nazis’ acquisition of power is revealed in these figures: in 1933, altogether 55,877 arrived in the UK as aliens, compared to only 41,065 in 1932. In 1933, altogether 48,449 Germans embarked in the UK as aliens, compared to only 39,803 in 1932. 7 Moreover, there is a remarkable near doubling of people landing in the UK every three months during 1933, coinciding with the Nazi takeover at the end of January and the consequent and increasing repression: 10,561 people between January and March 1933, 26,328 between April and June, 45,399 between July and September, and 55,817 between October and December. Ironically, Germany had been the country in Central and Eastern Europe regarded as the least anti-Semitic. Many Jews had moved there in the nineteenth century from what was to become Poland, from Lithuania or other parts of western Russia or from the more anti-Semitic parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, precisely for this reason. But there is a debate about how far anti-Semitism had been a feature of German society pre1933 and before the Weimar Republic. Richard Evans’s (2012, 20) argument is that, despite the Jews having been granted civil equality in 1871, there was rising anti-Semitism, with the emergence of right-wing parties that argued to rescind this equality on largely racial lines and that brought anti-Semitism far more to the fore in German politics. At the same time, from around 1900, German Jews were increasingly becoming absorbed into German cultural society. Evans (2012, 20) quotes that for every one

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hundred marriages where both parents were Jewish, there were seventythree Christian-Jewish marriages per one hundred in Hamburg, thirty-five in Berlin by 1914, and that twenty thousand German Jews were baptized between 1880 and 1920, out of around half a million Jews living in Germany at that time, a proportion indicative of a real level of assimilation. Eric Hobsbawm (1994, 120) notes that ‘popular’ anti-Semitism was far less deeply rooted in Germany itself than it was elsewhere. Even my economist father, as late as 1938/1939, wrote an article on the ‘Political Economy of Nazism’ in which he argued that anti-Semitism was dangerous but nevertheless an ideological flourish, which ‘real-politik’ would keep well in check. This was a near-universal view, even on the antifascist left. Bob Moore (2013, n.p.) also argues that much of the Jewish population did not see the Nazis’ anti-Semitism as especially threatening. Many Jews could not bear to read the writing on the wall or could simply not imagine what was to come, until it was all but impossible to get out. I can imagine people saying to each other after the pogrom in 1938: ‘Oh, so it’s another pogrom. We’ve had centuries of those. We’ll keep our heads down and it’ll blow over.’ Indeed, arguably, even some Nazis did not envisage what was to come. By the time that the genocidal Nazi policies started to become more apparent, starting with the pogrom of 1938, getting out of Germany became increasingly difficult: a matter of having enough wealth to buy oneself out, being willing to do so and having a clean enough record to be granted a visa. With the outbreak of the Second World War, the Nazi policy of allowing Jews to leave as long as they left behind their wealth no longer applied. The Nazi acquisitions of territories with a significant minority of Jews and then the defeat of the Nazis at Stalingrad culminated in a policy of extermination. By 1945, there were hardly any Jews or anti-Nazis who were known to the authorities left in Germany.

AUSTRIA Austria was run throughout the 1930s by a far-right authoritarian regime, heir to the Dolfuss dictatorship of 1933–1934, and sustained mainly by a de facto coalition between the Catholic semifascist Christian Social Party and the conservative nationalist paramilitary Heimwehr. The main opposition was the Social Democratic Party, which was formally banned in 1934. Unlike in Germany, the Communist Party was very small. Although by tradition anti-Semitic and anti-Socialist, the Austrian regime was authoritarian rather than totalitarian: the state did not seek to control

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all aspects of citizens’ lives and did not have the interlocking of party, paramilitary and state organizations that characterized the totalitarian Nazi regime. Between 1934 and 1938 it was easier in Austria than in Germany for oppositionists to survive through a variety of semilegal organizations. Nonetheless, there was periodically severe repression of Communist, Social Democratic and trade union activists, particularly in the period following a limited uprising by the Social Democratic paramilitary Schutzbund in Linz and Vienna in 1934, provoking a steady stream of refugees; many of the refugees from the pre-Anschluss days were primarily politicals. Much of the Social Democratic leadership fled to Czechoslovakia in 1934 and led the semiunderground party from Brno. Indeed, many of the political refugees before 1938 fled to Czechoslovakia rather than to the West; the small number of Communists mainly headed for the USSR. The Anschluss put both politicals and Jews in the same situation as in Germany and provoked a rush of refugees. The Austrian regime aligned itself with Mussolini’s Italy. However, while the Austrian regime was proud of Austrian independence from Germany, the Austrian Nazis sought to unite Austria with Germany. Indeed, the Austrian regime was almost as hostile to its own Nazis—who had tried to stage a coup in 1934—as it was to its opponents on the left. Ironically, until the Nazis took power, the Austrian left had generally maintained its traditional position of seeking a democratic pan-German state. The regime was anti-Semitic, and ‘everyday’ anti-Semitism was notoriously worse in Austria than in Germany. Hobsbawm (1994, 120) remarks that ‘Jews who escaped from newly occupied Vienna to Berlin in 1938 were astonished at the lack of street anti-semitism’. However, Berlin did not engage in systematic persecution of Jews until after the Anschluss of March 1938. Unlike in Germany, there was no SA or SS terrorizing Jewish communities or oppositionists before 1938. Thus, as became the case in other occupied countries, many of the Jewish population were unlikely to have anticipated the extreme measures that would be taken against them, rather seeing the 1930s up to the Anschluss as just another, even if protracted, period of anti-Semitism. They would, therefore, have been less likely to attempt to leave; however, when the Anschluss occurred, they wanted to leave in very large numbers, often with terrible results. At the time of the Anschluss, 185,000 Jews lived in Austria, almost all in Vienna; though according to Louise London, by the end of 1938, there were 200,000 Jews left in Austria, a slightly greater number. Some 120,000 Jews had fled by the time war broke out, another 6,000 left by the end of 1939 (Dawidowicz 1977, 447) and by September 1939, only 57,000 remained (USHMM, ‘German Jewish Refugees’).

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In terms of the numbers entering the UK, Lloyd stated that there were fourteen thousand Austrians in the UK prior to the Anschluss. In 1937, again pre-Anschluss, the total number landing in the UK, according to the parliamentary papers, was 18,722, compared to just over 13,000 in 1936. In 1938, 14,498 Austrians landed in the UK. While in 1933 the number was less than one hundred, almost one thousand Austrians arrived as ‘other aliens’, almost one-sixth of the total number arriving in 1938.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA Czechoslovakia, though a genuine democracy where Jews enjoyed civic and religious freedoms, was nevertheless subject to nationalistic and ethnic pressures both internally and externally. This was in part the consequence of how Czechoslovakia had been put together after the defeat and collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when the Versailles Treaty had used provincial, rather than ‘ethnic’ boundaries in the creation of new states. German-speaking Czechs no longer had the ‘protection’ of a German-speaking government in Vienna and felt subject to discrimination in the new state (Hobsbawm 1994, 31–33 passim). Ironically, most of the country’s Jewish population were German speaking. About 118,000 Jews lived in Bohemia and Moravia, about one-third of all Czech Jews (Dawidowicz 1977, 449). Prior to the Anschluss, many Czechs—and, indeed, also Hungarians— saw the Nazi state more as threatening foreign invasion than as an antiSemitic threat. So Jewish people generally did not see themselves as at more risk than anybody else and did not see any specific reason to escape. Thousands of refugees had fled to Czechoslovakia from Germany and Austria. Many—more than 150,000 people—who had initially fled to the Czech ‘interior’ from the Sudetenland, but also from Germany, Austria and to a smaller extent from Hungary, now had to flee again (Raska 2012). With the invasion of the Sudetenland, the Czech government took the decision that it could only support Czech and Slovak refugees. It announced to the UK that if they did not take the other refugees, the refugees would be sent back to Germany. The German government then successfully demanded that the political refugees be returned to Germany. The British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC) and other organizations urged the British government to grant more visas. 8 The figures for 1938, in the House of Commons parliamentary papers, were as follows: a total of 5,731 landed during 1938, doubling from 5,731 between January and March to 10,319 between April and

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June, reflecting the impact of the Anschluss. Ironically, it was easier for the Czech Jewish refugees to get out of Czechoslovakia and into the UK at this point, because it was the politicals that the Gestapo were hunting. Only a lucky few politicals ever reached the UK (Kapp and Mynatt 1997, 18–20). By 1939, the chances of escape were extremely low (Kapp and Mynatt 1997, 18–20). Captain William Benn, a Liberal MP who subsequently joined the Labour Party, provides us with more detail during a debate in the House of Commons on 7 February 1939: ‘We know from the “Times” that the Gestapo arrived almost immediately after the cession [of Sudetenland], in order to round up Marxists, Socialists and other undesirable individuals’ (House of Commons, ‘Czecho-slovakia Financial Assistance Bill’). During the same Commons debate of 7 February 1939, Colonel Josiah Wedgwood said that there were different types of Czech refugee: Jews and German Socialists from Sudetenland, ‘and the Jews everywhere’. Wedgwood also explained that ‘the decision as to who will be helped appears to rest solely with the Czecho-Slovak Refugee Institute’ in Czechoslovakia and asked who was eligible for the £4 million bestowed on the Czech government for assisting refugees from Czechoslovakia, strongly suggesting that the government’s priorities in effect excluded most Jews (House of Commons, ‘Czecho-slovakia Financial Assistance Bill’). 9 He continued that ‘the attitude of the present Czech government as regards the Czechs and Germans who have fled from Sudetenland is quite frank. They want them to go back to their homes and they do not want to spend money on the Jews. They would like to get rid of them but not to the tune of £200 each’ (House of Commons, ‘Czecho-slovakia Financial Assistance Bill’). Commenting on the chances of escape, Wedgwood said, ‘If you look at the map now you will see that Czecho-Slovakia is completely surrounded by the German Reich and by vassal states. There is no means of getting out of it, except through countries where the will of the Reich is dominant’ (House of Commons, ‘Czecho-slovakia Financial Assistance Bill’). 10

HUNGARY After the defeat of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 and the White Terror that followed it, Hungary was taken over by the conservative, Catholic and authoritarian regime of Admiral Horthy. The first wave of Hungarian refugees was from the White Terror and mainly involved political activists, intellectuals and ‘creatives’, many of whom

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went on to have distinguished careers in Britain, France and the US. 11 The Horthy regime has been neatly described as ‘parliamentary, but not democratic’ (Hobsbawm 1994, 113). Opposition parties were allowed to exist, for periods at least, but regularly had to operate underground against a background of increasing nationalism and anti-Semitism. Any activity that challenged the regime was severely repressed. Like its Austrian neighbour, Hungary was allied with Mussolini’s Italy rather than Nazi Germany and repressed its own Nazi sympathizers. It had its own ‘racial nationalism’, but this was Magyar and sometimes anti-German. As in Austria, most refugees before 1938 were in some sense or other political, although they included some Jews frustrated by the limits placed on their advancement by the loosely anti-Semitic regime. Subsequently, Hungary adopted a pro-German stance and a semivoluntary axis with Germany, including joining Germany in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia before the outbreak of war. This culminated in Hungary declaring war on the USSR in June 1941 and the invasion of the USSR (Dawidowicz 1977, 379). 12 Like Austria, the Hungarian regime was generally anti-Semitic. Yet there had been little direct persecution, and its anti-Jewish measures were initially relatively mild and late. When Hungary passed the first of a succession of anti-Jewish laws in 1938, in particular limiting Jews’ rights to hold professional jobs, including in universities, it was under German pressure (Dawidowicz 1977, 178–82, 454). It took the overthrow of the Horthyite regime by the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross in 1944 for Hungarian Jews to be rounded up and sent to the death camps. In 1930, about 450,000 Jews lived in Hungary, 50 percent in Budapest. In the towns, the Jews were middle class. By the outbreak of war, a further 250,000 Jewish refugees had arrived from elsewhere. In addition, by some strange historical quirk, another one hundred thousand Christians were categorized as ‘racial Jews’ (Dawidowicz 1977, 453–54). With Eichmann at its helm, the SS almost immediately started to round up the Jews. Seventy percent of the Jews of Greater Hungary were murdered over a six-month period (Dawidowicz 1977, 374–87). A conservative estimate is that between October 1944 and the end of the war, ten to fifteen thousand Jews were murdered outright and eighty thousand sent to Auschwitz. 13 In what is inevitably an unknowable and highly charged calculation, some estimate the deaths of Hungarian Jews at around half a million. Another group who were all but liquidated were political prisoners. The speed of the Jewish extermination combined with the previous exodus of the 1920s and the ‘soft’ anti-Semitic measures of the earlier Horthy regime help to explain why so few Jewish refugees made it out of Hungary. There are no reliable figures for Hungarians arriving in the UK

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in 1944. In 1939, the numbers rose dramatically: the total for 1938 was just over seven thousand. In January 1939, a further 852 arrived, rising to 4,920—the last available figure—by June 1939. Hungary was surrounded by countries held by the fascist Axis, making escape even more perilous. There were lamentably few who got out, and those who did succeed in reaching Britain often had virtually no family surviving in Hungary by 1945.

WHY POLAND IS NOT INCLUDED Poland, like other countries that Germany subsequently invaded, falls outside this study. I did not interview any second-generation children of Polish parents. The invasion of Poland only one week after the signing of the infamous Hitler-Stalin Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact precipitated the declaration of war. When the invasion did occur, it took place with great speed. The invasion began on 1 September 1939 and ended on 6 October 1939 with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of Poland. There was almost no possibility for flight. Therefore, very few refugees from Nazism escaped from Poland or got to the UK before the outbreak of war: it is the prewar refugees who are the concern of this study.

Most Poles had not anticipated invasion, partly at least because of a trust in the Allies’ guarantee of Polish sovereignty, which would provide them with protection from the Nazis, and most Jews had not seen cause for flight from the Nazis specifically. Other reasons why few Poles escaped were because of their attachment to the land, because they came from artisan backgrounds and because they did not have the money necessary for flight and/or the awareness of a world beyond their own experiences. Unlike in Hungary, only about 6 percent of the Jewish population were professionals. The Polish government’s actively anti-Semitic policies had kept the Jewish population at a low economic level. About 3.3 million Jews lived in prewar Poland, 10 percent of the total population. Although after 1919, the civil liberties of minorities were theoretically guaranteed, in practice, even before 1939, there were a series of pogroms, accompanied by restrictions on education and jobs (Dawidowicz 1977, 471–73). 14 The refugees who had already left Poland before 1939 were not insignificant in number, though far fewer than from

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Germany or Austria: in 1938, a total of just over 10,000 Poles had arrived in the UK, in January 1939 alone 1,021 Poles arrived, rising to 6,188 by June 1939, and 200,000 Poles served under British command during the war. However, while these refugees were fleeing the government’s openly anti-Semitic policies, they were not, in general, fleeing Nazism. Because war broke out with the invasion of Poland, the House of Commons’ figures end with June 1939. Most of the Polish refugees who did arrive in the UK, I suggest, defined themselves primarily in terms of their Jewishness; and their children, the second generation, are more likely to identify themselves as Jewish rather than as second generation.

Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people who would have wanted to leave Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary never made it; whether because of the impossibility of gaining the necessary papers to exit, the impossibility of escaping without them or the impossibility of gaining visas of entry, for example, into Britain. Ironically, Germans had an advantage in that the Nazi regime only slowly ratcheted up the pressure on Jews and only slowly turned concentration camps into something worse, so at least some people had the opportunity to get out and survive. For whatever complexity of reasons, this was an advantage not bestowed on the population of most of the countries Germany invaded.

NOTES 1. Though the following figures cover a longer stretch of time, the figures are indicative of the significant numbers of minority groups after 1918: Poland’s total population was almost 32 million in 1931, of whom almost 750,000 were Germans, 2.7 million Jews, 4.4 million Ukrainians and 1.7 million Belarusians. By 1991, the respective figures were 500,000, 15,000, 150,000 and 100,000. 2. See the next section for details on numbers entering the UK. 3. The KPD were tragically underprepared for underground work in Germany, and many of their militants were picked up within months of the Nazis coming to power. The Social Democrats were even less prepared. However, they had an advantage: they had observed the KPD members being picked up, and so had taken the opportunity to get their main local and national figures out of the country or to Saarland. Both parties, although for different reasons, had seen the Nazi regime as likely to be a temporary aberration and had assumed that the majority of their members would be able to stay in Germany, underground if necessary, until conditions changed.

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4. Many well-known members of the German ‘intelligentsia’ left in 1933: Ernst Cassirer, who came to London, Thomas Mann, Max Born and Erich Fromm; Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Arnold Schoenberg and Albert Einstein all happened to be out of the country during the Nazi takeover and decided not to return. Later, Herbert Marcuse, Sigmund Freud and Theodor Adorno got out. 5. The figures in this entire section are drawn from this source, unless otherwise stated. 6. Of the refugees from both Germany and Austria, some ninety-five thousand emigrated to the United States, sixty thousand to Palestine, forty thousand to Great Britain, eighteen thousand to Shanghai and about seventy-five thousand to Central and South America, in particular Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Bolivia (USHMM, ‘German Jewish Refugees’). 7. These figures are taken directly from the ‘Aliens order’ archives in the House of Commons. But in table 2, it states that only 46,449 Germans embarked. As argued elsewhere in this section, the immigration authorities did not have a fail-safe way of knowing the refugees’ original country of origin, and one has to assume different sections of the immigration authorities came up with different tallies. 8. According to Wedgwood, initially a Liberal MP, who took the Labour whip from 1919, they would not qualify as refugees in the UK according to the British government’s criteria. House of Commons, ‘Czecho-slovakia Financial Assistance Bill, 7 February 1939’, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, vol. 349, cc 773–855. 9. ‘But let us look at the definition of a refugee. I think it is clear that definition . . . of the White Paper excludes all those Jews who reside now and who resided previously in the present Czecho-Slovakia. Although now they are subject to nearly all the disabilities that are inflicted upon Jews in Germany, those 821 Jews who will want to get out, just as much as any Jew in Vienna or Berlin wants to get out, will be excluded from the benefits of this agreement by that definition as I read it. The Chancellor of the Exchequer used much wider words. He said that all Jews living in Czecho-Slovakia who wanted to get out would benefit from the Bill. He cannot have read the Bill, or else he must have some information beyond that contained in page 12 of the White Paper. Residents in the present Czecho-Slovakia who resided there before are not, according to this definition, refugees. Further all those Jews resident in the Sudetenland and in the territory ceded to Hungary, who did not get out before the Germans came in, and who were unable to escape into the present Czecho-Slovakia, are also excluded. The stateless Jews seem to me to be excluded. None who got in after September, 1938—and that includes many from the November pogroms in Germany—stand to benefit or can hope to benefit. Last, but not least, none of those Jews who are unable to get visas into foreign countries and who therefore cannot emigrate, can benefit under this Agreement’ (House of Commons, ‘Czechoslovakia Financial Assistance Bill’). 10. Quoted in Cohen (2011, 3) is an extract from the writing of Doreen Warriner, who had been put in charge of arranging and accompanying the transport of 250 Sudeten Social Democrats on 25 October for whom short-stay visas

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had eventually, if grudgingly, been granted by the British government: ‘It was a long journey, all night by slow train into the depths of Slovakia, then by a motor train, passing the ruins of Ostrava Castle, up over a pass in the mountains to the tiny border post of Sucha Hora . . . here we had to wait a whole day in this poor Slovak village . . . at last, at night, another tiny train appeared on the Polish side, we walked over the frontier.’ 11. Thousands of intellectuals and the left, Jewish and non-Jewish, fled during the 1920s. The roll call of exiled photographers alone is astonishing. Among others, László Moholy-Nagy went to Germany in 1920 and became an influence on the Bauhaus movement; Martin Munkácsi arrived in Berlin in 1928, where he worked for the mass circulation Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung; and André Kertész moved to Paris in 1925, a year after Brassaï. Then there were academics such as Nicholas Kaldor and Thomas Balogh. 12. While Hungary had had a repressive right-wing regime under Horthy, in October 1944 Horthy was removed from power when he tried to pull away from supporting the Nazis. On 12 March 1944, the Germans completed their invasion of Hungary which, until the Soviet troops ‘arrived’ in October 1944, fell essentially under the control of the SS. By 7 July, 437,000 Jews had been deported to Auschwitz. Horthy’s command that the deportation should stop had no effect, and the number would rise to over 450,000. By the beginning of November 1944, the SS, on orders from Himmler, aware of the approaching Russians, disabled the gas chambers at Auschwitz and yet another thirty-five thousand Hungarian Jews were sent on a forced march. 13. One calculation is that between May and July 1944 alone, Hungary’s Jews were being deported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz at the rate of twelve thousand people a day. Auschwitz was ‘turned off’ as the Russians approached. 14. In May 1935, Marshall Josef Pilsudski, leader of the Second Polish Republic from 1926 to 1935, first openly espoused a policy of getting as many Jews as possible to leave, suggesting Madagascar and Palestine as possible places for relocation, but refused to either finance or permit Jewish refugees to bring their assets (Dawidowicz 1977, 108,109). Poland had gone through a period of civil unrest, repression, territorial conflicts and anti-Semitic pogroms since the end of the First World War, from which the radical intelligentsia and some Jews, Isaac Deutscher exemplifying both, had already fled to the UK and who therefore do not fit my criteria of being refugees from Nazism. Of the 3.3 million Polish Jews, about 3 million were murdered along with 3 million other Poles (Dawidowicz 1977, 471–73).

2 SOCIOPOLITICAL RESPONSES TO AND BY THE REFUGEES

To understand the character and responses of the British second generation, it is useful to consider how their parents, the refugees, were received in the UK and how they responded. Evaluations by historians of the relationship between the refugees and the British in the 1930s and during the war have changed markedly over the decades. The initial glow of victory over Nazism was overtaken by a desire among historians to consider ‘exile experience’, in particular, the internment of aliens, followed by a further shift towards an emphasis on the significance of refugees’ experience of anti-Semitism. Though I am not entering these debates, for my concern is the second generation, some contextualization of their parents’ experiences as exiles in the UK is useful.

THE NUMBERS GAME: REFUGEES ARRIVING IN THE UK, 1933–1939 Although the figures are elusive, open to different interpretations and not all relevant records have been released, it is important to have some sense of how many refugees, the parents of the second generation, made it to the UK between 1933 and 1939. This provides some sense of where the refugees came from and gives us some sense, from the distance of time, as to how difficult it was for refugees to get into Britain. It confirms that most refugees arrived in the UK up to the beginning of the Second World War, rather than after.

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There is no way of knowing exactly how many people arrived or tried to arrive in the UK as refugees or where they originally came from. Nor do the immigration figures indicate cause of exile. There are a variety of reasons for the lack of clarity. To begin with, UK did not distinguish between refugees and ordinary travellers. Numbers of landings in the UK are made up of a variety of categories, the largest being visitors on holiday and business visitors. Both Sherman and London point out that early political refugees from Germany succeeded in getting into the UK initially by posing as visitors, revealing an early awareness of the difficulty of gaining admittance as a refugee (Sherman 1994, 94; London 1991, 485). Indeed, in 1933, there were twenty-eight thousand ‘visitors’ from Germany who arrived in the UK, as opposed to twenty thousand in 1932. But the Home Office and the immigration authorities soon got wise to this ruse. In April 1933, the home secretary, Sir John Gilmour, stated that in the first two days of ‘this week’ in April, one hundred aliens arrived as visitors, fifty the next day: figures, he said, far in excess of normal traffic (London 1991, 485). Then there is the category of ‘Aliens holding Ministry of Labour permits’, that is, those who were coming to jobs already agreed. In fact, many refugees entered the UK who fit more than one criteria, which the figures do not reveal. For example, business links prior to Nazism allowed some of my great-aunts and uncles into the UK on business permits. The final significant category is ‘other aliens’. While it has not proven possible to establish who constituted ‘other aliens’, my assumption is that, as these were people arriving without other visas, it is likely to have included political refugees who could not get exit permits or the proper paperwork from Nazified authorities. Although only one example, my father, escaping the Gestapo in February 1933, fled Germany with no papers at all. Out of the 55,877 who landed in the UK from Germany in 1933, 1,004 were ‘other alien’ adults, almost 28,000 visitors and almost 15,000 business visitors. In 1934, the number of ‘other aliens’ was 1,594 adults; in 1935, 1,612; in 1936, 2,488; in 1937, 2,838 compared to 777 in 1932, a steep and significant increase (Houses of Parliament, Cmd459611). 1 Another cause for the misleading immigration figures is that the immigration authorities generally categorized the person in terms of the last country they had come from, for example, German refugees could be recorded as coming from Czechoslovakia or France. My mother, fleeing Berlin, entered the UK from France, where she had lived for six months, and also arrived as a visitor in late 1933. Her suggestion was that the immigration officer—at that time, on board the ship from France—essen-

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tially turned a blind eye. Thus all figures on the numbers of refugees who arrived or settled in the UK are open to many interpretations. The government expected most refugees to be ‘in transit’ to another country, and the high numbers who did reembark, when we have no breakdown of who they were or why they were leaving, makes any definitive analysis of who stayed in the UK nearly impossible. Jewish organizations were more likely to hold accurate figures, but only for refugees who chose to define themselves as Jewish. That the full figure for those who landed in the UK does not constitute all ‘real’ refugees is revealed in the figure of a total of only twenty thousand German aliens registered with police in March 1938, given to the House of Commons by Mr Geoffrey Lloyd; although for reasons developed on later, this is certainly a significant underestimate (Houses of Parliament, Cmd4596-11). There is indeed a wide range of figures given for the total number of people who arrived in the UK as refugees. In the first years after 1933, the vast majority of refugees who reached the UK were Germans. Sherman (1994, 23) suggests that German refugees numbered about sixty thousand, but London (2003, 12, 23), who used registration with Jewish organizations as her base, criticizes Sherman’s figures as too low. Indeed, Sherman (1994, 23) himself tells us that many refugees initially went to neighbouring countries rather than straight to the UK and would therefore not have been categorized as German aliens. According to Todd Endelman (2002, 215), who unfortunately does not provide sources, only eleven thousand refugees altogether were admitted into the UK before the events of November 1938. Kapp and Mynatt (1997, 3), who were deeply involved in refugee politics at the time, calculated that eighty to ninety thousand refugees had arrived in the UK by 1939, of whom twenty to thirty thousand had reemigrated before the outbreak of war. On the other hand, the House of Commons figures on alien entries into the UK from Germany are both significantly lower than London’s and from their own figures from 1943. The home secretary, Sir John Anderson, on 12 October 1939 gave the overall figures of 49,500 for German and Austrian refugees from Nazism into the UK by that date, including 9,000 children (House of Commons, ‘Debate 12 October 1939’). The 1943 figures were for fifty-five thousand refugees from Germany and Austria, still fewer than London’s later estimates. The 1939 figures may well reflect the government’s desire at the time to underestimate numbers, given the prevalent antipathy towards refugees, something, of course, the government had itself contributed to; but the differences in figures also remind us to treat all of these figures with scepticism. Nevertheless, for a more sensitive barometer, it is worth reminding ourselves of the yearly breakdown of some of the House of Commons figures on ‘Alien passengers who entered and left the UK presented under

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the Aliens Registration Acts 1914 and 1919’, although the meaning of all the figures is open to interpretation. 2 The escalating numbers of arrivals gives a sense of the escalating crisis and the increasing repression in Germany against both Jews and politicals. In 1932, around forty thousand Germans had arrived in the UK, but, as discussed, most did not intend to stay (HofCPPi). In 1933, close to fifty-two thousand Germans had landed in the UK; by 1934, close to fifty-six thousand; by 1935, almost sixty thousand; in 1936, nearly seventy-five thousand; in 1937, just over eighty thousand (HofCPPi). In 1938 there is a slight fall: just under eighty thousand arrived. Over the years, the largest proportion of those who arrived in the UK left again: just over seventy-two thousand (HofCPPi–ii). Kapp and Mynatt (1997, 4, 5) list, in roughly chronological order, a variety of distinct groups of refugees who fled to the UK: Communist and left-wing politicians who fled as a result of the Reichstag fire, social democrats and trade unionists, liberals and pacifists during the summer of 1933, civil servants and professionals, Jewish shopkeepers and traders following the non-Aryan laws of April 1933, members of the Confessional Church, German nationalists, the many different opponents of Hitler from the Saar in 1935, large Jewish industrialists by 1938, Austrian political and racial victims, Sudeten German and Czech antifascists, followed by many Jews. Once war had broken out, the British government suspended their ‘alien’ admission procedures, but Wasserstein (1979, 82) estimates about ten thousand Germans succeeded in reaching the UK after the outbreak of war. 3 This figure sounds large, but these were not all German refugees coming from Germany. They also included people who needed to flee for a second time, such as from Vichy France and Czechoslovakia. A few also managed to return from their ‘internment in the Colonies’, and a few with resources and an unblemished record—apart from being Jewish— still managed to get out from under the Nazis. The figures for exiles from Austria are far smaller: about five thousand had arrived by 1933, and the figure slowly rose to a bit above thirteen thousand by 1937. Significantly, in 1938, the year of the Anschluss, the figure dropped to around 4,500. Nineteen thirty-eight also tragically marks a doubling in the numbers who were refused entry: from 93 in 1937 to 215 in 1938. The numbers wanting to flee Austria were causing much concern among embassies (London 2003, 181). In 1937, 18,722 Austrians had landed in the UK (HofCPPii). But in 1938, the number fell, despite—or rather because of—the Anschluss, to a total of 14,489. As the previous section reveals, the figures per quarter actually dropped. The British consul general to Austria reported that it was virtually impossible for Austrians to obtain visas to the UK, even for a short stay, because they had become destitute and often stateless and were therefore

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deemed ineligible. Only fifty out of one thousand Austrian doctors who applied throughout were admitted, despite being qualified professionals (London 2003, 131). The government’s policy of restricting entry was all too successful (London 2003, 81). Indeed, though numerically not as many as Germans, proportionately Austrians were being refused entry at a higher rate: in 1938, altogether 196 were refused, with the numbers increasing each quarter. There was some concern expressed, for example, in the Guardian and the News Chronicle, at the strict immigration controls: Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, MP, tabled a motion in the House of Commons calling for the admittance of Austrian refugees. Hoare’s reply in the Commons lamented the plight of the Jews but reiterated that the door could not be opened, except on a short-term basis to suitable professionals, and not all of those professionals (House of Commons, 22 March 1938, quoted by Sherman 1994, 92, 93). The last ‘wave’ of refugees to the UK before the outbreak of war was from Czechoslovakia. According to the census of 1930, there were 356,830 Jews in Czechoslovakia. About fifty thousand had emigrated (Gilbert 1986, 79, 80) by 15 March 1939, and by 3 September 1939, approximately a further twenty-six thousand had left (Dawidowicz 1977, 449–53). About six thousand successfully arrived in the UK by October 1939, though the government’s later figure in 1943 was, controversially, as high as ten thousand. The situation of those Jews attempting to flee Czechoslovakia for the UK after the Munich Agreement was lamentable. The British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC) was established in October 1938 after the Anschluss, mainly to arrange hospitality and to handle the allocation of funds raised in the UK by the Lord Mayor of London’s Fund, the Council for German Jewry and others. These funds were intended primarily for the Sudeten German refugees, as well as the Reich Germans and Austrians who had sought refuge in Czechoslovakia and exiled Czechs and Slovaks (Kapp and Mynatt 1997, 18–20; Cohen 2011, 2; Cohen 2013). The BCRC and the resulting Czech Refugee Trust Fund (CRTF), formed in July 1939, were the main organizations dealing with the thousands of Czech refugees who came to Britain. But neither the German Jewish Aid Committee, the renamed Jewish Refugee Committee, nor the BCRC would take responsibility for getting Jewish people out of Czechoslovakia and to the UK, passing the buck between them. Even though the BCRC technically opened its doors after the German invasion and was subsequently engulfed by applicants, it failed to act decisively (London 2003, 163). It was not until early 1939 that any official government financial help was made available to Czech refugees by way of the so-called Czech loan. Many Czech refugees, as subsequently with Polish

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Jews, became stateless. By 1945, thirty thousand Jews who had remained in Czechoslovakia were still alive; 277,000 had perished in the camps. However, Kapp and Mynatt have a different emphasis: they argue that the people in the gravest danger were the politicals—Sudeten German Communists and Social Democrat leaders who opposed Hitler urgently sought political asylum abroad. Many Sudeten German Social Democrats had immediately been rounded up and placed in camps. The BCRC’s priority was for those in the greatest danger: it was the politicals who were ‘these marked men’ (Kapp and Mynatt 1997, 59, 60). Doreen Warriner, appointed to represent the BCRC, successfully organized a convoy to the UK first of Social Democrats and endangered men and later their wives and children. She was subsequently centrally involved in saving hundreds of others, including Communists from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and others who had already fled Germany (Cohen 2011, 3–6; Cohen 2013, n.p.). Jewish Communist foreigners, argue Kapp and Mynatt (1997, 61), were the most unpopular of all refugees, both at the level of the British government and more widely within the UK. It is not clear how many refugees settled permanently in the UK after the end of the war. Moore’s (1991, 37) figures show 65,000 German refugee adults and accompanied children resided in the UK by 1945, of whom 8,300 had been unaccompanied children. Of the sixty-five thousand, eighteen thousand had to reemigrate, another ten to twelve thousand planned to reemigrate and about six to eight thousand intended to return to Germany. This, Moore states, left approximately only thirty-four thousand who settled in the UK, a figure lower than London’s (Moore 1991, 73). According to London, of the eighty to ninety thousand refugees who succeeded in entering the UK, about sixty thousand Jewish refugees were still living in Britain in 1945, and many of them, probably about forty thousand, settled in the UK (London 2003, 11, 12). Kapp and Mynatt (1997) estimate the figure at around forty-six thousand, a larger figure again. In 1947, the Home Office calculated that almost sixty thousand German, Austrian and Czech refugees were residing in the UK, an even higher figure (Home Office Report 1947, PRO HO 213/968 from Moore 1991, 73). London (2003, 11) estimates that ten times as many people sought refuge in Britain as succeeded in getting in, based on the files of the Jewish refugee organizations. One tragic detail regards those who got to a British port but were refused entry: 484 were sent back in 1933, 378 in 1934, 365 in 1935, 412 in 1936, 438 in 1937, and 489 in 1938 (HoCPPi). Even in the six months up to June 1939, 119 people were refused entry. A second-generation man told me that only one person, his father, was allowed admittance to the UK on arrival in early 1939, and that was directly through the intervention of the Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson,

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whom they knew through political contacts. The rest were sent by boat back to Holland. The fate of those turned back is unknown. These exclusions, London reminds us, are part of Britain’s forgotten history. Knowing the numbers who came to the UK for political reasons is also difficult. Partly this is because so many were in one sense or another Jewish. But there is a more fundamental reason. Nobody would declare themselves as political refugees when they tried for a visa or came in without papers. After all, the Home Office’s position was that aliens must not partake of political activity. Even though the category of ‘other aliens’ certainly included political refugees, there is no way of knowing what their proportion was. In fact, one unexpected outcome from the interviews for this study was to discover how many of the participants’ parents had been, at one level or another, political before they became exiles, something that a merely quantitative study would never reveal. A word of caution: in the research I conducted for this book, it became clear that there is no agreement as to who was a ‘Jewish’ refugee. For reasons explored later, it seems a significant number who fled and arrived here, ‘Jewish’ and non-Jewish, were politically aware or even active. For them, as opposed to the ‘authorities’, their ‘Jewishness’ was frequently not what they primarily defined themselves as and was only one cause for their flight. My impression from the interviews was that for many of the parents, their Jewishness was only one cause of their becoming refugees. This raises an underlying issue about the interpretation of statistics on Jewish refugees. People may have been defined as Jewish by the British state—and certainly by the Nazis—who did not primarily define themselves as Jewish, especially when they came from the assimilationist traditions of Germany. Being Jewish may not have been their main source of social identity before they fled. Yet in the UK, there may well have been motives to adopt a Jewish persona. Especially after the November 1938 pogrom, the British government took a more relaxed view towards Jewish immigration. Although the official policy was that the refugees were only in Britain temporarily, refugees may have seen an increasing advantage in identifying with being Jewish. In addition, the advice and support offered by Jewish charitable organizations when there was little else available is likely to have encouraged some refugees who might otherwise not have done so to register with those organizations. For instance, when my mother was interrogated in Holloway prison in 1940 as a possible spy, she referred to her Jewishness in a way I never heard her do, hoping, I suspect, that this would lessen her chances of being expelled from the UK. The very fact of having to flee at least in part because of being defined as an Untermensch for being Jewish will have encouraged some refugees to embrace their Jewishness. Thus, it has to be borne in mind that the nature of ‘Jewish-

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ness’ for some of the refugees who were so labelled by the British state or who registered with Jewish charitable organizations was ambiguous, and for some political refugees who were ancestrally Jewish, it was a contested or even rejected identity. Escape to the UK was for the lucky few. Though there is some disparity over figures, what emerges from all the estimates is how few refugees succeeded in entering the UK. There is, of course, no record of what happened to the thousands that Britain turned away.

THE JEWISH COMMUNITY AND ITS RESPONSE TO THE REFUGEES IN THE 1930S Although I am fully aware that not all refugees were Jewish, however that is interpreted, they constituted the largest group, and in this section I shall start by examining the responses of the Jewish community to the Jewish refugee. As my concern is with the children of refugees who arrived here before the outbreak of war, I will say little about the responses of the Jewish elite during the war itself as news of the actual Holocaust became well acknowledged. First, however, I want to mention the question about how far popular anti-Semitism can be understood as a backdrop for the Jewish communities’ reaction to the refugees in the 1930s, a theme made more complex because there was not a singular, homogeneous Jewish community. 4 Endelman’s (2002, 199) position is that anti-Jewish discrimination in the UK in the interwar period was not systemic but was widespread, especially in its cultural manifestations, and affected some parts of the Jewish community more than others. 5 What is generally agreed upon is that in the UK during the early twentieth century there was a popular ‘soft’ antiSemitism, which contributed to the wariness about accepting the refugees from Nazism among both the Anglo-Jewish establishment and the government. 6 At its peak before the new Jewish refugees arrived in the 1930s, the Anglo-Jewish population only numbered at most four hundred thousand people. It is useful to remind ourselves of the character of the Jewish community in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1930s, the largest single group within Britain’s existing Jewish community was second-generation immigrants, composed mainly of workers and generally poor traders who had grown up among the working class. Although there is disagreement on the exact figure, somewhere around 40 to 50 percent of London’s Jews lived in East London in the late 1920s and 1930s, a solidly working-class and—relatively—small geographic area.

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The divisions within the Jewish community lasted into the 1930s. There were tensions between the leadership of the Jewish community with the less prosperous and often working-class sections of the Jewish communities in particular, some of whom additionally were Yiddishspeaking and far more devout. The economically dominant Jews of Western European descent still held most of the leading positions within the community’s political, religious and cultural institutions and spoke to the government on behalf of the whole community, but they were now in a minority, surpassed by Yiddish-speaking, often working-class Jews (Rosenberg 2011, 17–34). As Rosenberg (2011, 17–34) shows, in the mid1930s, the most prominent figures in Anglo-Jewry were from a very different class location;, for example, Neville Laski, an Oxford-educated barrister and president of the Board of Deputies; Lionel Louis Cohen, a barrister and vice president of the board; Robert Waley-Cohen, an oil industrialist and leading figure of the United Synagogue; the Oxfordeducated philanthropist Leonard Montefiore, president of the Anglo-Jewish Association; and Hannah Cohen, president of the London Jewish Board of Guardians, who had worked as a civil servant in the Home Office and Treasury. 7 The leaders of the Jewish community wished to establish themselves within the grand tradition of the ‘English gentleman’ and were far more attentive to the possibility of formal barriers than to more insidious forms of cultural anti-Semitism and the needs of working people up against the National Union of Fascists. This division is highlighted by the Workers Circle, an influential ‘friendly society’ for working-class Jews, mostly Jewish immigrants from Russia, initially formed in 1908 in Tower Hamlets, a part of the East End. 8 They did not find existing Jewish-friendly societies suitable because of their religious and class bias and did not even join the Board of Deputies for over three decades after the board was formed in 1909. The Workers Circle emphasized trade union membership, and in 1919, the first branch was formed for English-speaking members who were active in East London labour activities. The organization promoted self-education, literary work and support for the sick or unemployed. The 1920s and 1930s saw the formation of a Zionist branch and a Yiddish schul. They became active in the fight against fascism in the 1930s. The very same Jewish elite who had scorned the Eastern European refugees about thirty-plus years earlier and who feared those refugees would cause an anti-Semitic backlash were now responsible for bestowing charity on the new refugees (London 2003, 39). In March 1933, Schiff set up the Jewish Refugees Committee (JRC), its funds provided by the Central British Fund for German Jewry (CBF). It was Schiff who henceforth met regularly with government officials (Endelman 2002, 214). Indeed, there is a question as to why the Jewish establishment and

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Jewish philanthropists responded more positively to this cohort of refugees than they had done thirty or forty years earlier, especially given that, as early as 1933, the Nazis’ anti-Semitic project was only emerging. Although this is merely supposition, I suggest they felt an affinity with the bourgeois German Jew in a way they had not with the earlier Eastern European refugees. Four leading Jewish figures—Harold Laski, Otto M. Schiff, Leonard G. Montefiore and Lionel Cohen—reached an unusual agreement with the government in 1933: the government would remove its usual requirement that any aliens had to have the means to support themselves before entry was granted and, in return, the Jewish leaders agreed that no refugee would be a charge on public funds (Endelman 2002, 214). It was also understood that the Jewish ‘community’ would control the influx, selecting those refugees who were likely to be the least troublesome and most likely to reemigrate. A raft of Jewish support facilities were established to care for the refugees upon arrival. But the long-established and prestigious Board of Deputies of British Jews did not involve itself in refugee work, seeing its brief more to do with Jewish/non-Jewish relations, though some leading individuals, such as Schiff, were exceptions and had links with refugee organizations (London 2003, 40). Also, in the early months of 1933, leading members of the AngloJewish community, including Anthony de Rothschild, Montefiore and the German-born banker Schiff—notably all of them men—founded the Central British Fund for German Jewry (now World Jewish Relief) to raise funds for the refugees from Hitler. But the Central British Fund for German Jewry was bestowing its largesse primarily on the exodus to Palestine and gave only a small amount to the Jewish Refugee Committee (London 2003, 39). The emphasis of much, though not all, of established Jewry was to persuade the British government, and the refugees, of the desirability of Palestine, a heated topic that consumed the Jewish establishment in the 1930s. Moreover, the initial pledge given by the Jewish establishment to the government back in 1933 that no Jewish refugee would become a public charge was based on the assumption that only three to four thousand refugees would be arriving in the UK (Sherman 1994, 266; Wasserstein 1979, 82), as opposed to the fifty-five thousand who had arrived by 1939 at a cost to the Jewish community of around £3 million (Wasserstein 1979, 82). Others, such as London, estimate a higher figure. The two to four thousand figure was not such an out-of-touch underestimate as it now looks because Nazism was not seen in 1933 as primarily concerned with the ‘Jewish question’. Indeed, according to Endelman (2002, 215), before the events of November 1938, there were only eleven thousand refugees altogether in the UK. But as the numbers of refugees swelled,

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the ability or willingness of the Jewish establishment to support them waned—and with it the government’s propensity to allow them in (Sherman 1994, 266; Bolchover 1994, 70). With the outbreak of war and a further threatened influx of refugees, the Jewish refugee organizations decided they could not honour their 1933 commitment to the government that no Jewish refugee would be a drain on the state. A compromise was reached late in 1939 to split the costs fifty/fifty between the voluntary organizations and the government (Wasserstein 1979, 83). Before the war began, these organizations had decided they would have to halt the influx because of their shortage of funds. Sherman (1994, 266) again quotes Colonel Wedgwood, arguing that the restriction in numbers of refugees being admitted, with all its deathly implications for Jews in Europe, was just as much the fault of the Jewish refugee organizations as the government. The Jewish Refugee Committee was far from unequivocally pressing the government to ease its controls. Otto Schiff, the chairperson of the Jewish Refugee Committee, saw his role as limiting the entry of Austrian refugees, complaining to the government in 1938 that too many had been admitted, as he felt that they did not have plausible chances of work or reemigration (London 2003, 82). Schiff, among others in the Jewish leadership, expressed acute concern to the government in 1938 that of the three thousand Austrian refugees on the books of the German Jewish Aid Committee, a mere 10 percent had been officially sponsored prior to admittance to the UK by the German Jewish Aid Committee or the Coordinating Committee. The Jewish leadership cautioned against the government’s further acceptance of any Austrian refugee they had not sponsored, in effect arguing against taking any additional Austrian refugees (Sherman 1994, 156, 157; London 2003, 138). Indeed it was Lord Winterton of the Home Office who cautioned Schiff that some refugees would have to be accepted who had not received the committees’ blessings. Although he had campaigned earlier on, when the refugee crisis was not so acute or evident, for the home secretary to admit children and old people from unoccupied France (Wasserstein 1979, 205), in early 1939 Schiff campaigned against taking people with physical or mental problems (London 2003, 138). The Jewish leaders also reminded the government that there were other victims of Nazism besides the Jews, in an attempt to lessen the specificity of Jewish suffering. They sought to control the entry of Jews to those they had approved, and it was clear that it would only have been with great reluctance that the board would have pursued a policy that would result in a large number of refugees entering the UK (Bolchover 1994, 48, 49). Yet the relative absence of sustained support for the Jewish refugees who did reach the UK’s shores is more notable given how effective the

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existing well-off Jewish community had been in building itself a wide range of support organizations. Indeed, during the War, the Anglo-Jewish establishment collected assiduously for Jews in German-occupied Europe (Bolchover 1994, 67). The splits, even internal warfare, within the community and among its organizations are part of the explanation, which profound disagreements over Zionism and the desirability of settlement in the British mandate of Palestine only exacerbated. Bolchover is one of the historians who argues that the Jewish leadership’s greatest preoccupation and worry was about stirring up anti-Semitism, and this contributed to their attempt to restrict the number of Jewish refugees entering Britain. ‘Anti-alienism’ had been a common feature among the Jewish elite, as we have already seen, and the uncomfortable thought of a conspicuous, alien and obviously Jewish element in society was a distinct factor in the formulation of the community’s policy (Bolchover 1994, 48, 49). Once refugees did arrive, the community’s attitude was ambivalent. Schiff, for example, appears to have supported a view that the refugees needed to stop being so Jewish (Bolchover 1994, 48). This was not unrepresentative: there was a fear that overt displays of Jewish nationalism or internationalism would break what was understood as a contract that had yielded emancipation and could well lead to anti-Semitism, especially among what was perceived as the ‘uneducated masses’ (Bolchover 1994, 48). The Board of Deputies appointed a public relations officer whose main job was to monitor and, when necessary, correct the behaviour of the refugees, admonishing the refugees to be modest and retiring. She approached people in the street who spoke German too loudly and told off café owners who displayed German-language papers. Refugees were urged to learn English and not criticize government policy or take part in political activity (Bolchover 1994, 50). As Bolchover (1994, 50, 51) says, the upshot of such restrictions was that the refugees, who knew what was happening under Nazism, played no part in the Jewish establishment’s responses to Nazism, although the Jewish Chronicle advised the refugees against setting up their own organization. The Anglo-Jewish community went to great lengths to disperse around the country those refugees who did get in. Indeed, the Board of Deputies and the German Jewish Aid Committee jointly produced a leaflet of ‘helpful information’ after the November pogrom and the Anschluss as numbers entering the UK rose (Bolchover 1994, 50). The leaflet was titled Helpful Information and Guidance for Every Refugee, which, fifty years later, my mother still spoke of with scorn, but also as an indication of what life was like in the UK. The pamphlet urged the refugees, or rather the Jewish refugees, to learn English, to speak it properly, to refrain from speaking German in public or reading German literature publically or to ever speak in a loud voice. 9

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The refugee was also advised not to criticize the government or to stand out in any way. They were not to take part in any political activity—a precondition of entry into the UK was nonparticipation in political activities, and breaking these terms could cause a refugee’s expulsion—although, in a few cases, they did. It was not a rule my own parents respected. But a few in the ‘Jewish establishment’ did have a generous approach towards the actual refugees: the Rothschild family gave generously, consistently helped organize support, had the government’s and some civil servants’ ears and even sponsored a few German Jewish refugees. At the same time, the Rothschild family’s assimilationist, non-Zionist position annoyed many in the Jewish establishment (London 2003, 41). Henrietta Franklin, who came from the well-heeled Montagu family, allowed her home to be used as a clearing centre for many Jewish refugees. Franklin, however, had already shown her contentious political colours by her deep involvement in the suffragette movement. As then president of the Board of Deputies Neville Laski pointed out, the new refugees were an asset to the country, cultured, many with professional attainments, unlike the ignorant, uncultured, Yiddish speakers of the 1880s and 1890s (Rosenberg 2011, 17–34). A very different and rare perspective emerged from a prestigious and socialist academic, Harold Laski—not to be confused with his younger brother, Neville—who renounced his Judaism, to his family’s disgust. His argument was that anti-Semitism was a product of class struggle, and the Jews were the first victims of counterrevolution (Bolchover 1994, 48). A quite different form of backing came from the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a grassroots organization that aimed to mobilize support for the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany, beginning in 1941, rather than during the Hitler-Stalin pact (Bolchover 1994, 154). This was an unusual group because it crossed ‘cultural boundaries’. There were always rival positions on how to defeat anti-Semitism on the left: the Communist Party (CP) and fellow traveller’s position was that support for the USSR aided the fight against fascism and, therefore, the fight against anti-Semitism. 10 As London (2003, 130) points out, the campaigns in favour of Jews, the politicals and indeed any other persecuted group were generally distinct. At the end of 2012, the debate as to the reception of Jewish refugees was still alive in the columns of the Journal of the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR). Edith Holden, a first generation refugee, in a letter to the AJR in October 2012 retained a sense of grievance at the lack of assistance given by Anglo-Jewish organizations, which other letters subsequently supported. But Grenville, the editor of the December 2012 AJR issue, along with other contributors, while appreciating Holden’s perspec-

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tive, expressed far more support for the role of the Anglo-Jewish community in the 1930s. His view was that the Anglo-Jewish community had established communal organizations across the UK to provide material aid and financial support, raised money, lobbied the British government, arranged for the admission of refugees and guaranteed their maintenance and later both put pressure on the government to admit children and then found places for Jewish children at hostels and orphanages. Grenville suggests causes for the tensions that he recognized existed: that AngloJewry were concerned that too many refugees could inflame anti-Semitism and that some British Jews found the middle-class character of many of the Jewish refugees unappealing, evident, for example, in the relationship between some refugee women ‘domestics’ and their Jewish sponsors. Grenville’s generous approach to the role of the Jewish establishment is, however, not shared by all analysts.

THE GOVERNMENT’S RESPONSE TO THE REFUGEES, 1933–1940 The background to the government’s generally ungenerous response to the refugees can be understood as a confluence of a variety of historical and ideological factors. The 1920s and 1930s marked a high point in European nation-building and concepts of national identity, from the new nations established by the Versailles Treaty after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to the demands, supported in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, for ‘a home for the Jews’ in Palestine. Moreover, Britain, the nation that had ‘ruled the waves’, was run by many people who had a supremacist view of those they perceived as Other. This view also underlay the Aliens Act with its ideological legacy of casting the refugee as an alien. In addition, a faction of government retained anti-Semitic views, although how far this contributed to the government’s unsympathetic approach to Jewish refugees is controversial. Moreover, however one interprets it, there was a level of popular anti-Semitism, which validated an antirefugee response. These processes coincided with a period of high unemployment, especially among men, and growing activity in support of racist views, examined in the next section. The key work on the responses of the state, though its focus is on Jewish refugees, is London’s Whitehall and the Jews, 1933–1948 (2003, passim). Her position is unambiguous. The government’s policy was consistently to place ‘British interests’ and the need for ‘alien’ controls above humanitarian concerns. 11 London argues that government policy was a product of a contemporary combination of the government’s and the Jew-

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ish establishment’s belief that too many refugees could well incite antiSemitism, their keen desire for the refugees to become anglicized, a concern that the refugees should not live off the public purse and the reality of unemployment. 12 Jewish organizations guaranteed support on the understanding that the refugees’ stay was temporary, not permanent. That might look like a mere matter of words, but it was not. It gave the government and its agents the right to threaten the refugees constantly with withholding renewal for their temporary visas, the right to check their mail and the right to investigate their lives. The extent to which anti-Semitism underlay the government’s decisions is contested. London sees the Jewish establishment’s fear of rousing anti-Semitism as itself an indication of anti-Semitism at the level of the state and civil society. Wasserstein (1979, 351) argues that the British government’s intentions post-1918 to stop Jewish emigration to Palestine had given rise to a view of the Jewish refugee as a problem, but he sees anti-Semitism as only one explanation for the government’s policies. Wasserstein (1979, 351–53) looks to the civil service, in particular the Foreign Office and Colonial Office, and their bureaucratic tardiness as responsible for delays and obstructions in government policies towards refugees. Certainly, there appears to have been a preference for political refugees at this level of government and civil service, as they were seen to have been persecuted for their ideals, while Jews were seen as economic refugees (London 2003, 10). In July 1939, a Foreign Office official claimed that a great many refugees were not political refugees and were therefore quite unsuitable. Although one should not make too much of the influence of the ultraright, anti-immigration Conservative MPs such as Edward Doran, nonetheless, theirs was a constant voice urging the government to prevent the ‘invasion’ of ‘hundreds of thousands’ of alien Jews from Germany ‘scurrying over’ to Britain. Trade unions, the Labour Party and Jewish organizations were all criticized for their ‘soft’ position on Jewish refugees. Indeed, there was a significant pro-Hitler faction in the Tory Party, as represented by Lord Halifax’s sympathetic visit to Hitler on behalf of the British government in November 1937. The mechanisms by which potential refugees were kept out have already been rehearsed, the absence of means being the most significant, a criterion that inevitably excluded thousands upon thousands of people fleeing persecution, home and country (Sherman 1994, 91). The ability to assimilate was another key criterion. But up until 1936, few refugees were refused entry; the government and Jewish officials found ways to accommodate them within existing immigration controls. The assumption remained, however, that, in line with the Aliens Act, the refugees would

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only be residing in the UK temporarily—although in practice reemigration was exceedingly difficult. The country that many refugees wished to reach—the US—had stricter visa requirements than the UK, though it was more feasible if the person was rich and/or had family or business contacts in the US. 13 As potential refugee numbers grew, refugees had to pass increasingly stringent tests to gain admittance to the UK. Whether or not the person would be an asset to Britain was the main criterion for admission. Being a professional or possessing sought-after skills helped. The process of Aryanization was gathering momentum in Germany. Despite the British government being cognizant of the suffering and increasingly hopeless position of the Jews, their response to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 was to tighten immigration rules (London 2003, 16–18). Indeed, the British ambassador to Germany suggested that the intention of the German government was the annihilation of the Jew, an understanding that was rare as early as 1935/1936. Indeed, the British government was well informed. One of the government’s key concerns, however, was to persuade the German government of the right of German Jews to transfer their capital out of Germany, not so much because it was in the refugees’ interests, as to avoid them being a liability for the British government (London 2003, 23). By 1939, an agreement was reached that transit emigrants had to provide evidence to that effect, although children under eighteen and adults over sixty could be granted permission to enter as long as they did not undertake any work and were financially guaranteed. The effect, whether by design or as a by-product, was to keep out working-class foreigners in particular, who did not have contacts and were less able to work the system (Kapp and Mynatt 1997, 25–27).

A variety of plans was mooted by the British government in different international and national bodies. The key international event that Ronnie Landau (1994, 138, 139) has accused of contributing to the circumstances and thinking that opened the door to the Holocaust was the Evian Conference, held in France in July 1938. This was convened at the initiative of Roosevelt, ostensibly to address the plight of the increasing numbers of Jewish refugees, and included representatives from thirty two countries and many private and voluntary organisations. The conference can be seen, according to Landau (1994, 138), drawing on an internal American State Department memorandum, as primarily an attempt to soothe liberal opinion. The US and the UK, the main opinion formers internationally, both rejected the possibility of taking in substantial numbers of refugees. And insofar as any refugees were to be admitted, they needed to fulfil a

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number of stringent requirements. Although aware of opening themselves to criticism from the US and elsewhere, the Colonial Office representatives, speaking ‘on behalf of’ the colonies—though this was contested by some members of Britain’s ‘empire’—informed the conference that very few colonies could take any refugees: Kenya, Tanganyika and Northern Rhodesia offered the ‘least unhopeful prospect’, though Dominica should be encouraged to take some; this was a list that noticeably did not include the nonblack colonies (Sherman 1994, 103, 105). Lord Halifax, the colonial secretary, stated that ‘he could not hold out any hope that the colonial empire would be able to contribute very much to the settlement of the problem’ (Sherman 1994, 105). Only Holland and Denmark in effect agreed to increase their intake. Lord Winterton, the British representative at Evian, is purported to have reported to the cabinet that ‘under instruction from the Sectary of State for Foreign Affairs’ he ‘resisted successfully’ the suggestion from the US that the Evian Conference should denounce Germany’s policies (Landau 1994, 138). Instead, the conference’s memorandum to the German government stated that the UK did not challenge the German government’s right to introduce measures affecting their own subjects (Landau 1994, 138). The Foreign Office’s position was largely that an orderly solution to the refugee problem lay in the hands of the German government (Landau 1994, 113). The British treasury representatives were as unhelpful on matters of funding. They stated that financial assistance to refugees ‘was almost out of the question’ (Sherman 1994, 103). Nor would they subsidize either shipping companies or travel costs (Sherman 1994, 104).

What compounded the difficulties for the refugees was that the Home Office did not have nearly sufficient staff, but the government was loath for the public to see more public money being spent on the refugees (London 2003, 66, 81, 86). As the refugee crisis became even more urgent, the British government imposed far stricter immigration controls on refugees from Austria and Germany, so the need for entry criteria appeared more pressing. Some on the Tory right criticized the National Government for not favouring the political refugee over the Jew. The government, which was insisting that any refugee would only be offered temporary residence, revived the entry requirements necessary to obtain a visa, mandating preselection abroad, something most ‘non-Aryans’ and political dissidents were not going to find easy to do (London 2003, 10).

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In 1938, the Home Office established the Coordinating Committee for Refugees as the main umbrella organization to advise government and coordinate the main relevant charitable and refugee organizations— churches, trade unions and Jewish organizations, including the GermanJewish Aid Committee, of which Lord Schiff was the chairperson, all took part. Lord Hailey, a previous viceroy to India, was chair of the Coordinating Committee. Lord Hailey’s role was not a glorious one—in 1939, he promised to try to avoid bringing would-be refugees to the UK, instead directing them to emigrate elsewhere (London 2003, 158). The committee’s remit was to distribute entry applications to the relevant bodies, advise the government and help refugees to find jobs (London 2003, 216). It helped with correspondence from would-be refugees and visa applications, which, as London argues, meant the government did not then have a systematic record of applications and visas and also protected it from the terrible reality of the would-be refugee’s plight. Indeed, the government did appear to have at least temporarily trusted the Jewish establishment to make the crucial decisions about the refugee situation. In an illuminating exchange with Wedgwood in the House of Commons in 1938, the prime minister stated that the Coordinating Committee for Refugees was a purely voluntary body, not responsible to any government department, and that any communications relating to its work needed to be addressed to the committee directly (House of Commons, ‘Debate 25 May 1938’). At this stage of 1938, the government was making use of the Coordinating Committee to distance itself from the messy business of who was to be let in, and who was to be left to die. The November 1938 pogrom did cause the government to loosen its controls temporarily, partly on the stubborn insistence of the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, despite his anti-Jewish prejudices (London 2003, 20). Indeed, about half of all refugees arrived in the last year before the outbreak of war. The previous tightening of controls had in effect excluded Austrians from entry. Nevertheless, as the demand for entry visas massively increased, the government became ever more drawn back into making the decisions about criteria and refugee numbers. Entry to the UK became increasingly random, as the voluntary committees lost control over numbers and became sidelined. In late 1938, the Coordinating Committee remonstrated with the government that people were being admitted without its say-so (London 2003, 78). The committee was overwhelmed by numbers and administrative muddle, and they said—with reason—that they were at a breaking point under the pressure. But the government was reluctant to provide them with extra funds, and they became of marginal significance. The outbreak of war closed the doors on further entry. Despite an increasing awareness of the Holocaust and some opposition around 1942,

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the National Government, including its Labour ministers, kept the doors closed. No more visas were issued once war had been declared, and even visas that had been already issued were rescinded. As always, a few in the civil service behaved generously. But London, searching for an explanation for the government’s unnecessary restrictions at this point, which, in effect, condemned thousands to death, points the finger at Britain’s imperial history and the ideology of the foreigner as an ‘inferior’ and the Other. Often unobserved, one effect of the government’s criteria was the development of a gender imbalance in the numbers of refugees: significantly more women were allowed entry than men. Moore (1991, 73) quotes the Home Office census of 1944 as showing 21,866 male aliens and 34,856 female aliens, but these figures can only provide an indication of the total numbers and the gender imbalance, for reasons already discussed. This imbalance was largely due to the fact that, as entry criteria became ever more stringent, women had the advantage since they were more likely to get a Ministry of Labour permit to work, either to be nurses or as maids, jobs that still had vacancies. Kushner (1991) is one of the few to draw attention to the significance of gender in analysing the government’s entry criteria. The decision to admit about twenty thousand refugees—a significant minority of total admissions—as domestic servants was more to do with satisfying the demand for domestic labour in middle-class households than a humanitarian gesture (Kushner 1991, 554–67). Some of these women had previously held professional or semiprofessional jobs (Moore 1991, 72). Most had never done work like this before. Indeed, there were sufficient complaints about poor workmanship from Jewish employers to encourage the Coordinating Committee to try to insist it should have more control over who was granted entry. The refugee servants were often badly treated, badly paid and unhappy. There were also about 180 trained and 840 partially trained refugee nurses in the UK (Moore 1991, 72, 73). Refugee men, on the other hand, were much more likely to be seen as in competition with the millions of British unemployed skilled and semiskilled men; unless they were lucky enough to fall into the government category of being able to build up an enterprise that could provide work in areas of high unemployment, offer some form of specialist academic or professional skill or if they were willing to become agricultural labourers, all areas where there was a shortage of suitable labour power. Some sections of the Jewish German merchant class had had business links to Britain for many years, which could help them gain rights of entry and even residence. 14 Moore (1991, 73) suggests another underlying reason for the lower number of male refugees is the number of refugees who signed up for the armed forces—almost ten thousand.

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One last example of the government’s position on refugees is taken from the time when the refugees were already living in the UK. Internment, the rounding up of mostly Jewish ‘enemy aliens’, which occurred in 1940 after the outbreak of war, was not, according to Kapp and Mynatt (1997), incidental, but fuelled by the prevalent British attitude towards foreigners and Jews. It was the culmination of the government’s policy of tight restrictions on immigrants: on residence, employment and political activities and their stated intent that the refugees should reemigrate, which the government pursued despite the consequent loss to the economy (Kapp and Mynatt 1997, 28–30). The Jewish elite did not challenge the need for or reality of internment. According to Kapp and Mynatt (1997, 90), altogether there were 573 ‘A’ aliens: people with Nazi sympathies or causing suspicion to be interned; 6,691 ‘Bs’: not sufficiently trustworthy who could be interned; and 64,324 ‘Cs’: unrestricted freedom. Internment brought with it still unrecognized misery, but it was a far more random affair than is often presented. The tribunals were sometimes particularly unjust to socialist or Communist refugees who appeared before them—despite their impeccable anti-Nazi credentials. For example, Jürgen Kuczynski, a prominent resistance figure in the KPD in Germany until 1936, which alone was cause for the tribunal’s suspicions, was harshly interrogated and then interned (Brinson 1997, x, xi). Some left-wing refugees were asked whether they would be willing to take up arms against the USSR as a criterion for whether they would be interned. The underground opposition to the Nazis was at times equated with underworld crime. The rules were sufficiently opaque and the tribunals on occasion sufficiently reactionary that over a quarter in category A were well-known anti-Nazis (Kapp and Mynatt 1997, 86–91). But even the threat of internment had its psychological consequences, especially acute on people who had just escaped Nazism. Internment gathered momentum following a ‘fifth column’ panic after the failure of the Allied Norwegian campaign in April 1940 when Germany succeeded in taking over Norway and after Germany had occupied France in May 1940. Thirty thousand ‘enemy aliens’ were rounded up and sent to a variety of camps across the UK, often for a few months only, though in some cases for far longer. The first releases of internees took place in August 1940, following an outcry in Parliament. By February 1941, more than ten thousand had been freed, and by the following summer, only five thousand were left in internment camps. Many of those released from internment subsequently contributed to the war effort. Wasserstein estimates that some sixty thousand refugees, the majority, were left at liberty and never interned (1979, 85). That many of the ‘enemy aliens’ were Jewish refugees—in one camp, around 80 percent—and therefore hardly

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likely to be sympathetic to the Nazis was a complication no one in the government bothered to try and unravel. The circumstances of internment varied—my mother said of her time interned on the Isle of Man that it was like a cross between a holiday camp and attending university. But even she, like most others, had her contact with the external world through visits or letters, heavily circumscribed, which deeply affected some exiles who had only recently escaped Nazism. She, along with other anti-Nazis, also felt uneasy about having fascists—who had been rounded up with rather more reason— sharing her living quarters, even though there were comparatively few of them. And other internees had far a worse time of it. The government’s proposal, unfortunately implemented in part, to send to Canada or Australia the internees who were defined as posing the most danger to national security sharply heightened other internees’ worries; more than seven thousand internees were deported. 15 The internees were far more likely to be so defined because they were Communists rather than Jews. It is simplistic to see internment as proof of government anti-Semitism. This was a move, even if unnecessary, to round up enemy Germans, not Jews. Yet Wasserstein is not alone in suggesting that this controversial policy can be interpreted as revealing some level of antiSemitism in the ranks of the government and civil service. 16 Wasserstein, in a still well-respected study, argues that despite the appearance of welcome, government policy towards the Jewish exiles lacked generosity. There were, he writes, flashes of humanity, but the benevolence of a few officials and politicians was overwhelmed by others’ indifference, even once news of the Holocaust became well known. Kushner (1994, 163–208) too argues that the illiberal character of Nazism, especially once the extent of Nazi violence was fully recognized, could not penetrate the liberal imagination. Wasserstein rejects conscious anti-Semitism as the key explanation for the government’s failure to act more positively, rather explaining such behaviour in terms of the strategic realities of war, collective paranoia, war hysteria, xenophobia and a limited imagination.

THE GROWING ACCEPTABILITY OF ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE RISE OF THE ANTIFASCIST MOVEMENT Although there had not been an organized racist presence in Britain since before the First World War, the European groundswell towards ‘national socialism’ also penetrated British society. As previously suggested, it had a fertile bed in which to grow—the latent anti-Semitism of sections of the

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ruling class, the abiding popular dislike of the ‘Bosch’ since the days of the First World War, a ‘Little Englandism’ with its roots in Britain’s ‘ruling of the waves’ over its imperial empire and an associated ideology of the ‘black man’—indeed almost anybody who did not have white British skin—as an inferior. The eugenics movement in Britain had drawn on those from the left as well as the right on the political spectrum. It was during the years 1934–1937 when the concept of the Jew as ‘different’ and anti-Jewish incidents became increasingly prevalent. Anti-Semitism was growing as a political movement. The growth of the fascist movement in the UK arguably represented the most severe anti-Semitic threat for many centuries. Particularly in the East End of London, a spate of ‘Jew-bating’ had broken out. But AngloJewry did not have a tradition of organizing separately against anti-Semitism, and the Board of Deputies’ philosophy was low-profile, behind-thescenes negotiations and a policy of placing trust in the British traditions of liberal tolerance (Endelman 2002, 171). They were also, as we have already seen, not keen on too many new poor Jews, especially from Eastern Europe, whom they saw as broadly part of the working class, sharing its outlook and culture (Endelman 2002, 171, 172). They did not want to make a fuss or draw attention to themselves, especially, one can surmise, when it would be on behalf of another class of people altogether (Endelman 2002, 257–70). Lebzelter (1978, 138–43) similarly argues that the board, with its assimilationist outlook, was desperate to avoid the ‘public display of Jewishness’ that communal defence would entail, and was therefore reluctant to combat anti-Semitism. Although it eventually established what came to be known as the Jewish Defence Committee, Lebzelter argues that the board did so to alleviate intracommunal pressure and to prevent the appropriation of defence work by independent Jewish groups. Even then, it emphasized that it opposed only anti-Semitism, not fascism per se. Thus the Jewish leadership’s failure to respond created a political vacuum when it came to combatting the growing strength of the British Union of Fascists. The British Union of Fascists (BUF), established in October 1932 by Oswald Mosley, had a growing presence over the following years and produced a variety of journals and pamphlets, which they distributed widely. Its significance is inevitably disputed, but for Jewish people, refugees and left-wingers living in the East End of London, its presence was significant. Initially not explicitly anti-Jewish, Mosley chose a rally at the Olympia in October 1934 to ratchet up his Jew-baiting. 17 Even the government was increasingly concerned. The BUF campaigned largely in the socially and economically distressed areas of 1930s Britain, highlighting the plight of the country’s nearly three million unemployed, whose

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jobs they falsely claimed had been taken by the three million Jews in Britain; however, I am not aware that they specifically targeted the new refugees. In fact, the actual number of Jews residing in Britain at that time was less than four hundred thousand, many of whom were themselves unemployed, among a population of forty-five million (Rosenberg 2011, 17–34). The BUF also used street violence, emulating the Nazis: uniformed members of the BUF marched through the East End, sang Nazi songs, smashed windows of Jewish shops and daubed anti-Semitic slogans on buildings, including on a synagogue (Endelman 2002, 203). Ironically, despite the ferocity of its antialien statements, small elements of the Jewish communal leadership associated themselves with the BUF, as they had previously with the British Brothers’ League, a precursor to Mosley’s fascists in the early twentieth century (Rosenberg 2011, 17–34). The peak of organized anti-Semitism was the events of 1936, which culminated in the Cable Street riots when an alliance of the local Jewish community—almost all working class or artisan—aligned itself with local Communists to beat back Mosley’s fascists. This cooperation should not be taken for granted. The East End had generally been the site of strong racist opinion since the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as of intercommunal rivalries, and this alliance marked a significant coming together. The fascists were attempting to march through the East End and claim it as ‘theirs’ (Rosenberg 2011, 17–34). The ‘indigenous’ working class stood with the Jews against the fascists. The Battle of Cable Street marked the high point of the fascist advance in the UK and its attempt to recruit from poor, unemployed and working-class areas—as had occurred in Germany. Its demise had more to do with the grassroots opposition than with any ‘official’ position, which, at least as expressed by the Jewish Chronicle, was at best ambiguous about such guerrilla tactics, especially when aligned with Communists (Rosenberg 2011, 17–34). There is an alternative recent interpretation that derives from right-wing revisionist British historians’ wish to reclaim Cable Street: taking on the fascists was a boost for the BUF, encouraged anti-Semitism and detracted from the struggle against it (Tilles 2013). The Communist Party in the East End in the 1930s was deeply involved in mobilizing for antifascist activities in association with other organizations and grew significantly in influence—the Stepney branch alone, most of whose members were Jewish, had around 500 members plus 250 Young Communists by 1939 (Endelman 2002, 208). Another significant reason for the success of the Communist Party among the Jewish population at the time was that the other organizations such as the Labour Party and the Board of Deputies were not involved in protecting or mobilizing against the BUF in the East End. Phil Piratin’s success, first

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as a CP councillor in Stepney in 1937, then as the CP MP for the East End constituency of Spitalfields East in 1945, was a consequence of the CP’s antifascist credentials. What is also revealed is the profound confusion of the Board of Deputies, who attributed the growth of anti-Semitism as much to what they perceived as the vulgar, ostentatious and unpatriotic behaviour of the local Jews as to the impact of Mosley’s ‘un-English’ intolerance (Endelman 2002, 209, 210). The board also believed, in an argument that is still familiar, that to confront anti-Semitism was to give it attention and therefore to encourage it. Their compromise was to establish a Defence Committee to chart anti-Semitic activity and to encourage a more positive attitude to Jews through, for example, unofficially leafleting the election candidates for the 1936 election—but there was no way to connect the leaflets to the Defence Committee (Bolchover 1994, 46). The board also initiated a campaign to persuade Jews born in the UK to behave more like ‘Englishmen’ and to stamp out illegal or supposedly unpopular Jewish behaviour (Bolchover 1994, 47). The heterogeneity of the ‘Jewish community’ was not well reflected in its established institutions, which supposedly sought to command the unified support of Britain’s Jews against organized anti-Semitism (Rosenberg 2011,17–34). Indeed, establishment Jewry felt little affinity with the working-class Jewish activists of the East End, some of whom were socialists or anarchists. Working-class Jews also often were not inclined towards support or involvement in many of the regular Jewish organizations. Although the Workers Circle retained strong religious affiliations, many young working-class people in the East End absorbed trade union traditions and distanced themselves from the synagogues and even became ‘secularists’ in some cases. The Jewish People’s Council against Fascism and Anti-Semitism (JPCAF), a coalition of many varied Jewish groups, was established as a response to the board’s perceived fearfulness and ineffectiveness towards the threat of the Mosley’s Blackshirts. Much of this pressure on the Board of Deputies emanated from East London, where the Jewish community experienced Blackshirt provocation firsthand. The Jewish People’s Council against Fascism and Anti-Semitism represented a popular defence organization whose activities appealed to young, working-class Jews far more than did the Deputies’ official line. It regularly physically confronted the Blackshirts in the East End and was instrumental in the antiBUP coalition that resulted in Cable Street, which won them much local support. Its militancy infuriated the board, who urged Jews to avoid confronting anti-Semites directly and who saw the JPCAF as confronting fascism, rather than anti-Semitism exclusively—and with some reason (Endelman 2002, 212). 18 The refugees from Nazism were coming into a

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country where the official Jewish leadership had been badly discredited, the Jewish movement was profoundly split and the left had gained considerable credibility as antifascist. But the fascist movement was far from dead after Cable Street, and the increasing numbers of refugees seeking entry as a result of the Anschluss in Austria, followed by the 1938 November pogrom in Germany, further revealed the limitations of the Board of Deputies’ responses and played to their overwhelming fears that more refugees meant more anti-Semitism. The fascist movement also gave scope to Nazi sympathizers, such as Lord Londonderry, a leading appeaser among the aristocracy, who argued that Jews, for whom he had ‘no great affection’, were always to be found at the centre of all havoc (Kershaw 2004, 228–30). But a ‘softer’ form of racism could be found in many newsrooms and professional bodies. The Daily Express and Daily Mail both campaigned for appeasement and against the refugees, whom they presented in terms of many of the wellused caricatures, moreover suggesting that the British Isles were being swamped by hundreds of thousands of these people, many of whom were stealing British jobs (Sherman 1994, 217). A typical Daily Express leader on 24 March 1938 was ‘Shall All Come In?’ followed by the suggestion that Britain was going to be inundated by Jewish refugees from all over Western and Eastern Europe (Sherman 1994, 217). Even the Observer, a more left-leaning paper, argued that a mass influx might lead to increased anti-Semitism (Sherman 1994, 124–26). In 1940, sections of the British press, such as the Daily Mail, began an aggressive campaign against German refugees. All Germans were bad Germans (Brinson 1997, xii). It is too easy to assume that the British fascists were inevitably defeated. It is worth asking what the significance of the rise and brief but successful mobilization of the British Union of Fascists was. Did they just represent a lunatic fringe or, as Kushner (1990, 143–60) suggests, did they reflect a more broadly held view of the Jew as ‘the Other’ in popular thinking and reveal the hidden ideological hold of anti-Semitism? Kushner, opposing the view that downplays the existence of anti-Semitism in the UK during the 1930s and 1940s, and in a position similar to that articulated earlier by Williams, suggests that despite their abhorrence of Nazi barbarities, liberal and conservative thinking before and reactions during the war were built on anti-Semitic assumptions: they expected the Jew to assimilate in return for the tolerance proffered by the government and civil society. Anti-Semitism therefore came to be viewed as the Jew’s own responsibility, an analysis Kushner refers to as ‘liberal or assimilationist anti-Semitism’ (Kushner 1990, 145). From that perspective, the BUF’s relative success was in part because there was an ideological seedbed within which it could grow.

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The refugees were entering a society in which much opinion was, if not hostile or actively anti-Semitic or antirefugee, not sympathetic either.

STRANGER IN A FOREIGN LAND Many exiles did not feel welcomed or at home in the UK. To quote from one of my mother’s published poems, they were ‘Strangers in a Foreign Land’, a phrase that reappears in her writings. In a similar vein, the title of an anthology of her poetry is Heart in Transit. The British poet W. H. Auden (2003) in his poem ‘Refugee Blues’ poignantly describes refugee experiences. Despite many of the refugees’ profound sense of being aliens in the UK, the Board of Deputies, as opposed to the Jewish refugee organizations that have already been discussed, did not see their role as campaigning for visas or providing much of a ‘refuge’ for the refugees once in the UK, but rather as trying to anglicize the refugees as fast as possible. According to Bolchover (1994, 51), none of the Jewish refugees made it into the hierarchy of Anglo-Jewry. Local Jewish support organizations were set up in a variety of towns (Moore 1991, 75). But attempts to establish separate organizations were met with disapprobation (Bolchover 1994, 51). A few ‘national’ refugee organizations were established, for example, the Austrian Cultural Centre, which was an active and effective group, and the Free German League of Culture, which had been founded shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War to represent the cultural traditions of the refugees from Germany in Britain. However, the most active of these organizations were generally Communists, able to organize under the aegis of a cultural association. A split-off organization, Club 1943, was established by a group of predominantly Jewish refugee intellectuals at the beginning of 1943. It provided a forum for cultural and political discussion and only stopped functioning in 2011. It was a product of some of the members’ disagreement with the Communist influence on the Free German League of Culture and its pro-Soviet position. Some organizations worked hard for the refugees. The Society of Friends—or Quakers—worked hard for German refugees and many people owe their lives to the Quakers’ selfless activities (Sherman 1994, 26). Moreover, they kept a watchful eye on ‘their refugees’ in the UK and stopped instances of abuse of refugee ‘domestics’ by their employers (Seabrook 2009, 79). Other church groups also became involved to a lesser degree. The Labour Party and the Trades Union Council both engaged in relief work for political exiles of all hues, and Victor Gollancz,

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best known for the Left Book Club, publicized and campaigned against the anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime from early on. Only a few MPs took up the cudgel for the refugees. Wedgwood campaigned steadily for the refugees. In the Commons in 1938 and 1939, he spoke to draw attention to the persecution of Jews in Czechoslovakia, the plight of Polish Jews and urged the adoption of refugee children in the UK, although this was technically illegal. As early as February 1933, after the Nazis had taken over, Wedgwood wanted the Aliens Act relaxed to allow Marxists in from Germany and was told by Gilmour, the Conservative home secretary, that this was not in the public interest (Sherman 1994, 27, 28). On the other hand, another Conservative, Harold Macmillan, a postwar prime minister, was one of a tiny number of Tory MPs who campaigned on behalf of the refugees, even sheltering forty Czech refugees in his house in Sussex (Wasserstein 1979, 10). Eleanor Rathbone was another of the handful of actively supportive MPs. She came from an affluent and Quaker background; Quaker values influenced her towards philanthropy (Cohen 2013, n.p.). In 1929, she became the Independent nonconstituency MP for seven English universities, though Oxford and Cambridge had separate representation. She became a tireless and exceptional campaigner beginning as early as April 1933, making herself most unpopular with all hues of politicians in the process. Even during the war years she campaigned for more refugees to be given visas to enter the UK, and in the 1940s, she campaigned against the cruelty of internment. Several voluntary funds were launched for Czech refugees, including the Lord Mayor of London’s Fund in September 1938, and by the Trades Union Congress, the Labour Party, the News Chronicle and the Manchester Guardian. This indicates that a significant level of British society was willing to give money in support of the refugees (Kapp and Mynatt 1997, 37; Cohen 2011, 2). The Labour Party MP David Grenfell, alongside Rathbone, tried to secure visas from Britain to get the politicals out of Czechoslovakia (Cohen 2011, 3). Local relief committees, some of which had been set up in response to the plight of the refugees from the Spanish Civil War, collected money or even provided homes, all signs that the British public was more supportive of the refugees than the British government (Kapp and Mynatt 1997, 38, 39). Yvonne Kapp, coauthor of British Policy and the Refugees, was also heavily involved in relief work and offered accommodation in her own home, including to the German artist John Heartfield. She first worked full time for the Jewish Refugees Committee. Then she was assistant to the director of the British Committee to Refugees from Czechoslovakia and secured jobs for hundreds of Czech refugees. But along with her coauthor, Margaret Mynatt, who was head of Tribunals for the Czech

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Refugee Trust Fund from 1938 to 1941, she was dismissed from her post by the Home Office in 1940. Kapp and Mynatt saw this as the government victimizing them as a result of the Soviet–German pact (Brinson 1997, xv, xvii). One figure who passed through Britain on his way to preeminence in the US and who gave support to this cause was Albert Einstein. At a meeting at the Albert Hall in London on 3 October 1933, Einstein addressed an audience of ten thousand people. William Beveridge, later Lord Beveridge, the founder of the Academic Assistance Council and the economist after whom the later Beveridge Report was named, had been instrumental in setting up the event. Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics and, along with Einstein, one of the leading physicists of the twentieth century, also spoke at the event. Einstein wished to raise money for refugees and for the Academic Assistance Council and urged the British government to extend British citizenship to more people wishing to flee Nazism. Being political refugees did have some limited advantages. Though barred from political involvement in the UK, they had become refugees because of their own principles, rather than primarily being the subject or ‘victim’ of a eugenicist ideology. Once in the UK, many could get in touch with previous political allies and be part of some sort of political network. In their study of 1940, Kapp and Mynatt (1997, 5, 6) distinguish between refugees of many political hues who had actively opposed Hitler and understood what they stood for and why they had to flee and the many Jews who were ‘so innocent’ that they perceived exile as a purely individual tragedy. But this was a small advantage, and my parents are telling examples of the loneliness incurred when one falls out with a small coterie of past ‘comrades’. For academics, on the initiative of Lord Beveridge, there was the Academic Assistance Council (AAC), which was to become the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL), closely linked to the government and which provided a safety raft. 19 The AAC helped about one thousand academics, mostly from Germany, but acted only for already qualified academics of high repute who were seen as likely to contribute positively to Britain, almost all of whom were men. Rutherford (2009, 37, 38) provided the figurehead. Seabrook suggests that the AAC was not nearly as interventionist as it could have been. But with the agreement of the government—though on the basis it would not cost the government anything—the AAC did approach universities to employ refugees. This was not always successful. Seabrook’s (2009, 66, 67) clear implication was that one cause was anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, the prestigious University of Oxford and the London School of Economics (LSE) did take on refugee staff. Beveridge, according to Seabrook (2009,

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66), emphasized the non-Jewish character both of the AAC and of many of the people they were assisting. Many if not most refugee academics, including my father, arrived in the UK and gained academic jobs without any support from the society. Nevertheless, those who succeeded in entering academic circles did fare relatively well, and some achieved eminent academic careers (Seabrook 2009, 35, 37–39). Although the accelerating repression in Germany caused some relaxation by the SPSL towards potential refugee academics, Seabrook presents these organizations as examples of the national insecurity felt towards refugees, even when they could have easily been seen as an asset to the UK. On the other hand, about a third of all Austrian and German male refugees were industrialists, whom the government often welcomed. Of the three hundred manufacturing companies established by refugees by February 1939, some with government subsidies, two-thirds were in depressed areas, offering employment (Seabrook 2009, 57). Kapp and Mynatt (1997, 30), referring to Sir Norman Angel’s pro-refugee work, suggest some entrepreneurs had been allowed to set up in Wales and the North East as they offered work to the unemployed. Referring to Sir John Hope Simpson’s survey on refugees, Kapp and Mynatt (1997, 30) estimate that twenty thousand refugees altogether officially held jobs in 1938. As Moore (1991, 74) states, except for the refugees from Eastern Europe who already had a kinship network in the UK that they could contact, many of the refugees arrived not knowing anybody and often almost penniless. This encouraged a concentration in London and, indeed, initially in its northern and northwestern boroughs, famously in Hampstead, which subsequently drew other refugees to it as community networks started to provide support. Indeed, this concentration drew a comment from Lord Schiff in 1939 that he thought he would find it preferable if there were not such a concentration of Jews in one place (Moore 1991, 74). Kapp and Mynatt (1997, 16, 17) describe the appalling daily misery of many refugees: ‘Before one had turned the corner of the street the waiting throng of refugees [outside refugee organizations was such] one had to fight one’s way in at the door . . . the multitude of desperate petitioners stood waiting—for news, for help, for advice, for something that would give them hope.’ They hunted passport officials and news from home, and the next temporary permit. ‘In many cases suicide presented itself as the easier way out’ (Kapp and Mynatt 1997, 17). Seabrook refers to an article by Hedwig Born, a specialist in quantum mechanics who corresponded regularly with Einstein, about living in Britain. She praised the fresh air of the democracy but said, ‘Homesickness averted my heart and eyes from anything new. Everything was so

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different’ (Seabrook 2009, 36). Some refugees felt unwanted. Their previous assimilation in Germany heightened their awareness of being outsiders in Britain. Hobsbawm (2002, 87, 88) felt Britain to be a boring place after Berlin, bound by ritual and tradition. My Berliner parents also never got over what they perceived as the general cultural ignorance and absence of intellectual curiosity, even among those they met in academic circles. Some academic exiles felt keenly their loss of status. Many who arrived in the UK moved on, most commonly to the US; for others that was only a dream. Most either did not intend to come to the UK or did not intend to stay (Moore 1991, 76). To take a midway point, from January to March 1936, a total of 14,828 Germans landed in the UK, but 12,639 reembarked. Of the little group of left-wing German exiles, almost all some sort of academic, that my father was involved with, a good proportion moved on to the US, which is indeed where my parents wished to go. Behind this desire, though never stated, lay my parents’ fear that Germany would succeed in invading Britain, a fear held by many refugees, Jewish and non-Jewish (Seabrook 2009, 40, 41). The British government made little attempt to hold onto outstanding scientific, medical and academic professionals (Seabrook 2009, 63–65). Nonetheless, by halfway through the war, almost all refugees had secured employment of some sort (Moore 1991, 79). In line with the theme of this book, Seabrook brings out the unwillingness of the refugees to look back once settled in the UK. He writes: ‘In some cases, hurt is covered by the most rigorous silence. The clean break, the refusal to look back, represented a kind of emotional self-cauterization’ (Seabrook 2009, 69). Seabrook (2009, 69) suggests that part of the pain of exile may have been dimmed by a high commitment to work, which was ‘sometimes a self-anaesthetizing balm to psychic wounds’. Seabrook (2009, 71) also refers to ‘emotional elusiveness’ and ‘cutting off’. He tells about how the first generation would only talk in the most general terms to their second generation children. The shadows of death danced about the living. The son of Otto Frisch, a famous physicist, writes of his father that, having written a record, his father stated he would never talk of the concentration camp again—and he never did (Seabrook 2009, 69). Seabrook asked Gustav Born, a professor of pharmacology, about his father, Max Born, who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics and had fled Germany in 1933. In 1954 Max Born finally received the Nobel Prize in physics. Gustav Born stated, ‘If they [Jews] remained silent, it was because they could not give voice to the unspeakable’ (Seabrook 2009, 71). Born also said that for the exiled scientific community, their work became the object of their desires. Moreover, the British ruling class’s reticence to complain, the

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famed ‘stiff upper lip’, which influenced a British way of being, chimed well with the refugees’ need for silence. What also is striking about this analysis and these stories is that they have largely been about men. Seabrook’s prism—a concern for refugees who contributed to Britain—partly explains this. Women refugees generally were not nearly as successful as men, but why? The reality is that the largest single group of refugee women, many middle class, who were admitted to the UK were admitted as domestic servants, and a few as nurses, because that was how to get into Britain, and any way into Britain was better than none. 20 There must be other explanations; for example, the desire to start again and have a family, which will have limited many women in a way that it did not limit men. In addition, once the war was over, the government’s aim was to encourage all women in Britain to leave their jobs and return to the hearth, to make way for the ‘returning male heroes’ and become ‘domestic goddesses’. But the position of the women exiles appears to be an underresearched area worthy of more attention. Hearing the voices of the refugees from this time is not as easy as it sounds. Even in the pages of the Journal of the Association of Jewish Refugees, founded in 1941, which is where I expected to find contemporary records, what one largely finds are second-hand accounts, though there are exceptions. The actual refugees generally did not want to speak out at the time. 21 With contemporary accounts, one enters into the very real issue of the accuracy of hindsight, although, again, this is not the place for an in-depth review of this subject. Certainly, Grenville and Lewkowicz’s study of Jewish refugees in the UK, based on hundreds of interviews, did not find that the now settled Jewish refugees felt they had experienced anti-Semitism (Association of Jewish Refugees, Refugee Voices). Grenville, who tends to the position that anti-Semitism is not seen as being as prevalent as do some commentators, analysed the pages of the Association of Jewish Refugees Journal for the years immediately after the war. He argues that, far from Britain being a hotbed of antiSemitism, virtually all the refugees broadly depicted Britain as tolerant and welcoming, though this was many years after they had arrived there (Grenville 2002b, 199–211). 22 An additional difficulty has been that an academic concern with hearing the voices of the exiles only generally emerged as the refugees were growing old and dying. This work’s concern is with a private silence, rather than the much debated issues surrounding how long and of what type were public silences about the Holocaust and its effects. 23 The first generation, the parents of the second generation, lived through a time in the UK where the vocabulary that is now in common use, such as Holocaust, trauma and survivor, had not yet come into common parlance. They not only did

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not wish to dip into these turbulent emotional waters, but they also did not have a ready language to do so. The increasing popularity of the ‘Holocaust’ in both the academic and popular imagination from the 1970s, and particularly from the 1990s, provides a context for the construction by the second generation participants, interviewed in 2011, of their parents as silent. For private silences to be broken and articulation to be possible, a certain language and set of concepts are needed. Therefore, the historical conjuncture provides the context in which the first generation talked or did not talk about their and their parents’ lives to their second generation ‘children’. I am only taking this sketch up to 1939/1940 as the concern of this study is with the second generation whose parents arrived before the outbreak of war. The war marks a historical break. After the crisis of internment in 1940, the government introduced no new measures directed specifically at the existing refugees. Moreover, once the appeasers in the cabinet under Chamberlain had been displaced by a clearly anti-Nazi coalition government under Churchill, refugees increasingly felt a security in the UK and no longer had a sense that they were in the UK temporarily. That the refugees would feel safe staying in the UK once the war was close to being won is not the same as saying that they might not have wanted to return to their country of origin, and the question remains as to why most stayed in the UK. But return to what? As will be seen from the testimonials, all the participants had lost some, if not almost all, of their family. Even the political parents’ families had been decimated. Some never wanted to have anything more to do with Germany. Moreover, by the end of the war most men had made a new start in the UK. But there was a difference with Communist families, many of whom did return to Germany—which was, until 1948, both a united country and a shattered one. There appears to have been some sense of the possibility of building a new and democratic Germany. Maybe, to an incalculable degree, those who returned to build a Communist or Social Democratic socialism were just more optimistic. But most refugees developed a hope and expectation of settling in the UK and a sense of their future in British society, which, as explored in subsequent sections, framed their responses to their second generation children. It has not been possible—nor was it my aim—to go into any detail on the experiences of the first generation refugees who did make it to Britain and settled here permanently. Nor is it possible to reach an uncontroversial conclusion on what they encountered here. Experiences were different according to a variety of variables—the refugees’ gender; their previous and present occupation; whether they were Jewish, political or both; whether they became involved in the antifascist struggle in the UK;

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where they lived; whether they had family in the UK and whether they already had a community to become a part of or even disappear into. Mine is not a study of how the first generation affected their second generation children, but in this section, I suggest one can catch a glimpse of the backgrounds into which the British second generation were born and grew up.

NOTES 1. All the figures in this paragraph are drawn from this source. 2. The figures are drawn from the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, which are produced in a variety of tables, including ‘Particulars of Alien Passengers (Excluding Transmigrants) Landed in the UK, Classified according to Nationality’, that is, country of origin; figures from this table will be referred to in the text as HofCPPi. A separate table shows ‘Number of Alien Passengers . . . Landed, Embarked and Refused Leave to Land in the UK . . . Classified according to Nationality’, which will be referred to in the text as HofCPPii. The figures in HofCPPi provide a breakdown into ‘residents returning’, ‘in transit’, ‘visitors’, ‘diplomats’, ‘seamen’, those with ‘Ministry of Labour permits to work’ and ‘other aliens’. Presently, it does not appear to be possible to distinguish under which category the refugees entered the UK or for what reasons, an area that could do with further research. The figures in HofCPPii provide a monthly breakdown of the numbers of nationals landing, (re)embarking and refusing leave to land. 3. Wasserstein’s study is concerned with policy on the edge of the period this study focuses on but is still of use. 4. Endelman argues that the absence of legal restrictions on immigrants and ‘aliens’ at the beginning of the twentieth century (and prior to the 1906 Aliens Act) had been partly because of the particularities of the British state. The British state played a less central part in civil society than in some European states, which in turn had lessened the status of Jewish immigrants being problematized (Endelman 2002, 161). One further cause of assimilation, Edelman suggests, is that compared to the US or much of pre-Nazi Europe, the percentage of the Jewish population in Britain was very small. Moreover, British society before 1939 was relatively homogeneous, which, combined with a relatively low level of adherence to more orthodox Judaic cultural or religious ideas in the UK— unlike in the European cultural milieu—made life beyond the Jewish community appear more attractive in the UK (Endelman 2002, 166–69). Unlike in much of Europe, anti-Semitism was generally not part of the official ideology of rightwing parties. 5. Many private clubs, some smart restaurants and boarding houses, private schools and even some universities and professions discouraged Jews or had more or less formal quotas, which was in effect a form of ‘cultural anti-Semitism’ (Endelman 2002, 199), a pattern that arguably did not disappear until the

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1970s or even later. Endelman also highlights the imagery created of the Jew as ‘different’ in much establishment and popular literature, listing T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, H. G. Wells, John Buchan, Rudyard Kipling and Agatha Christie, among others (200). Eliot wrote in After Strange Gods in section 19, ‘more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable’. I owe this example to Ian Birchall (http://archive.org/stream/afterstrangegods00eliouoft/ afterstrangegods00eliouoft_djvu.txt). 6. The historiography of the period from the early 1900s to 1939 and its approach to the existence of anti-Semitism has to be viewed partly in terms of historians’ diverging discourses: whether Britain was a welcoming and tolerant nation—similar to the assimilationist position of the Anglo-Jewish establishment—the position ‘race’ was seen as having in British politics or whether Britain was an imperialist nation. Daniel Glover argues that historians who emphasize the prevalence of anti-Semitism at the beginning of the twentieth century could be doing so within a political paradigm that justifies the Zionist movement, which was gathering force at the time. He also suggests that this emphasis in more recent historical writings is used to justify the contemporary Zionist project (Glover 2012, 161, 162; 2013). A distinction also needs to be made between institutionalized anti-Semitism and an active popular anti-Semitism, as seen in many European countries prior to and under Nazism. There had indeed only been two instances of organized and popular anti-Semitism between 1900 and 1939: the British Brothers League, founded in 1902 in the East End of London to campaign against Jewish immigration and for ‘England for the English’, and the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s. Thus, though the influence of these organizations should never be underestimated, I suggest that they were the exception. 7. The Board of Deputies of British Jews is the main body recognized as representing British Jews. A standing committee was first established in 1760; the different organizations appear to have united in the early nineteenth century. 8. See Workers Circle Friendly Society Records 1909–1984, http://www. nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/records.aspx?cat=084-ds61&cid=0#0. 9. Helpful Information and Guidance for Every Refugee was published in January 1939 by the German-Jewish Aid Committee in conjunction with the British Board of Deputies (Endelman 2002, 216; interviews with Lotte Moos, n.d.). 10. By ‘fellow traveller’, I mean somebody who has a broad sympathy with the aims of the Communist Party and is influenced by them but is not, and possibly would not become, a member. 11. In 1931, a minority Labour government under Prime Minister MacDonald had fallen and been replaced by a National Government. Ramsey MacDonald was still the prime minister (PM), but the Conservatives held the majority of cabinet positions. In 1935, Stanley Baldwin, a Conservative, took over as PM and in the General Election of November 1935, the National Government were reelected with a now clear Conservative majority. Neville Chamberlain took over

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in May 1937, to be replaced by Churchill once war had begun, heading another National Government; the cabinet included a minority of Labour MPs. 12. One suggestion is that the government’s appeasement policy towards the Nazis acted to curtail their inclination to be generous to those fleeing the Nazis. 13. Although this study does not pretend to be comparing the UK and the US, ‘a reasonable estimate of the overall number of such [Jewish] aliens [into the US] for the years 1933 to 1940 would be between 20,000 and 30,000’ (Perkins et al. 2001). 14. A great-uncle of mine was granted British citizenship in the mid-1930s because he had been visiting here as a businessman over the years. He was then able to bring over a few chosen relatives as so-called business associates under a business visa. 15. The liner Arandora Star left for Canada on 1 July 1940 carrying German and Italian internees. It was torpedoed and sunk with a loss of 714 lives. Others being taken to Australia on the Dunera, which sailed a week later, were subjected to humiliating treatment and terrible conditions on the two-month voyage. 16. Wasserstein gives a variety of examples of the British government barring the escape routes, including to Palestine, from Nazi Europe for Jewish refugees from 1939 onwards, which he does not see as bringing credit. His explanation for the government’s indifference includes that they did not really believe the stories of Nazi barbarities. 17. My mother, despite being prohibited from political involvement, attended the rally, probably under the aegis of the Independent Labour Party but possibly linked with the Communist Party. The protesters bravely heckled the rally, revealing to the public gaze how easily the BUF resorted to the extreme use of violence. 18. There is still much heat over the issue of how the British Board of Deputies responded to the rise of the BUP. Anybody interested in following up on this topic could refer to David Cesarani, Reporting Anti-Semitism: The Jewish Chronicle 1879–1979 (University of Southampton, 1993), 25–27; David Rosenberg, Facing Up to Antisemitism: How Jews in Britain Countered the Threats of the 1930s (London: JCARP, 1985), 48–53; and Neil Barrett, ‘The Threat of the British Union of Fascists in Manchester’, in Remembering Cable Street: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Society, ed. Anthony Kushner and Nadia Valman (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000), 56–70. 19. The same Beveridge was subsequently responsible for the Beveridge Report which laid the foundations of the welfare state. 20. One other route that people rarely speak about was that young German women would marry unsuitable men in order to get out; these marriages certainly did not all end up ‘happily ever after’. In one case, the mother of the woman I was speaking to never saw her non-German ‘husband’ after her daughter was conceived, and the only thing the daughter knows of her father is his name; in another case, the mother killed herself. The incidence of marriages purely in order to get out of Germany, would otherwise not have taken place, is probably higher than generally recognized.

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21. Norman Finklestein in his article in the London Review of Books presents a contrary view in relation to the US. He disputes that an explanation for refugees’ silence was their need to subsume difference, as commonly assumed, suggesting instead that the Jewish establishment as much as the ‘zeitgeist’ discouraged them from speaking out (Finkelstein 2000, 33–36). 22. As Grenville points out, although the journal provides the only—invaluable—source of contemporary accounts, one of the problems in gaining a reliable selection of firsthand data from these archives has been the absence of indexing. Another limitation is that the AJR’s supporters were largely drawn from a quite small area of North London. Grenville’s Jewish Refugees from Germany and Austria in Britain: Their Image in ‘AJR Information’ consolidated and developed on his earlier work analysing the contents of AJR and considering how the refugees first experienced Britain, came to decide to settle here and then adapted to British society. 23. See for, example, David Cesarani, ‘Challenging the Myth of Silence: Postwar Responses to the Destruction of European Jewry’, in After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence, ed. David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), 13–39. Cesarani’s position emphasises the degree to which there was a breaking of the silence, but his concern is more in the public than the private/familial sphere, which is the concern of this study.

3 METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES

THE MEANINGS OF THE HOLOCAUST FOR THE BRITISH SECOND GENERATION

Though this is not a study of the Holocaust, the interviews repeatedly reveal its continuing salience. As will be explored in part 3, the issue that most concerned the participants was the murder of their grandparents and other kin. So the participants’ understanding of the meanings of the Holocaust frames their responses to themselves and their lives. The loss of my own family, though I resist the realization, makes the Holocaust unbearable. I find reading or thinking about the Holocaust makes me giddy. While writing this book, I discovered, seventy odd years after her death, what had happened to one of my aunts. What made the pain worse—of her death by gassing, one of the very first—was that nobody could or would talk to me about it. Hidden and unmourned, it is almost as if she had never lived. The following overview will only address the points relevant to this study and will not enter in any detail into the purported historiographical shifts in the importance given to the Holocaust between the end of World War II and the twenty-first century, nor how far Jewish experience was part of academic, official or even cultural discourses during the same period. While it is well known that there was work done on the ‘Holocaust’ from soon after the end of the war, not least the writing of camp survivors, the concept of Holocaust with all its connotations only became part of public discourse in the late 1960s at the very earliest. The first generation parents, therefore, were very unlikely to view themselves through this lens. Their emphasis was far more likely to be based on universalism 53

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and anti-Nazism, on assimilation, integration and going forwards into a fresh future. The vocabulary was also different after the end of the war: the horrors of the camps were initially referred to in terms of atrocities that were not presented as uniquely targeting Jews (J. Alexander 2002, 5–85). This approach would have formed part of the dominant paradigm within which the second generation was brought up. The dominant discourse did not provide a space for words that dwelt on grief and loss, nor did the postwar period encourage the revelation of feelings as happens now. To try to describe the unspeakable is made even more difficult without the right words. The debates around the introduction of the concept of the Holocaust and its meaning provide a context for first generation parents and British second generation’s understanding—or nonunderstanding—of their own experiences. Thus I want to examine what is meant by ‘Holocaust’ and how far the Holocaust’s place in modern discourse has influenced how the first and second generations understood their own experiences. So much attention is now given, academically and through the mass media, to aspects of the Holocaust that it is easy to forget how little attention was previously paid to this construction. Saul Friedlander (2002, 415–19), for example, argues that the construction of the Final Solution only emerged in the early 1970s and the first German study to refer to it only appeared in the late 1970s. Many earlier German historians were either associated with Nazism or repressed the memory of Nazi history. There was a similar coyness in much of Europe. Even Jewish historians of this period tended not to look at the death camps, maybe because they could not bear to. A variety of events—the Eichmann trial, Israel’s defeat of different Arab nations in the 1967 and 1973 wars and the opening up of Soviet files in the late 1980s—helped push the Holocaust or Final Solution onto the political/historical agenda. The causes for the increased attention given to the Holocaust are hotly debated, but the detail is on the edge of the present discourse: for those interested, the endnote gives an outline of Finkelstein and Novick’s intriguing debate. 1 One explanation for the silence of the first generation is that the features and consequences of the Holocaust were neither recognized as such nor given much attention publically in the decades after the end of World War II. This was partly because of the war’s immediacy, partly because the Cold War made an ally of West Germany and an enemy of the USSR. But in the last decades, the greater importance given to the Holocaust has played a part in the construction of what it means to be Jewish and what it means to be the child of exiles from Nazism. In addition, there are national/cultural particularities surrounding these debates. Germany, for example, is seen as coming to terms with its sense of responsibility and guilt. The lived experience of being Jewish, I postulate, has shifted, and with

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that, an identification with Jewishness been brought more to the fore. Novick (2000, 2, 3, 11 passim), among others, argues this is a shift to an identification that encourages a sense of exclusive victimhood. But the Holocaust has increasingly diverse interpretations in both academic and media commentary, and this, I argue, also affects Jewish selfidentity. At its simplest, the Holocaust is equated with Nazism or anybody who lived under Nazi rule. The Holocaust becomes a catch-all word for all the horrors of Nazism. As I shall argue, it therefore loses any specificity and suggests an inevitability about the Holocaust as a consequence of Nazism and the Jews as Nazism’s inevitable victims. For others, the Holocaust refers to anybody directly affected, from people who were dispossessed to those in the resistance who went underground. ‘Holocaust’ is sometimes used to apply to the entire period in which people were put into concentration camps. A more nuanced position is to apply the Holocaust to the period after which it became close to impossible to exit a concentration camp—assuming one was still alive—starting in roughly 1937. Each definition will have differing implications for the groups and their children affected by the Holocaust. What I am arguing here is different again: ‘Holocaust’ refers to the systematized murder by the German Nazi state of a group or groups based on ascribed social characteristics and does not apply to the whole period of Nazi inhumanity. There are different stages moving towards the Holocaust, which have to be analysed rather than assumed. As Browning (2003, n.p.) argues, after several decades of debate, although there are differences in emphasis and timing, historians have reached a relative consensus that there was no single decision, no ‘big bang’, that produced the Final Solution, but instead a series of decisions that took place over time. The earliest phase of Nazi policy in Germany was primarily aimed at preventing political dissidence of any form: people were imprisoned or sent to camps but without the intent to kill them— although death certainly was a by-product of hard work, cruelty and little food. A second pre-Holocaust phase focused on the Untermenschen who were sent to—and isolated in—camps or ghettoes but where the purpose was more to put the people to work and/or to send them East, rather than systematic extermination, although there was a tension within the Nazi machine as to which should be the main purpose (Browning 2005, 2, 3, 11 passim). The second phase was marked by massive deportations from western—and annexed—Poland during the winter of 1939/1940 and to a lesser degree from Germany into France in autumn 1940, as well as by a series of isolated massacres at the end of 1941 and into 1942 (Browning 2005, 112; S. Friedlander 2002, 419). Almost all deportations took place in Eastern Europe, but, though locally based, they still need to be under-

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stood within the context of centralized Nazi policy. Some historians have argued against the idea of a well-oiled Nazi killing machine, particularly since the opening of Eastern European files; instead they emphasize the impetus in terms of pressure from below by autonomous radicalizing initiatives from rival power centres, even if this pressure was within the policy of the Nazi state as a whole. A frequently used example are the massacres in Lithuania, where there was a shift from casual murder of Jewish men to mass murder of Jews during 1941 by Einsatzgruppen. 2 In addition, mass killings such as the Babi Yar mass killings, another instance of an Einsatzgruppen-led massacre that resulted in the murder of around thirty thousand Jews in Kiev in September 1941, are sometimes used as an argument that the Holocaust needs to be dated from early on in 1941. My position remains, however, that any ethnic cleansing will give rise to genocidal atrocities, but this still needs to be seen as distinct from state-coordinated and state-led industrialized murder. The euthanasia programme—or as the Nazis labelled it, T4—which was administered by doctors and psychiatrists, formally started at the end of 1939 but was put into practice from early 1940 and was more systematic. I refer to this as a precursor to the Holocaust, though I am aware that it has, credibly, been seen as the first stage of the Holocaust. 3 The origins of the euthanasia programme, which is too often overshadowed by the Holocaust, lay in the nineteenth-century euthanasia movement, which in Germany had become intermeshed with nationalism. The programme had clear nonmedical goals. In August 1939, Hitler endorsed ending the lives of seriously ill mental patients, a plan implemented in Germany and Poland (Browning 2005, 185,186; Burleigh 2002, 128–34). The first killing centre used carbon monoxide gas in January 1940 in Brandenburg near Berlin; 4 by August 1941, over seventy thousand had perished in the six euthanasia centres (H. Friedlander 1995, 136–50). But then a fundamental ideological shift occurred—by April 1940, the criteria for gassing moved away from inability to work, the initial criteria, and became Jewishness. Thus the euthanasia programme reveals the first time that being labelled as Jewish was grounds for deliberate and systematized murder and provided a training ground for the subsequent mass genocide. The partial cessation of mass gassing after limited protests in 1941 ‘suddenly made available a large staff of professional killers experienced in gas chamber operations, available for other assignations’ (Browning 2005, 143). The T4 victims were the first to be gassed, the guinea pigs, the first demonstration of collective and systematic mass murder. T4 also habituated the practitioners to the concept and practicality of ‘mercy killing’, ‘confirming’ the assumptions behind the euthanasia programme. ‘Most crucially, with the killing of the German “handicapped”, the Nazi regime discovered how it could harness . . . capacities of modern society

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to implement its racial projects through systematic mass murder’ (Browning 2005, 169). The euthanasia centres pioneered the approaches later used in the extermination camps: the technical and organizational expertise, the gas chambers disguised as showers and the mass cremation of bodies. 5 The T4 programme marked an escalation towards mass murders. As Peter Longerich (2012, 141) argues, although the euthanasia programme marked the crossing of the threshold into systematized, racially based annihilation, two years before the mass murder of the Jews the programme was still framed at a local level and full of contradictions, and it was only one of the stages towards the Holocaust. But while the euthanasia programme was a precursor to the Holocaust, even an essential precursor, it still did not make the Holocaust an inevitable consequence. It is only in the third phase that the goal was extermination based on explicit and crude racist/biological categorization of Jews, Sinti and Roma, and this is what I refer to as the Holocaust. How this stage was ever reached cannot be resolved in a few paragraphs here. Yet a brief overview of the major explanations of how the Holocaust ever happened seems to be called for. The Nazis’ avowed intention had been to ‘relocate’ the Jews eastwards, but there had been divisions within the Nazi state, although historians differ as to its significance. There was a double strategy in Germany itself—coerced emigration, which became far more difficult once war broke out, and ghettoization, though in different forms (Browning 2005, 169, 170). There was a split between attritionists, who saw the dying out of the Jewish population as the desired goal, and productionists, who wanted to maximize the productive potential of the ghettoes. While the productionists initially were dominant, intervention from Berlin was to favour elimination. This can be attributed in part to the ‘problem’ for Nazi Germany from September 1939 to June 1941 of about three million Jews in Poland. In his unusually detailed analysis of how the policy of industrialized extermination—in other words, the Holocaust—emerged, Browning (2005, 25, 29, 113) argues that the planned ‘dislocation’ of millions of Polish Jews into ghettoes and concentration camps in the east only took shape after Germany invaded Poland. He argues that the inability to pursue Nazi policy in Eastern Europe—to first ghettoize and subsequently deport the Jews to Lublin or Madagascar—led to the Jews remaining in urban ghettoes, originally intended to be temporary, with little guidance from Berlin (Browning 2005, 112). Intriguingly, ‘the decision over the timing and intensity of the concentration of Jews in Poland still remained in the hands of the individual Einsatzgruppen leaders’, according to Browning (2005, 27).

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Browning also refers approvingly to Longerich’s (2012, 430) recent concept of a fourth stage of escalation in May 1942, characterized by the Nazi’s ‘indiscriminate murder of all Jews at the end of the deportation’; in other words, where before some Jews, for example, from Germany, had been deported but not murdered, now all Jews would be indiscriminately exterminated. ‘The final decision for the Final Solution’ is how Browning sums it up (Browning 2000, 31). Though originally called some months earlier when the Nazis were still advancing through the USSR, the Wannsee Conference only finally took place in January 1942 when the stalemate in the USSR was already becoming clearer. The Wannsee Conference is often presented as the key turning point when the responsibility for getting rid of Jews was handed over to the SS, and Heydrich, a pivotal figure, stated that Jews were to be annihilated by a combination of forced labour and mass murder. But a distinction is still being made between what was to happen to ‘German Jews’ and ‘Slavic Jews’. Longerich’s (2012, 306–10) fourth stage takes place after Wannsee in April/May 1942. It is in this ‘fourth stage’ that all Jews were to be exterminated, and extermination camps were rapidly expanded. Thus the ‘Holocaust’ was not an inevitable outcome but a consequence of previous stages. Indeed, Browning’s argument is that the ‘final solution’ to the Jewish question, a phrase first used in 1939, initially referred to a territorial solution. So the position that is being put here, in line with Browning, is that the extermination of the Jews was a piecemeal process, rather than emerging fully formed from Hitler’s long-term plans. What I see as decisive is the crucial element of systematized and centrally coordinated mass murder. I will be using the word Holocaust to apply from late 1941 onwards, just before the Wannsee Conference acted to consolidate a system of industrialized murder, centrally supervised and enforced by the state apparatus, and to talk about the couple of years prior to 1941 as the ‘precursor to the Holocaust’. This allows for a sense of development and for questions to be asked about why the ‘Final Solution’ happened, rather than assuming its inevitability. Thus a distinction is possible between, for example, referring to Nazi atrocities and actions and referring to the Holocaust. I am aware that this definition excludes the T4 euthanasia programme and the murders of between seventy and eighty thousand Jews before December 1941, including at Babi Yar, and that this is contentious (Pohl 2013). 6 Although I have focused more on an exploration of the ‘hows’ not the ‘whys’, I shall briefly touch on a few of the underlying key explanations of the Holocaust. Whether the Holocaust is seen as an inevitability, the ultimate example of the persecution of the Jew, or as a consequence of

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particular but not inevitable events also impacts how members of the second generation see themselves. Diverse explanations for why the Holocaust happened have filled many academic books. The position I start with is also one I reject. It sees anti-Semitism as both the heart of Nazi ideology and its glue, which, it is sometimes argued, grew out of age-old anti-Semitic prejudices in Germany. The Nazis were able to play on anti-Semitism because notions of racial exclusivity, particularly in relation to the Jews, already existed in German society. At the extreme is the argument presented by Daniel Goldhagen, and now largely discredited, of anti-Semitism lying at the heart of German society—a position that, as Bauman (1989, xii) argues, comfortingly clears the rest of us of guilt and responsibility. Some historians, such as Michael Burleigh, emphasize the centrality of biological/ eugenic ideology within Germany in validating the extermination of the Jews. But the position of anti-Semitism lying at Nazism’s heart ignores the differences in forms of anti-Semitism pre-Nazism and during the Nazi period, as well as the well-researched divisions within the Nazi formation as to the need to eradicate the Jews (S. Friedlander 2002, 417). Though highly diverse, most alternative explanations look beyond this approach. There has been at times acrimonious historiographical debate about the origins of the Nazi state and the Holocaust, which developed from the 1960s; the main schools were recently categorized into functionalists and intentionalists (Mason 1995, 213–17). Any reader interested in greater academic detail should refer to the many endnotes in this section. Put very briefly and simplistically, the intentionalists argue that antiSemitism was at the very core of Nazi ideology and that the decision to try to exterminate all Jews was therefore virtually inevitable under a Nazi regime. Many intentionalists particularly stress the individual role of Hitler. 7 The main alterative perspective is that of the functionalist. The functionalists, of which there are many strands, argue that although persecution of Jews was a central feature of Nazism, the decisions to carry this through to systematic mass murder and its timing were linked to particular historical circumstances and to the development of particular power structures within the Nazi state. They also emphasize the importance of local/national divisions, important tensions within the state apparatus and the significance of international relations. 8 One key figure, Zygmunt Bauman, who is generally categorized as providing a structuralist analysis, argues that anti-Semitism, though one aspect of Nazi ideology, was not its overriding purpose. While the Holocaust was a Jewish tragedy and a part of Jewish history, he argues it was not simply a Jewish problem and not an event in Jewish history alone (Bauman 1989, x). 9 Bauman’s other distinct contribution is his connection between the Holocaust and rationality. ‘The Holocaust was born and

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executed in our modern, rational society . . . and for that reason it is a problem of that society, civilization, and culture’ (1989, x). In other words, it is not, as some would argue, a failure of modern society. Rather it is its product, though only a possible and not an inevitable product (Bauman 1989, 5). 10 Anti-Semitism, Bauman (1989, 27, 41, 51–53) argues, is based on the drawing of boundaries. Nothing reinforced the sense of the Jew as the outsider more than the Jews being a ‘non-national (or “supra-national”) element’, defined as outside of the German nation, who became the ‘strangers’ requiring exclusion and excision (53–55). 11 This argument also enables us to include other ‘outsiders’ such as Roma and Sinti, who were also victims of Nazi mass murder. The relationship between the invasion of the USSR and the decision to exterminate the Jews is also hotly debated. Most—though evidently not all—historians agree that the Nazis did not initiate plans to exterminate the Jews until after their attack on the Soviet Union. But there are wellresearched differences over exact timing between September/October 1941 and early 1942—that is, between the period of early German success and when the attack on the USSR had begun to stall—and the implications of that timing, which the endnote considers in some detail. 12 This change in circumstance can also be linked to the decisions of the postponed Wannsee Conference, referred to earlier. Similarly, there is disagreement as to the centrality of America’s entry into the war against Germany in December 1941. 13 While there is a specificity to the deliberate and systematic extermination of six million Jews, the result of the Nazis’ aggression was that somewhere around sixty million people were killed or died as a result of the war, though such a figure is incalculable and incomprehensible. It is worth reminding ourselves of some of the figures just for those whom the Nazis chose as their victims: figures are of course never neutral. While the Holocaust is generally associated with the six million murdered Jews, their mass murder only constituted one-third of the total number of the Nazis’ direct victims (Mann 2000, 331), meaning those who died as a result of mass murder or systematic and deliberate ill treatment by the Nazis based on their ethnic origins or other aspects of their identity, and not as a result of military or civilian war actions themselves (331–66). 14 First, there were the early victims, in 1933 in particular, though to a lesser extent in the couple of years following, mainly in Germany of leftists, trade union activists, artists and bohemians and left-leaning intellectuals. Further ‘ideological’ victims include the estimated 2,500 to 5,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses who died in the camps or prisons from hunger, disease, exhaustion, exposure and brutal treatment (USHMM, ‘Resistance during the Holocaust’).

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Kristallnacht marked the Jews as the main target, but this was then overshadowed by the aforementioned T4 ‘euthanasia’ project, which officially killed about seventy thousand, mostly mentally challenged Germans, both children and adults (Burleigh 2002, 155). In fact, T4 continued in wartime secrecy, killing perhaps as many as 250,000. Burleigh (2002, 277) gives the astonishing figure of five hundred thousand for those who were either sterilized or euthanized. Racist ideology also sealed the fate of the ‘asocials’: 55,000 homosexuals, 200,000 Roma, most German black people 15 and the Slavs—the ‘Untermenschen’: 3 million Poles, at least 7 million Soviet civilians and 3.3 million Soviet POWs (Mann 2000, 332). 16 Of those victims listed above, the Roma, Sinti, gays and black Germans, along with the Jews, were victims of the Holocaust itself in the sense in which I defined it earlier. Longerich reminds us that the deportation and later extermination of the ‘gypsies’ was running concurrently with the Nazis’ anti-Jewish practices: 2,370 were deported in May 1940, 5,000 to the Lodz ghetto in November 1941 and 2,000 in early 1942. He argues that any story of the Holocaust has to be written with an eye on other groups who were persecuted for racist reasons (Longerich 2012, 288, 289). The Roma or Sinti have received relatively little attention as victims of the Holocaust, partly because they are still often seen as somehow ‘outside’ of normal society. 17 Michael Zimmerman argues that the Nazis’ racist treatment of the ‘gypsies’ was not simply a continuation of the traditional German view of the ‘gypsy’ as a public ‘nuisance’ but invoked theories of racial hygiene, which led to incarceration and genocide. What I am suggesting is that the ‘Holocaust’ was one among many consequences of Nazi barbarism, and the attention given to it and the meanings associated with it need to be understood critically. While this study inevitably focuses on the horror of the Holocaust and accepts its uniqueness in targeting one ‘ethnic group’ with the intent to exterminate them, many other genocides have occurred over the last two hundred years. If I am not referring to other writers’ uses of ‘Holocaust’, I shall on occasions make use of the word genocide rather than Holocaust because it highlights both that the Jews were only one group, even if they were the largest one, among other groups that the Nazis set out to exterminate for eugenic reasons and that the Holocaust has been only one of many genocides. This discussion of the Holocaust and its place within the general brutality of the Nazi state is important because, as I argued earlier, the Holocaust now frames most understandings of Jewishness and in particular frames the experience of the second generation and their understand-

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ing of themselves and of their relationship to their histories and their families’ histories.

Of the UK second generation’s non-British grandparents, almost all were murdered. Here I want to present a personal aside about how time passing does not imply the passing of affects—or effects. Born at the end of the war, I am paralyzed and terrified by the ‘Holocaust’. Reading and writing about the Holocaust for this study burns me up. Even conducting and recording the interviews included in this book with people who had lost relatives they had never known to Nazism and become overwhelmed by that loss left me sleepless. I find it close to impossible to read the sources. This far exceeds the usual difficulties that scholars have constructing their work. This is not just some academic sensitivity, though such are valid. What I want is to drag my grandfather and aunt out from the deathly trapdoor of history and back to life. That is my task and that I cannot do. What makes the Holocaust even more difficult is that I do not accept the common meaning of the ‘Holocaust’. Not for me a wringing of the hands over my murdered ‘Jewish brethren’. The Nazis murdered and victimized people other than the Jews. My aunt was killed under the euthanasia programme. Who talks of these victims? Where are they commemorated? My father’s friends and comrades were murdered for being Communists and trade union activists. My parents fled the Nazis, not as Jews, but as anti-Nazis. This alone makes me painfully, acutely aware that many groups suffered under the Nazis, many millions of people who were not Jewish or for whom being Jewish was not their defining characteristic. Yet the way the concept of Holocaust is frequently used can suggest only one group truly suffered and lay claim to an emotional exclusivity for that group. So I am burned twice, once by the murder of my family as Jews, once by the construction of the Nazi’s barbarism as uniquely targeting the Jews. As I read about and try to take in the enormity of the Nazi’s actions and present the deaths of the people the participants talked about—and often found it close to impossible to talk about—I am forcing myself not to walk away from a subject that causes my body to tremble and refuses me sleep. So I do intimately understand why the facts of genocide were ignored for so long after the end of the war, both by historians and by those immediately affected.

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TRAUMA AND THE BRITISH SECOND GENERATION: HOW USEFUL AN APPROACH? This section examines whether or how far concepts of trauma or ‘transferred trauma’ provide insights into the experiences articulated in the testimonials. When I started the research for this book, I had anticipated that the concept of transferred trauma would be useful in understanding the British second generation. While I do not pretend to a psychological expertise, the more I researched, the more questions emerged as to how useful the concept was and its inherent limitations. However, the issues raised under ‘transferred’ or ‘secondary’ trauma have sufficient apparent relevance to the British second generation for me to introduce them. Many studies suggest that transferred trauma is the most useful approach: although the second generation have not themselves experienced trauma, the trauma of the parents enters the second-generation child’s being without intent. 18 Although relating to the broader issue of ‘haunted subjectivities’, Brothers’s (2009, 11, 12) comment is illustrative: ‘One of the most unsettling things I discovered as a fledgling analyst was that the patients who entered my consulting room were not alone; they brought their dead along with them.’ While anybody who has read the book thus far will recognize that my emphasis has been to position the British second generation within a broader cultural and historical context, I also want to ask how useful it is to position the British second generation’s experiences within a more psychologically driven framework The field of Holocaust transmission or ‘secondary transmission’ has been dominated by psychoanalytically oriented theories. As Kellermann (n.d., 1) puts it, ‘According to these theories, emotions that could not be consciously experienced by the first generation are given over to the second generation.’ 19 The child thus unconsciously absorbs the repressed and insufficiently worked-through Holocaust experiences of survivor parents. Further, the second-generation child unconsciously identifies with the parent. The first problem is that much of the work on transferred trauma has been done with the children of Holocaust survivors, indeed, frequently of camp survivors. 20 While I would never marginalize the violence of the death camps, it is as if the death camp survivors have been sanctified, whereas other survivors or those who fled or were under threat under Nazism do not merit the same attention. Auschwitz becomes the—deadly—prism through which all other experience under Nazism is viewed. The reasons for this narrowing of the lens is not the subject of this book, but the implication of what is often referred to critically as the construction of a ‘hierarchy of suffering’ is nevertheless worth noting. 21 It seems

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especially important to be aware of this difference given the Nazi’s condemnation of so many groups as ‘Untermensch’. In addition, the concept of ‘Holocaust survivor’ is used as a catch-all phrase. As Lomranz (2000, 2) concluded from his review of 182 Englishlanguage articles on the web between 1974 and 1993, about 76 percent of the studies only refer to ‘survivors’ or Holocaust survivors, without specifying whether they were inmates of death camps, work camps, partisans, refugees who had previously fled to Russia or fugitives hiding under false identities. Whatever the reasons, almost none of the psychologically directed literature’s concern is with others who survived Nazism, including political refugees. The category of the Holocaust survivor is often used academically and in everyday speech as if it essentially only referred to camp survivors. Yet these different forms of persecution are likely to have distinct psychological outcomes. Parents of the British second generation are a distinctive group: they fled their homes and families before the Holocaust, generally not because their lives were in immediate danger but because they—correctly—perceived a future danger. Their children, the British second generation, were therefore hardly ever the children of Holocaust survivors or victims, even though they may have been their grandchildren, and did not grow up in a family with a Holocaust survivor(s). Another issue is that the work on trauma and transferred trauma is frequently carried out in the US or Israel, which, as previously argued, are societies with their own distinctive historic and cultural specificities. In Israel’s case, there is a greater emphasis on the memorialization of the Holocaust. 22 The discourse on the Holocaust can be seen as providing a key reason for Israel’s existence, even invoking some form of sanctification. This has implications for the centrality of the Holocaust in the Israeli ‘psyche’. Lazar et al. (2008, 93–101), for example, compare the responses of the second generation/grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and of non-Holocaust survivors in Israel and suggest the specificity of the ‘Israeli’ experience: sociocultural mechanisms affected the perception of the Holocaust as a cultural trauma, irrespective of whether the secondgeneration child had a family ‘connection’ or not to the Holocaust. The US is a different case again given its tendency to understand trauma outside of a historical context; the importance attached to ‘lived’ ethnicity, for example, what it means to be Jewish; and its own history of episodes of genocide, as, for example, suggested by Novick (2000, 15). Given the importance of cultural difference, to what extent, therefore, can research on US or Israeli trauma help to explain the British second generation’s patterns of trauma? Thus what I am suggesting here is that to understand the British second generation’s experiences, they have to be seen within the particularity of their own historical/cultural context. 23

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Another problem is that the meaning and measurement of trauma differs significantly, and any conclusions on the precise connection between being a Holocaust survivor and experiencing forms of trauma are contentious. Just to remind ourselves that ‘trauma’, while it may be part of contemporary discourse about the effects of the Holocaust, was not always so and may well not be again in the future. For twenty or so years after the end of the war, the concept of trauma, with its association with being a victim, was a position to be avoided. Moreover what is meant by ‘transferred trauma’ is itself open to much debate and dispute. As Kellermann (n.d., 5–7) argues, the existence or nonexistence of any manifestations of psychopathology in the offspring of Holocaust survivors has been the subject of much disagreement, especially between clinicians and academics. 24 As Kellermann (2009, 70) brings out, there are crucial unanswered questions about the process of transmission from parent to child, such as what exactly is transmitted, how and with what—varied—effect. One methodological problem relating to trauma that impacts any interpretation of data and highlights the problems of understanding the application of the concept of trauma, is the difference between clinical/psychological studies based on studies of presenting patients/clients and the more generalized academic empirical studies, which generally fail to confirm the clinicians’ diagnosis and present a less pessimistic picture (Kellermann n.d., 5–7). Moreover, there is the added complexity as to how far one can generalize from clinical studies even to the whole Holocaust survivor population, as, for reasons that are not explored here, the majority of Holocaust survivors did not seek psychological support, and therefore the conclusions from any clinical study may have a very limited generalizability (Yehuda et al. 1998, 841–43). Wardi (1992, 5) similarly asks whether ‘transmitted trauma’ should be attributed to the children of all survivors or only those who seek psychotherapeutic assistance, suggesting that there are many other significant intervening variables. A critical review of the literature of the differential impact on the second generation of the trauma experienced by different sorts of Holocaust survivors lies outside the remit of this study. My concern is not with what the theories on transferred trauma have to say per se, but how usefully they address issues relevant to the British second generation. So I am only going to draw upon what is useful to an understanding of the British second generation, studies that will generally look at groups other than camp survivors. But I want to first make a few personal observations. Although the parents of the British second generation had not gone through the camps, some of the parents of the second generation who arrived here as adults and then had children were ‘making up’ for terrible losses of family and

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home. The British baby, ‘the new beginning’, who may have brought delight also often had to shoulder the responsibility of being alive where others were dead or maybe had never been born. This inheritance, I suggest, contributed to the thread of guilt that runs through so many of the testimonials included here and suggests some overlapping in experiences and responses with the people whose parent was a camp survivor. Certainly I feel that my birth marked failure. Not that this was anybody’s fault. But my parents had failed to stop Nazism, had failed to get close relatives out of Nazi Germany and the ideals they had held dear had failed them. To have a child in the UK was a mark of failure, and that failure marked me. Yet I was born and felt as a child that I was living with ‘ghosts’. I knew they were not supernatural ghosts. These were presences in their ‘nonpresence’ and in their ‘nonpresence’ were present. I knew without knowing that death wanted me for itself. I now suspect I was ‘picking up’ on my parents’ unspoken, unspeakable grief for their dead. Even as I write this, sixty years later, I shake. 25

Most of the literature on trauma focuses on the interaction within the family—as did my conversations with the participants in this study—and whether or how the experience of the parent impacts on the child. But I shall start by briefly illustrating a sociobiological approach to transferred trauma by reference to the work of Rachel Yehuda. Yehuda considers how far a predisposition to trauma can be transferred while the foetus is in vitro. Did our parents’ sadnesses and insecurities flow into our blood streams while we were still attached to our mother’s placentas? Yehuda et al. (2007, 1040–48) essentially established that the children of parents with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), specifically the children of Holocaust survivors, can themselves ‘inherit’ PTSD. The suggestion is that low cortisol—a ‘flight or fight’ trigger—may be a sign that a person’s body may not be able to easily turn off certain stress-related reactions, promoting the development of PTSD; high stress is correlated with high PTSD through low cortisol. The adult children of Holocaust survivors with PTSD were generally found to have lower cortisol levels than the children of Holocaust survivors without PTSD, and they were found to be more vulnerable to stress. In other words, the factor of PTSD impacted independently from the effect of the Holocaust experience. But Yehuda et al. are not definitive in their interpretation. Possibly, mothers with PTSD form attachments to infants marked by enhanced attention and contact, rather than there being relative neglect or physical

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abuse. Indeed, the children of Holocaust survivors in psychotherapy characteristically complained of difficulties in physically and emotionally separating from parents, implying strong attachments, although not attachments that protected from the risk of developing psychopathologic disorders (Yehuda et al. 2007, 1040–48). An overlapping view is presented by Vivette Glover (2011, abstract): ‘If a mother is stressed or anxious while pregnant her child is more likely to show a range of symptoms such as those of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, conduct disorder, aggression or anxiety.’ Yehuda et al. are not biologically reductionist, and their approach can contribute to a broader understanding of how transmission might occur. Most studies, however, place more emphasis on sociocultural features. There are hundreds of such studies relevant to this analysis of the second generation. I was initially influenced by Rosenthal et al. who compare the families of victims with Nazi collaborators. 26, 27 Though the concern here is with the families of victims, not collaborators, the study is relevant to the nature of being second generation and analyses the particular way that the past hangs over the second generation. The study emphasizes how the second generation carry on the parents’ burden of mourning for Nazism’s victims: ‘the intergenerational sequential process of mourning’. Rosenthal et al. (1998, 187) argue that ‘the grieving process does not necessarily come to an end during the lifetime of one person, but might continue from generation to generation’. The first generation grieves over and mourns the separation from their parents; they have a clear idea of what happened and who they are. But if the first generation parents’ discourse is structured to shield the children, the second generation or themselves, then the children do not know what is true and what to believe. The second generation then concerns itself with discovering the persecution of the grandparents, though it took place in a distant time and place. ‘Exactly the reverse holds true of the common belief that the impact of persecution becomes weaker for later generations. The greater the distance from the time of the persecution, the less the specific knowledge those successive generations possess. And the less the specific knowledge that they possess, the more powerful will be the effect of a diffused transfusion that has come down through the generations’ (Rosenthal et al. 1998, 196). It is only in the third generation, Rosenthal suggests, that the theme of murder is approached. The Holocaust in Three Generations is one of the more significant books on the issues of transference, made even more remarkable as it is one of few such studies where the editor/author is based in Germany, as is some of the sample. Rosenthal (Rosenthal et al. 1998, 3) conducted ‘narrative-biographical’ interviews with twenty families in Israel and eight-

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een families in Germany, using snowball sampling. 28 This study’s emphasis is, therefore, to look at group experiences, and is not a quantitative study of individuals. Inevitably, there will be specificity to families living in Germany because of its Nazi history: the widespread silence in West Germany over Nazi crimes, which then became institutionalized, and also Israel’s particularities. 29 But Rosenthal’s emphasis is that the country the interviewees lived in appeared to make little difference to any of the three generations. She instead emphasizes that it was their pre-1945 past that mattered: whether the survivors had been in some ways incarcerated or had instead escaped Germany or Eastern Europe before 1939. 30 Kellermann (2009, 70–81) supports the approach towards transferred trauma that sees the transfer of trauma from Holocaust survivors to their children as the result of cumulative effects, for example, of parental communication, particularly whether the Holocaust was discussed and in what manner; the parent-child relationship, particularly the adequacy of the parent as role model; the dynamics both culturally and personally that are independent of the Holocaust; class and the saliency of a Jewish heritage. In their Israeli study of a nonclinical, high-functioning sample, Scharf and Mayseless’s (2011, 1539–41) analysis of secondary or transferred trauma focuses on feelings of intense fear, terror or helplessness. Drawing on the American Psychiatric Association’s literature, Scharf and Mayseless (2011, 1539) define secondary traumatization in terms of ‘learning about unexpected or violent death, serious harm or threat of death or injury experienced by a family member or close associate’. The difficult experiences of the second generation, while not traumatic in themselves, can lead to difficulty in functioning or ‘attaching’ themselves ‘normally’. Scharf and Mayseless’s thesis is that the second-generation Holocaust survivors may not show direct symptoms of PTSD or attachment disorganisation, but are nevertheless at risk of developing high levels of psychological distress or, as they put it, ‘the echoes of trauma’. 31 They distinguish three different types of survival issues for the second generation—lack of emotional resources, a focus on survival needs and a sense of obligation to please parents (2011, 1543–47, 1549). Their position that transferred trauma, if extreme, is comparable to experiencing trauma—even though, unlike with ‘fully traumatic experiences’, the individual’s well-being is not threatened—is questionable. Trauma has to be experienced, even though the child will be affected by the way the traumatized parent behaves. But as Kellermann suggests, any close reading reveals that some studies emphasize the problems Holocaust survivor families have, others focus on how well the families have adapted. Kellermann concludes that the

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nonclinical population of children of Holocaust survivors do not show signs of more psychopathology than others do, unlike the clinical sample of second-generation children. 32 Kellermann (2008, 263, 264) concludes that the data suggests that there is a clinical subpopulation, at least in Israel in the first years of the twenty-first century, who suffers from a severe kind of ‘Second Generation Syndrome’, including ‘a predisposition to PTSD, various difficulties in separation-individuation . . . a personality disorder or various neurotic conflicts, periods of anxiety and depression in times of crisis, and a more or less impaired occupational, social and emotional functioning with problems centred on the self, cognition, affectivity and interpersonal functioning’. In addition, there is a concern with death. Significantly, the parents, who included not just camp survivors but also people who had survived ghettoes and work camps, were mostly rated as ‘fully functioning’ and not overly preoccupied with the Holocaust, yet they still ‘appeared to have transmitted their trauma upon their offspring’. The people who appeared in the clinical sample in Israel had parents who did not share their Holocaust experiences with them, were born early after the war, were female, married, highly educated, working as teachers or in the caring professions and were the first or the second child (Kellermann 2008, 268). 33 One possible explanation is that Kellermann has underestimated the significance of parents not sharing their Holocaust experiences with their children. Another possible explanation is that living in Israel can encourage an identification with the Holocaust, though Kellermann (2008, 268) is careful to highlight that the conclusions from Israel may not always apply to all second generations, for example, when parents fled, rather than being camp survivors. But Kellermann (2009, 93) is also aware that the impact of the past will have contrasting, even contradictory, effects on the second-generation person, who will be intermittently torn between resilience and vulnerability. Both forces struggle against each other internally and which one is dominant at any one time will vary. It is significant that one of the leading interpreters in this field brings out both the importance of resilience and the fluidity in responses. Pierre Fossian et al., writing from a clinical perspective and drawing from patients who were mostly self-referred, develop on how the child of Holocaust survivors, whom they analyse as prone to psychological distress, appears to be characterized by the contradictory responses. They feel both a sense of responsibility for the parent, including an overidentification with the survivor parent(s) and a sense of duty to make their parents’ sadness better, as well as the realization that they could never satisfy their parents’ needs. They learned to neglect their own feelings,

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which encouraged a sense of helplessness. Similar issues occurred for both the second and third generations (Fossian et al. 2003, 519–23). The second-generation child experienced the parent as overprotective, uncommunicative and overvigilant. The child suffered from impaired self-esteem, high levels of fear and anxiety and from difficulties entering into intimate relationships as well as handling interpersonal conflicts. Their parents’ silence was understood as an unspoken prohibition about intimate communication, including about the past. For the reasons already discussed, one must beware uncritically assuming this analysis fits the British second generation, yet the testimonies included in this book do suggest that Fossian et al.’s work offers some insights. Wardi’s (1992, 41, 42) famous—and influential—earlier study from 1992 focuses on camp survivors and is embedded in attachment theory with an emphasis on unconscious processes. She argues that many survivors had never been able to free themselves from imagining their parents’ deaths and were not able to experience the usual process of loss of loved ones in a conflict-free way. Therefore, making attachments, including with their own children, and the experience of separation become more difficult for them and, subsequently, their children. In the most extreme cases, parents who had been in the camps deserted their children, feeling this was in the child’s best interests. Wardi posits that the child is not seen as a separate individual: the parent has lost much of their sense of identity and then strives to find it through the child, their ‘off-shoot’. Indeed, Wardi (1992, 28, 31, 79) argues, having a child may be an attempt by the parent to memorialize their dead and defeat death. As a result, the child may not just be a symbol of regeneration; she or he may believe she or he is instrumental in keeping the parent alive. Wardi suggests how far the children of the camp survivors lived in the deep shadow of their profoundly damaged parents, a shadow from which many could not escape. They tended towards being defensive, insecure, guilty, overpossessive and with acute anxieties, especially over separation, yet often with problems over bonding. She talks of the hidden messages parents convey to their children, especially girls, of being ‘memorial candles’ for the dead and how the second-generation child, without choosing to, becomes overwhelmed by what had befallen relatives they never knew (Wardi 1992, 32–40). An overlapping analysis is presented by Rowland-Klein and Dunlop (1998, 363–67), who, again looking at the children of survivors and emphasizing unconscious processes, propose that parents project their anxieties onto the child, who then starts to experience these as their own and, despite their normally secure lives, sees danger round every corner. The parent has suffered so much, how could the child cause further pain? The child becomes acquiescent, yet at the same time, as Wardi

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(1992, 79, 125) suggests, also cuts off from the mother, becomes defensive, mistrustful, guilty, even hostile, patterns that continue into later life. If the child feels unprotected by his or her parents, this undermines their attachment and can lead to a desire to both flee and to protect. Parental inconsistency or nonresponsiveness can lead to ambivalent attachment to the parent, weaker self-esteem of the child or anxiety at separation. Thus the legacy of the Nazis and the Holocaust is transmitted and played out through the first generation on the second generation. ‘The dualism of life and death together is a central motif in the personalities of many members of the second generation’ (Wardi 1992, 90). Janine Lurie-Beck’s (2007) study on the traumatic effects of the Holocaust across three generations considers differences between the children of people who fled before the war and the children of survivors and is, therefore, of some relevance. 34 Her sample was not drawn from a clinical source and was based on self-referral from a variety of countries. Drawing out from her material the points most relevant to this study, she established that people who got out before the war and people who were in hiding, including for political reasons, all fared better psychologically, had better coping strategies and a more positive worldview than camp survivors, a pattern that is ‘transferred’ to their children. Her study raises the issue that runs throughout my work: how far does active participation in an event affect the pattern or experience of trauma? 35 Lurie-Beck also considered the impact of the country of origin on the refugees: people from Hungary, for example, exhibited the most severe symptoms. She hypothesizes that this was because of the rapidity of the decimation. She suggests that the number of Holocaust-affected ancestors was the strongest demographic predictor of the psychological health of the second-generation child. 36 I do not explore the shifting emphasis that ‘guilt’ has been given in the study of Holocaust survivors. The association of PTSD with guilt appears in many of the approaches, including Wardi’s: guilt was a defining feature of PTSD. But Ruth Leys (2007, 9, 10, 15), looking at why this approach has become less dominant, argues that the concept of ‘survivor guilt’ is inseparable from the notion of the subject’s unconscious identification with the ‘Other’, including the perpetrator. She argues that the concept encourages a focus on the ‘guilt’ of the survivor, not the perpetrator, suggests an immersion in guilt and issues of dissociation and undermines a focus on resilience. In 1987, the influential American Psychiatric Association removed ‘survivor guilt’ as one of the diagnostic criteria for PTSD. The emphasis has switched to shame as the centre of PTSD, ‘to enforce a strict dichotomy between the autonomous subject and the external trauma’, in other words, that the trauma is seen as external to the person/

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‘subject’ rather than their being caught up in it. The concept of ‘shame’ suggests that the person ‘remains aloof from the traumatic experience, in the sense that he remains a spectator of the scene, which he can therefore see and represent to himself’. The person is also aware that her or his deficiencies and inadequacies as a person are ‘being exposed to the shaming gaze of another’ (Leys 2007, 9, 10). A model that emphasises shame therefore acknowledges that the guilt or culpability of the person is reduced. Thereby, it has been argued, the emphasis on shame suggests that PTSD is a condition from which it is possible to recover. Leys, however, argues that although shame has now become the dominant emotional association with PTSD and trauma in the study of Holocaust survivors, this shift of focus from actions, involved in the concept of guilt, to shame then focuses on the self and the person’s perceived inadequacies. Moreover, Leys (2007, 10) criticizes many, though not all, advocates of shame for reducing it to the materialistic effects of ‘inherited, neurophysiological responses of the body that are held to be independent of our intentions and wishes’. This is a remarkably contentious area, and this is not the place to explore it. I note these positions in passing and as further evidence of how far ‘trauma’, guilt or shame have to be understood as historically situated concepts. Although mine is not a study of how far difference can be associated with gender, I want to highlight briefly how little has been written on this and also draw attention to an issue whose salience will become apparent in the section on ‘Applied Methodology’. Wardi famously talked about how daughters were more likely to become the ‘memorial candles’, carrying a sense of responsibility of the past and for parents. In a longitudinal quantitative Israeli study, Scharf (2007, 615–17) distinguished between the male and female second generation and argued that when the survivor mother had a Holocaust background, it was associated with greater, though not acute, distress by second-generation women. 37 This was a study of second and third generations, and Scharf (2007, 618) also concluded that the third-generation teenagers, who were regularly critical of both parents, were more critical of their mothers. In a recent study, Glassman considers the relationship between daughters and refugees, rather than with survivor mothers, based on her counselling of groups of the British second generation. Using the language and perspective of attachment theory, she provides an analysis that is instructive. She states that daughters found it hard to separate emotionally from their mothers (Glassman 2013, 227). The trauma of the mother results in her daughters having ‘traumatizing attachment insecurity’, which would be easily triggered by the slightest incongruence of feeling between the second-generation children and their survivor mothers’ (225). The daughters consequently wished to avoid conflict of any kind, often ‘felt pulled

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in all directions and often saw themselves as failures as children, partners, mothers, friends, and workplace colleagues’, were disproportionately anxious and had issues around intimacy (228, 229).

An issue that is central to this work and that is not frequently addressed is how far the British second generation themselves find it difficult to open a window onto their families’ pasts. Although Aaron Hass’s (1996, 27) concern is not primarily with the second generation, he emphasizes the silence of the survivor parents towards their children and the difficulty the children have in breaking that silence. 38 The second-generation children talked of their parents’ secretiveness. The child knew something terrible had happened: perhaps the most obvious manifestation was the absence of grandparents (Hass 1996, 132). Even when the parent did give some account, they typically omitted more than they told. Dead children, for example, were not mentioned. The child did not want to increase the parents’ agony and did not ask (139). A ‘death anxiety’ can develop, which encouraged the second-generation child to develop deep anxieties of their own (58, 134). There was the scent of fear in the family (58). Moreover, the child developed a fear of what the parent had gone through, which coloured how they related to the parent (141). Finally, sometimes when the second-generation person has an emotional crisis in middle age or the parents are facing their own mortality, the parents may start to open up (137, 142). Yet Hass states that he encountered various levels of denial by the second generation themselves, many to do with not wanting to talk about the Holocaust (4, 140–43). Hass suggests that it took a level of psychological grounding in adulthood before some of the second generation asked questions (140). Even then, there were wide gaps in knowledge (141). Hass, the child of Holocaust survivors, who interviewed and focused on Holocaust survivors and writes as a psychiatrist from a psychologically informed perspective, is also keen to highlight how great the differences among Holocaust survivors may have been. This was particularly the case, he argues, if they were Jews: they may have been in hiding, passed as gentiles, lived in ghettoes, been in German or Soviet work camps as slave labour or may have joined the partisans (Hass 1996, 4). Other factors, such as country of origin, also make a difference: any Poles, for example, who survived were likely to have lost family. Such differences will impact the second generation. While Hass’s study is again of survivor parents and their children, and silence is only one aspect of Hass’s work, this study draws attention to this key aspect of British

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second-generation experience, which many of the studies already mentioned do not discuss. Rosenthal (1998, 87) also addresses the issue of silence, giving a number of examples of families where there was an effective prohibition about asking about a family member’s past in a camp. As Rosenthal writes of the Sneidler family who live in Israel, ‘The family dialog is loaded with attempts to prevent anyone from touching . . . Hermann’s past’ (91). Rosenthal writes that the second generation in particular cling to the families’ constructed myths and avoid specific questions (88, 89). Any comment too close to reality, a process Rosenthal refers to as the ‘blocked question’, created something close to panic (90). The consequence is a sense of loneliness (93). The impact of the Holocaust intensifies for the second generation. Silence may in part be a product of the exile’s inability to integrate past and present, of having lost a part of the past self as well as a past place—the country of birth—but they also need people to listen, and the second-generation child may resist hearing testimony. The parent’s sense of dissolution or fracturing can lead to an inability to talk about the past or about those ‘haunting’ him or her (Kitchen 2013, n.p.). Rosenthal (1998b, 17) remarks on the unexpected effect of the parents’ silence on the second-generation child: that their fantasies about what had happened corresponded remarkably with the reality. But remaining silent may have good reason. Not speaking may ‘protect’ the exile: from a bottled up incandescent rage at what had occurred, from the sense of drowning, from the fear that you will not see the dawning of another day. And there may not be anybody who wants to or can listen. The second-generation child may resist hearing what their parents have to tell them because in so doing they may feel they are colluding with any shame or pain that the exiled parent experiences and sucking in their parents’ pain at having ‘deserted’ significant others and ‘homeland’. 39 Listening may be too painful for the second-generation child. Like Rosenthal, Wiseman (2008, 352–55), who is also looking at survivor families in Israel, brings out how often the second-generation adult reported how lonely they had been as children, as a result of what she refers to as ‘echoes’ of their parents’ experiences. Wiseman emphasizes that the parents were seen as devoted to their children and, if anything, overprotective. In its turn, this led to the child/adolescent’s difficulty in exerting independence and to isolation from peers. Loneliness was expressed in different ways: the sense that the parents could not or did not provide easily accessible care, the child’s sense of abandonment, the child’s frustrated desire to communicate and be understood and a sense of role reversal, also referred to by Scharf and Mayseless (2011, 1546).

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The impact of dislocation or exile is key to this work and is referred to in a few studies. What is useful about Kassai and Motta’s (2006, 35–41) study, although it has received some serious criticisms, is that it compared thirty-two grandchildren of Holocaust survivors who had been imprisoned in concentration camps to thirty grandchildren of Jewish ‘nativeborn’ Americans and thirty grandchildren of non-Jewish immigrants. 40 The grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and the grandchildren of nonJewish immigrants scored significantly higher on their ‘trauma’ score than the grandchildren of Jewish Americans, suggesting that dislocation can be seen in itself to have a powerful traumatizing effect. Similarly, Weiss, O’Connell and Siiter (1986, 828–31) suggest that what is thought of as children of ‘Holocaust survivor syndrome’ could be explained in terms of an immigration effect. In a sample of the second-generation children of Holocaust survivors, twenty-five children of immigrants and twenty-five children of American-born parents, matched for a variety of variables, they found no significant differences between children of Holocaust survivors and the children of other immigrants. This again suggests that the process of immigration in itself and the dislocation and displacement associated with it has an effect on the children of immigrants not limited to the children of Holocaust survivors or even to forced exiles. Most immigrants, but even more so the ‘forced’ refugee, becomes a ‘nonperson’: their dislocation means that they no longer are a citizen of the state into which they were born, yet they rest outside the walls of their ‘adopted’ state’s legal protection. My position is that issues of dislocation and displacement need to be considered separately from issues around Holocaust survival, and this position forms part of my critique of how far the studies of children of Holocaust survivors are relevant to British second-generation children. The impact of exile is an issue of direct relevance to the second-generation experience. Most of this cohort of parents had suffered forced dislocation, but most did not want to go back ‘home’. There was no home to return to. This distinguishes them from many other refugees, such as exiles from apartheid South Africa or refugees from areas of Kurdistan. The refugees from Nazism had lost forever their country, the places and objects they were familiar with and their family and friends who had strengthened the sense of who they were. The parents’ loss of country, leaving behind parents, friends, job, language, all they knew, left a sense of ‘identity terror’, an unknowingness as to who one had become and a well of profound sadness. The refugee

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had to learn a new language, come to terms with a new set of cultural meanings and a different state’s laws and history, find new friends—or not—find a new, and quite possibly less suitable, job. They had to reinvent themselves. Ironically, the significance of the state is regularly underplayed in the studies of children of Holocaust survivors. Many of the parents of the British second generation had a belief in the nation-state and the importance of one’s membership of that state. This membership offered security and a corporate progressivism, or so it had been believed. In this case, however, the state into which the person was born threatened death. Then the British state, while it had allowed our parents in, did not welcome them and did not encourage them or others to feel ‘at home’. Transit was what was generally being offered. The refugees were officially discouraged from speaking in their first language or generally appearing to be ‘too foreign’. Many professionals, such as scientists and doctors, had to struggle to get permission to work. Until Churchill became prime minister, there was also a lurking concern about the government’s appeasement tendencies and maybe also about the influence of Mosley’s Union of Fascists. However grateful the refugees were to Britain, they were often left with an existential sense of insecurity, of not belonging. They had lost their sense of place, of the familiar. We were born to parents who generally felt displaced and dislocated. As the war ended, the exiles had to confront the past and brave the unimaginable search for family. The refugee from Nazism regularly had not and could not have known what was happening to their loved ones ‘back home’. Any letter sent abroad from under Nazi occupation could be opened and read. ‘Letters’ from the camps were at best in code. In any case, parents wanted to present themselves as coping. There was no way for the exile in the UK to help their parent who was under threat in another country. Even had they known that their parents were faced with the probability of death, even had it been possible to get the necessary papers, all of the foreign-born parents of the participants in this study would have risked their own lives by returning ‘home’. It is easy to mislay the realization of how brief the Holocaust was, that most people in the camps were murdered over a mere three years between 1942 and 1945. The suddenness of the parents’ disappearance and the gut-wrenching uncertainty as to whether the relative was alive or dead will generally have intensified both the sense of the unreality of the death and of the depth of the loss. When my mother looked for her father, I suggest she was not aware how far the odds were stacked against his being alive. For the exiled parents of the British second generation, there was frequently the discovery that their parents and/or other relatives had been suddenly, inexplicably murdered far away and out of reach.

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There is a contrast here with those who experienced the camps. The exile who fled and survived is more likely to accuse themselves of not doing enough to save their parents. That they were in a different country far away, across impenetrable borders, that they were unable to stop their parents being murdered will not have prevented a deep sense of having betrayed, of guilt, of feeling ‘what right do I have to be alive’. My mother frequently announced as she grew old that she wished she were dead and several times told me that she wished she too had died. There was no way that I could ease her pain. I have heard of other first-generation exiles making similar remarks. Exile brought with it a particular and terrible sense of guilt hand in hand with loss that dripped into the veins of the second generation. The refugee felt they ‘knew’ that they had saved themselves but left others to die. To speak of such ‘betrayal’ was impossible. But if the parent could not speak to the child about what had befallen the child’s grandparents, could not speak about their own ‘culpability’, then their ability to talk to the child about most matters became strangled. Our parents’ responses to exile and dislocation can be usefully understood as aspects of displacement. Our parents felt that a power beyond their control had moved around the pieces of their life and that their previous conceptual framework no longer engaged sufficiently with their present ‘reality’. This lessened their ability to connect present with past or make sense of the everyday or even have a desire to do so (Feather 2000, 8, 9). In turn, displacement impacted the British second generation: we could only draw on fragments to construct ourselves from within a family map and history, further limiting our ability to place ourselves securely in the now, even while we feel dominated by an elusive past. The British second generation’s sense of disconnection and anxiety was amplified by the sense that their parents did not feel well connected to their adopted society and often were unable to provide the synapses that might connect the child to its past. Experience cannot be identified as one’s own. The British second-generation person can easily internalize a sense of self as incomplete, which the absence of a coherent personal history intensifies. Hence a permanent state of interpersonal Othering is engendered, which is reinforced by many of the experiences of the second-generation child, especially if there are cultural/religious differences at school or with peers (Feather 2000, 8, 9). As with their parents, there can be a sense of ‘identity terror’. Although so little is known of the family’s past, this separateness from self exaggerates the sense of the impossibility of escaping from ‘living in the past’. But the studies of the children of Holocaust survivors do not focus on the effects of dislocation and of loss of grandparents out of reach, nor do they address how the internalization of being the Other impacts the Brit-

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ish second generation’s sense of the hollowness of their identity. Many— though certainly not all—of the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, particularly in Israel and to some extent the US, were brought up to know their histories in a cultural environment in which ‘Jewishness’ was often a badge of honour and where ethnicity and the Holocaust are given prominence. I suggest that this is not the case for the British second generation. What I am arguing is that issues of dislocation need to be taken as seriously in terms of their effect on the British second generation as being the descendant of camp survivors. What I have observed is that even in Jewish social/cultural networks in London it is as if the British second generation have almost disappeared; they have no visible identity outside their own circle. Though there has been attention paid to the second generation in some conferences on the effects of the Holocaust, issues around the British second generation are regularly marginalized. A group who are often unseen or marginalized are the parents who fled Nazism for political reasons, and there arises the question as to whether they had a distinguishable effect on their children. While the ‘politicals’ are not always a distinct category, there were many thousands of people who arrived in the UK before the war whose principal cause for flight was political: Communists, Social Democrats and unaligned ‘cultural’, business or right-leaning anti-Nazis, in particular from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. One of the few studies that potentially has relevance to the political refugees who parented some of the British second-generation cohort is Yehuda et al.’s 1997 study, which considers a comparison between the effect of being a camp survivor and going into hiding during the Nazi years. Yehuda et al. (1997, 435–63) conclude that the assumption that being a camp survivor will produce a higher level of trauma is not well founded; being in hiding correlated with just as high PTSD as being a camp survivor. 41 On the other hand, Hass (1995, 11) suggests that those who were active as anti-Nazis, in that they joined the partisans and fought back against the Nazis, emerged with a greater sense of their self-worth intact. 42

One implication of what I am arguing is that an academic concern with the personal effects of Nazism has amplified a tendency to see the individual as the ‘zone’ for interpretation or as the ‘problem’ and a concern with the unconscious and the importance of attachment. That is one of my difficulties with the present concern with trauma and transferred trauma. Another problem, as Judith Butler (2006) highlights, is that the use of

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‘trauma’ threatens to turn the traumatized into the helpless victim. Moreover, she suggests along similar lines to Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved, that overfocusing on the Holocaust can be at the expense of an understanding of suffering and can even demean the sufferer (Butler 2012, 195, 196). We need, argues Butler (2006), to become mindful of the way that a discourse based on trauma can both threaten ‘to absorb the present into the past’ and ‘re-enact the past as the present’. 43 This study is not orientated towards how best to approach the secondgeneration person seeking therapy or analysis, which is the background to many of the more clinically orientated transferred trauma studies. Indeed, I suggest that some of the responses by the second generation to their parents’ anxieties and insecurities may, because they are coping strategies, be more rational and protective than the negative and nontemporal association with suffering and victimhood that transferred trauma suggests. These responses may even offer some form of resistance to these negative associations. While the experience of the second-generation person is felt individually, it is both a product and manifestation of historical and psychological processes; how far these influences work together or separately in relation to the British second generation could be further explored. My task is to let the British second generation speak for themselves. My preference in ‘Reflections’ is to ‘reflect’ on the testimonies using words such as pain, loss, suffering or dislocation, words the participants themselves use, rather than trauma.

THE ISSUE OF GENDER One methodological issue that needs exploring is that, having started with an equal number of women and men, my final sample of included interviews were from two women and six men; three women, but only one man, would not agree to have their testimonials included. The problems arose when I showed the transcripts to the participants. I had not anticipated so much resistance to the use of the interviews. Seeing what they had said in print caused some of the female participants deep disquiet, though generally presenting this in terms of what their parent(s) or wider family would feel. They did not present their objections in terms of themselves—that they had changed their minds, had got upset after the interview or did not want what they had said about themselves in print. Their priority, in other words, was the interests of their parents, at least as they were perceived, not their own interests.

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The issue that repeatedly appeared as the key ‘problem’ was what the interviewees said about their mothers. Even though the interview would have appeared under a pseudonym and lacked all recognizable signs, the interviewees expressed a concern in particular that mothers might read the—always mild—criticisms made of her or even know her daughter had talked about her in an interview. Any explanations have to be tentative and generalized. I suggest the interviewees could not accept what they had said in part because when the words were in transcript form, they had become separate from the person and their inner truths had become more visible. Maybe reading the words that had been spoken encouraged a growing—and intolerable— realization about what they felt about their mothers. This suggests how deeply troubled some in the second generation, more so the women, are about their negative feelings about their parents, particularly their mothers (as explored in part 3). So why were these women unable to cope? As will be seen in the published transcripts, many participants were critical of their mothers. One interpretation is that many second-generation women identify so closely with their mother’s needs that they are not able to separate out their own wants. The daughters, striving to take responsibility for their— very old—mothers, like their mothers before them, did not want to confront their families’ pasts. They ‘acted out’ what they thought were the best interests of their parents rather than being able to make a decision in terms of what they wanted or what was best for them. This suggests a failure to take control of their own experiences. In line with the analyses presented by Glassman, Wardi and others, the disquiet is that of a daughter about the response of her mother. 44 Some in the British second generation still seek anonymity. Indeed, one possible feature of being second generation may well be a fear of being ‘found out’. One interviewee e-mailed me when they had read the transcript of their interview, putting into words what I suspect quite a number of the participants had felt: ‘Yes, this process has stirred up a lot for me. I have been sorting out my own head about it. It is quite one thing to spontaneously answer questions, to think out aloud, to carry on thinking by way of clarification on one’s own, and quite another thing to be happy for it all to get out into the wider world, however that may be.’ Another interviewee explained that if the interview was published, it was like sticking her head above the proverbial parapet, and it ‘would get shot off’. There is another interpretation of the refusal to allow me to use material from the interviews. The interviews were almost all free-flowing with few interruptions for questions. So the interviewee was able to allow a flow of words to emerge that, when in print, might have presented a

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different narrative from the one they would have ‘picked’ to present. Open-ended interviews are, as is well known, likely to go into greater depth, maybe to tap into a level of consciousness that the person would not have articulated given a more structured form. There may also be explanations for this inability to cope with a transcript of what has been said that is not gender-specific. Almost all the participants were very open, but then some felt uncomfortable with the subsequent transcript to an extreme degree. Arguably, the effect of dislocation is that of dissociation and even detachment, especially when it is associated with the destruction of family networks. Maybe the rupturing of these networks destroyed an ability to recover the past and thus created a hiatus between lived experience and the ability to articulate it. The nature of exile is the fracturing of ‘normal’ social and individual relationships, which leads to an otherwise not experienced level of insecurity, an insecurity that arguably the British state has reinforced through their emphasis on ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ and, ironically, the importance of ‘security’. 45 Maybe, the greater ease with which the children of political refugees spoke about themselves and their families is because they had an ‘alternative’ source of identity that was not as fractured as those who fled, not because of their beliefs, but because of an artificially assigned inferiority. Maybe the three women were just at an extreme and illustrative of a more general underlying pattern. After all, so many people whose interviews are included told me, either on or off the record, how rarely they had spoken as they had to me. Maybe, and this would be worth exploring, there is a pattern where the children of persecuted exiles often have to struggle with a sense of ‘non-ness’, which constricts the ability to accept the past or themselves. While any one interpretation of these withdrawals has to be viewed with some scepticism, nevertheless studies by Kellermann suggest that the children of Holocaust survivors present patterns of difficulties, of which one pattern includes impaired self-esteem with persistent identity problems and an overidentification with the parents’ ‘victim status’. While these three women’s parents were not Holocaust survivors, as they had all left before the Holocaust began, nevertheless this analysis appears to describe their behaviour. That they were women, and women are more likely in general to have low self-esteem, may well have amplified the possibility for these tendencies. Is it that the women feel more beholden to their parents/mothers and experience a greater concern for them and therefore ‘sacrifice’ themselves? Do the daughters feel a greater inability to separate themselves from their mothers, as Glassman (2013) suggests? A different, though potentially complementary explanation may be that these women’s families were part of a Jewish community that, in the 1950s and early 1960s,

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still saw the woman’s role more in terms of the home than work. Indeed, as far as I gathered, two out of three of the women who withdrew were dependent on the income of men, either their husbands or through inherited wealth. A sample of one cannot be that useful, but nevertheless, the woman whose parents had been Communists never had a problem with the idea of her interview being made public and indeed was the only woman interviewee who had always worked full-time and supported herself financially, gaining the experience of a world outside of the home and the confidence that bestows. One pattern I spotted too late to ask questions about was that none of the women appeared to have completed ‘conventional’ degrees: where a university degree is completed within about three or four years of leaving school and where the qualification gained is at the university and not the ‘technical’ level. Of course, far fewer women—both absolutely and proportionately—went to university before the expansion of universities after the 1960s. Every man I interviewed had a degree and, in some cases, several. I must emphasize that I did not deliberately draw my sample from a knowingly educated male group. Did some of the women find the implications of the interview and transcript too difficult because they had less confidence confronted with the world of ideas and an ‘academic’ code of language? This perceived difference would be worth a further, more systematic enquiry. I became so curious about the difference between the men and women in educational standard that I started to consider the educational background of other second-generation women and men I knew of and started asking people who attended relevant meetings about what educational standard they had reached. This has to be conjecture, but it does appear that British second-generation men are generally far better educated than British second-generation women. Some of the possible explanations have already been touched on, such as differences in parental attitudes towards boys and girls and the higher expectations of boys than girls within the educational system in the 1950s and 1960s. But one unexpected possible explanation appeared when I was discussing this issue with two second-generation women. The suggestion for the educational discrepancy emerged that maybe some of the second-generation women had chosen not to take degrees because they wanted to get as far away from their ‘overprotective’ families as possible and taking a degree was more likely to enforce their dependence on their family’s finances and goodwill, at least for the time being. A question therefore remains as to how far British second-generation women’s experiences differ from those of second-generation men.

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APPLIED METHODOLOGY This is a study that foregrounds the second generation’s own testimonial material and allows us a view into the lived experience in a way no amount of statistics can ever do. While background material is drawn from archives and published work, the emphasis on testimonial material is different from that of many historians or sociologists within a positivistic tradition. My aim was to allow the individuals to present their own diverse testimony, their own stories, which I then reflect upon but do not turn into my narrative or claim as ‘truth’. The study is trying to advance understanding of a phenomenon, and the cases should not be considered as particularly representative or as nonrepresentative. What is said in an interview may come as a surprise to interviewee or interviewer. Given that I was encouraging people to break their own silences, or at least step into uncomfortable and rarely visited personal territory, no other approach could have worked. I do not enter the controversial territory of the relationship between ‘truth’ and life story or of memory and reality in these testimonials, or even of how far the process of speaking about the previously unspoken reveals the authentic. What is significant here is that even if the memories spoken of were constructed, they are still ‘real’ in the sense that the participants themselves believe them and act accordingly. 46 This was, moreover, not a study about memorialization, and though the issue of memory was always present, how to memorialize was not something generally explored. I want to start with another ‘not’ about this study. This is not a study of the first generation, nor is it a study of how the second generation understood their parents. My concern was how the second generation understood their own lives, how they perceived the impact on them by their parents and how their lives were framed by experiences and events that generally had occurred before they were born or when they were very small. It is also not a study of the lives of the second generation in the round—I did not ask about children, partners or jobs, although these topics appear in most of the testimonials. Inevitably the ‘past’ is constructed, but particularly so in cases where the line of memory was cut, as was the case when grandparents did not survive to tell their ‘stories’ and parents also largely kept silent. Although he is referring to Holocaust survivors, not those who got out beforehand, Levi’s dictum that the witnesses to the Holocaust were rendered ‘mute’ by what they had lived through, and that what they could tell had become fable, illuminates the silence of the exiles (Butler 2012, 197). I had supposed that the ‘children’ would have created their own ‘story line’ or coherent narrative in terms of their parents and grandparents and had not anticipated the extent to which this was not the case. What is

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there to remember when the parent was silent? The participants’ remembering has to be understood even more in terms of how the person is putting together their own narratives.

THE SAMPLE I will start by introducing the people whose testimonials are included and mention how I was able to contact them. Then I will consider the issues around the sample. The order of the interviews in part 2 is alphabetical, and I present the names here in the same order. The participants were able to decide for themselves whether to adopt pseudonyms. I interviewed twelve people and had lengthy unrecorded chats with others. Only eight interviews are included for reasons I elaborate on later. Henry: Henry’s Jewish parents had lived in Hungary. They survived and got to the UK soon after the end of the war when Henry was a little boy. Because he was so young when he arrived here, Henry defined himself as second generation. He represents some of the ambiguities of what is meant by second generation. Henry was the ex-husband of somebody I knew through the Second Generation Network, though he himself was not involved, and I had not met him before. John: John’s father was Austrian and Jewish, his mother English. His father was arrested in Vienna, and he subsequently fled to the UK. His parents met through the Communist Party in London. After the war, they first moved to Vienna, then to East Germany, where John grew up. John moved to Britain as a young man and is now settled here. 47 Merilyn: My parents had met in the left/theatrical world of Berlin and fled, via Paris, to the UK in 1933/1934. Mike: Mike’s father, who was Jewish, fled Prague. He met Mike’s British mother in Communist Party circles in London. Mike was the exhusband of a woman I knew through a local campaign against local authority spending cuts. Robert: Robert’s father had been born in what is now Poland; his mother came from Hungary/Austria and lived in Vienna. Both were Jewish. I had known Robert thirty years previously via an MA cultural studies course, and I recontacted him.

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Peter: Peter’s Jewish father had come out of Hungary and married a British woman. I knew him via the Second Generation Network. Sarah: Both Sarah’s parents originated from Berlin. Her mother was Jewish, her father’s father was Jewish. I found Sarah through Robert, above. Tania: Tania’s parents both came from Germany and fled because they were Communists. Tania was born in the UK and was here until the late 1940s when her parents went to West Germany. Tania returned to the UK in her early twenties. I knew her via the Second Generation Network. Tom: Tom’s parents were both Jewish, on the left, came from Vienna, and fled to London. 48 Tom Wengraf’s (T.W.) interview of me is also included—between John and Mike. I also talked to and had ‘informal’ interviews with a number of people at various stages of this research when I took notes but did not record our conversations. I met them through Second Generation meetings, other meetings relating to exile, for example, at the Wiener Library in London, and more amorphous social gatherings. When approached, the majority were keen to speak to me, but when I refer to what they said, I give no autobiographical details. A couple of people whom I did not interview I do refer to with a name. When I was developing the idea for this book, I had a conversation with Judith—with German Jewish refugee parents— which, with her agreement, I refer to a few times. She made clear she was not interested in being interviewed. I talked at length outside of an interview format with Isaac, a friend who was born in Britain to German Jewish refugees, and I make occasional references to what he told me, again with his agreement. The participants were ‘handpicked’. With a little help from my friends, my contacts in second-generation circles and the reputation of The Language of Silence, I easily gathered a group of would-be participants, most of whom readily agreed to be interviewed when approached. At points, I refer to the group of participants as a ‘sample’. Given the circumstances, mine was an opportunity sample. I selected from people who fit my criteria and who were available and willing. Key to this study was that, although the number of participants is small, I wanted to interview a range of people whose parents left for very different reasons—anti-Semitism at the one end, political activism at the other. I could then consider whether such differences affected their chil-

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dren differently. I also wanted to see whether there were differences in responses of people whose parents had come from the ‘conquering’ country, Germany, rather than the ‘conquered’, such as Czechoslovakia. The countries of origin were therefore Germany and Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. 49 While Hungary had only been occupied by the Nazis proper in 1944, their government under Horthy became an ally of Mussolini’s Italy in November 1938 and allied itself with Germany in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Therefore, unlike Poland, people had started to flee before the outbreak of war. In addition, my initial intention was to draw people whose parents had arrived in the UK fleeing Nazism before the outbreak of war and who had therefore been born in the UK. I started out with a range of clear criteria that I wished any ‘sample’ to fit, but found that the diversity among the British second-generation cohort made this unlikely.

I started with the hunch that the people who were most likely to have escaped would be more likely to be political/Political, because they would be more likely to have a ‘worldview’ and be asking the ‘why’ and ‘what next’ questions about Nazism. (Although I will use ‘political’ at times to refer anybody political, I do at points refer to ‘Politicals’, which refers to people with a party allegiance, while ‘politicals’, when not being used in a general context, will refer to people who simply had a clear political understanding.) They were therefore more likely to have got out when, in one sense or another, it was still more feasible. 50 I also suspected that how our parents defined why they had lost their homelands would have affected their children’s own perception of themselves. One reason to look at the children of Communist parents who had actively opposed the Nazis, was to observe whether their children were more likely to have a more proactive and less pessimistic worldview. Were they less likely to see themselves as victims than the second-generation people whose parents were ‘victimized’ because of their perceived ‘ethnic inferiority’? Finding children of Political exiles who lived in the UK proved more difficult than I anticipated, and it is worth questioning why I could not find others who were permanent UK residents. London’s data suggests only about eight thousand political refugees of all political colours arrived here between 1933 and 1939. The precise number of Communists or fellow travellers who succeeded in getting to the UK from across Europe is unknown and probably unknowable. Calculations vary from about one to two thousand, and even if one goes with the larger two thousand figure, it is still a very small number. 51 Many Political refugees,

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especially if they were Communists or close fellow travellers, went back to their country of origin or to East Germany after the end of the war. Of those who stayed in Britain, a number had fallen out with the Communists in either a leftwards or rightwards direction. Overall, it seems likely that the number of people whose parents were Political refugees and who had been born and grew up in the UK is very few indeed. However, many of the people I interviewed with a Jewish background turned out to have at least one political parent, in other words, a parent who had done something in opposition to the Nazis, rather than having a political commitment for its own sake. This had not been my intention but, I came to realize, was to be expected. It is now understood that of the few who escaped Nazism, there were a disproportionate number with political inclinations. We should not view this period with hindsight. The Holocaust was as yet unimaginable. As a generalization, it will have been P/political activists, whether or not Jewish, who were most likely to have anticipated the danger they could be in and who might therefore seek to flee. I conjectured that second-generation people from a P/political background were more likely to be curious about understanding their identity within a broader context. The character of the sample took further twists and turns. I had started off intending to draw people to be interviewed from the Second Generation Network 52 because these were people for whom the label of ‘second generation’ was sufficiently significant that they attended second-generation meetings. Not all in the second generation see this as a distinguishing label. But I found that I needed to draw people from outside the Second Generation Network. Firstly, the greater number of refugees from Germany and Austria, for reasons already examined, meant a far greater number attending Second Generation meetings came from a German-speaking background, and I needed to find participants from a greater spread of countries. I also quickly realized that there was an enormous turnover in people attending Second Generation meetings: many people who had regularly or occasionally attended no longer did so, even though, crucially, they continued to identify themselves as second generation. To only interview attendees from meetings would be to catch only one stage and time in the British second generation’s lives. So, whether or not they attended the meetings, the people who were willing or even enthusiastic to participate in my study, all already considered themselves to be second generation. In addition, despite my efforts, everybody I interviewed was some sort of professional. I would have wanted the people I interviewed to have been a cross-section occupationally. But here are a cast of academics, teachers, artists and architects, among other professions. Ultimately, this

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study is based on the case studies drawn from one class, indeed, one fraction of that class. Part of the explanation may be that people from a professional background and/or people used to talking within secondgeneration circles are more likely to be familiar with examining the relationship between self and history in an in-depth interview. Being middle class linked to the class position of the second generation’s parents—the middle class had a greater ability to flee and survive. As one person told me, you needed money—and a not insubstantial amount—to get out of Germany and to somewhere ‘safe’. The alternative to escape for a fraction of the German working class was to be part of the—not always effective—Communist underground. A further explanation, already discussed, was the British state’s policy during the 1930s of preferring people who could contribute professionally. 53 I hope future researchers manage to access a broader social-class spectrum. I did not initially have an age range in mind, but I wanted to draw my sample from people whose parents had arrived in the UK as adults who had ‘chosen’ to come here. I quickly realized that this affected the age range of the second generation I was interested in. The children of those who had come out themselves as children on the Kindertransport were likely to have had different experiences from those who had arrived in the UK as adults. The people who arrived on the Kindertransport will generally not have had their own children until some years afterwards. Without wishing in any way to minimize the trauma of separation from parents and family that most of the Kindertransport children went through, nevertheless, many of the second-generation children of Kindertransport parents were more likely than the older group to have settled into British society, got jobs, married somebody who lived in the UK and become ‘integrated’ before having their children. So the children of the Kindertransport are not included in the sample. My focus is on second-generation people whose parents had arrived in the UK as adults. The very oldest second-generation person could now be in their late seventies— very few indeed fled Nazism before 1933; most of the participants were born between the mid-1930s and the early 1950s. Another reason for this clustering, I suspect, is that it is as people retire, they start to have the time to open up what had remained covert, maybe encouraged by their own children reaching an age of maturity where they want to become more interested in their families’ pasts. I had also decided to choose people, if practicable, where both parents had been exiled, without the ‘balancing’ influence on the child of a parent born in the UK. Also, I supposed that two ‘foreign’ parents were likely to contribute to the issues that particularly interested me: the relationship between the first-generation refugee parent and the second-generation child and the conflict for the second generation of being both a part of UK

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society while at the same time feeling outside it. A British-born parent could have a mediating effect. I was interested, moreover, in how far my own experience was typical. So I was surprised by how many people had one foreign parent and one British parent. Three of the refugee men, though no refugee women, had married a British resident. So three people whose interviews are included had British mothers. John’s Austrian father—and English mother—were Political, whom I therefore included. Peter’s father was Hungarian, his mother British, but Peter was the only person I could find at that point from Hungary. Mike’s father, who had married a British woman—and another Communist Party member—came from Czechoslovakia and was one of only two people from Czechoslovakia whom I interviewed, and I therefore decided to include him. The two people I talked to whose parents had fled for Political reasons and whose interviews are included had all lived part of their lives abroad. Tania, whose parents were not Jewish, had been born in Britain, but her family moved back to West Germany after the war. Tania then returned to the UK without her parents in her early twenties. John, who had an English mother and an English extended family, was again born in the UK, but, after the end of the war, his family moved first to Vienna, then to East Berlin. John also returned to London in his twenties. As both Tania and John had been born here, had strong UK roots and had lived in the UK for the vast majority of their lives, I decided to include them. The issue of gender has already been introduced. For a variety of reasons, out of the eight interviews presented, only two are of women, although I originally interviewed six women and six men. So, although I developed clear criteria for the people I wished to interview, in practice I ended up with about half of the sample not fitting all criteria. To conclude this section on sampling, key commonalities emerged strongly not just among the sample, but between the sample and many of the other British second-generation people I talked to, suggesting that the testimonies here may not be atypical. 54 Nevertheless, I am not presenting this study as providing a representative sample of the British second generation. The participants’ stories need to be understood in their own right. At the very end of my interviewing, I received a gift. One of the people I had consulted about my research, Tom Wengraf, offered to interview me. At first I was uncertain because the purpose of this study was to look at others, not myself. Then I agreed because I thought the reader would find who I am and what my issues are to be of interest. Tom’s interview of me was too long to include except in an edited version.

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The derangement associated with what happened to relatives under Nazism cannot be overestimated, even though it can take many different forms. Two people whose parents had been refugees, to whom I mentioned my research, essentially stopped me before I got started by telling me they didn’t want to think about it. It was just too painful. For them, seeing themselves as second generation would involve opening themselves up to something they could not bear.

INTERVIEWS The focus in the interviews was on how the second generation perceive themselves, how they situate themselves in relation to the fragmented memories that they ‘inherited’ and how they see the dislocation and displacement experienced by their parents as having affected them. I chose to do in-depth interviewing of a small number of people, which was all I could handle as a solo researcher. But I also consider this to have provided a level of intimate responses about difficult issues that most of the participants had rarely talked about previously, and which a quantitative approach could not have achieved. I will not reiterate the limitations of interviewing so few people, which are well known. 55 Initial contact was through either e-mail or phone calls. The participants were all told about the purpose of the interview, that I was interested in how they saw the past as having affected them, and I stressed that this was not an interview about their parents. The participants all voluntarily gave their consent to be interviewed and knew they could stop the interview at any point. They also knew my purpose was to publish a book that would be based around the interviews. All interviews, bar one, took place in my home. In all but the one case, the participants chose this location rather than other possibilities for a variety of reasons. As elaborated on in ‘Reflections’, the participants required little encouragement to talk, and, with one exception, concentrated on talking about themselves and how they saw the past having impacted them. Almost all the participants told me at the end of the interview what a valuable process it had been for them. I subsequently gave each person a copy of the transcript of the interview and then discussed it with them. While there is no professional agreement over such procedures, I felt that such was the personal sensitivity of the material that not to do so would be unethical. I am aware that it is for exactly this reason that some advise not to provide participants with transcripts of what has been said. Reading the transcript of the interview can lead to the participant, by then in a different ‘space’, to

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wish to take control of the material and present a different view of themselves and their reality. This was indeed what was to happen in a few cases (see the ‘Gender’ subsection above). With these few exceptions, none of the participants wished to change significantly what they had said or amend the transcript except in minor ways. However, the discussion about the transcript did allow for further contact with each participant, and in many cases, communication was subsequently maintained through conversation and/or e-mails, allowing me further insight into the person’s testimonial. Occasionally, I include comments made by the participants subsequent to the interview. While I refer to ‘interviews’, my purpose was to allow the ‘participant’ as much free range as possible within the inevitable constraints of a focused interview. Therefore, while this was not an exchange between equals, my intention was to prejudice what was said as little as possible, and I therefore see ‘participant’ as a more appropriate term than ‘interviewee’. Open-ended interviewing has its own strengths and problems. Any firsthand material has to be understood and its reliability contextualized and assessed within the context of time and place. Moreover, the interview is only one form of expression—it has the advantage of encouraging tapping into a less frequently visited part of consciousness, allowing a free flow of ideas and memories; unlike, for example, a diary, which might well yield different and more tempered ‘truths’. Indeed, as elaborated upon in ‘Gender’, the ‘truths’ that emerged in these interviews were sometimes then disowned by those who had spoken them. But it is important to pay attention to the testimony of the British second generation and not be too circumscribed by methodological concerns, including the inevitability that the participant will simplify, maybe dramatize and inevitably will have reconstructed the past and often only will be telling one ‘truth’ out of all the possible narratives. Even when the interviewee’s consciousness is ‘free flowing’, we all know how we express different sides of ourselves to different people and, just as significantly, how the composites of who we are shift over time. The interview was one snapshot in time. I am aware that the picture of the people interviewed will often no longer be the case and is inevitably partial, and that is only as it can be. There is an added complexity relating to an understanding of the historical meaning in these testimonials. While the participants lived, to one degree or another, in Nazism’s long shadow, their refugee parents both wished to turn their backs on their pasts and were at the same time overwhelmed by them. Their parents’ desire that their own memories of barbarity should not engulf their children also encouraged a parental silence about the past. For the participants, the interviews were part of their

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laying claim to and construction of their pasts: they were ‘Breaking the Silence’. Theirs is not a recalling of the past. Moreover, even more than is customary, the participants’ representation of their parents’ past lives needs to be read as revealing the participants’ feelings of both aggravated concern and antagonism towards their parents, rather than telling us about the parents themselves. I also had to be conscious of my role. The interviews were likely to address difficult topics, and I had to retain an awareness of my ‘inquisitorial’ role. However noninterventionist I strove to be, it is impossible to be true to anybody else’s interior realities and experiences. Any other interviewer would inevitably have gained a different interview. My hope is that as I was so intimate with the experiences talked about, that I will have encouraged a ‘truer’ picture than could otherwise be the case. Indeed, my impression was that the respondents’ willingness to open up to me was partly because they knew I was one of them and would understand. The experience of pain and the deconstruction of being do not always make for a coherent or sequential rendering. In order to be as faithful as possible to the originals, I have kept editing to a minimum and not significantly changed the wording or the sequencing in the script of the testimonials except when limited editing was required to help the reader understand the meaning of what was being said. In such cases, I highlight such changes at the beginning of the text or within the text itself. I wanted to honour the testimonials with minimal editing, but there are occasions where I have thought it preferable to edit the script. In other cases, the participant’s speech was so structured that my intervention was largely limited to working out where to put the paragraphs when transcribed. But even then, the participants inevitably did not always speak as in the written sentence or paragraph. Though I kept it to a minimum, I cut some of the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’, the pauses and the repetition in the pursuit of readability. Nor is it always possible to catch the timbre of how things were said. At some points in the transcript of the interviews, I indicate pauses or upset, but there is no way my transcript can fully convey the deep level of distress or hurt that some of the participants communicated during the interview. Due to these reasons, some of the transcripts may at points be difficult to follow. A literary non-second-generation friend, in an exasperated voice, told me, ‘They need a good edit’. But if the testimonials are a bit fragmented at some points, that is a telling indication of what it can be like to be second generation. The areas of questioning were deliberately very broad. Initially, I only had a list of six questions, and in some cases, after I had asked the first

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question, the participant hardly required any further steering. Different interviews developed their own trajectories, and frequently I hardly needed to say anything much at all; in other interviews, I responded to what the interviewee was saying and displaying and, very occasionally, needed to nudge the participant back ‘on track’. What I found is that the last question about whether the participant wanted to add anything provided a few of the participants with an opportunity to develop on what had not yet been said; in the circumstances where the reply was that there was nothing to add, I have not included the question. As could be anticipated in an in-depth interviewing format, the themes that mattered to the participants started to emerge from the first. This affected subsequent interviews. I have summarized many of these concerns below.

ORIGINAL QUESTIONS What do you know about your family’s past? How did you find out? How do you think your parents’ exile has affected you? Do you identify yourself as British/other? What is the meaning of being second generation for you? Has it been important to you? Is there anything else you would like to mention? Supplementary Questions If the parent(s) basically kept silent, how did you find out about the family? How has this process affected you? Was there a particular attachment to objects that were connected to the past, such as letters? How far did the experience and/or needs of your parents dominate—or not—your experiences as a child? If your parents fled primarily because of anti-Semitism, what does Jewishness mean to you? Did you have the same beliefs and customs as your parents? If your parents fled primarily for ‘political’ reasons, how did this affect the way you saw yourself? Did your parents impact other aspects of who you are? Did you identify more closely with one parent than another?

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There is a question as to why so many people wanted to talk to me when they had rarely spoken about such matters. I suspect many had read or come across my novel, The Language of Silence, and in its pages they recognized themselves and the relationship they had with their parents. They appreciated that I understood the issues of being British second generation from the inside. Had I presented myself as ‘neutral’, in an academic, literary or professional sense, I would have had less response. But I was not a neutral interviewer and understood intimately how difficult it was to talk and what the participants might want to talk about. I suspect that my being a woman also helped the process, as, stereotypically, women are understood to be more emotionally open. I was seen to offer a safe space. Maybe, and this is surmise, some of the people felt the chill wind of age and took the opportunity of having some record of what they had been through, the pain they had borne. And for some I provided an opportunity to explore aspects of their lives and themselves that I suspect they sometimes discovered only as they talked. Although one or two of the participants thought they knew beforehand what they wanted to say about themselves, my impression is that most of the interviews took the participants to places they had not expected to talk about. These interviews were a unique way of discovering and observing the life experience of this small, usually hidden strata in British society. The interviews document and reveal the second generation’s lived experience, including the intricacies of the relationship with their parents. They represent a ‘reclaiming’ of a past by the participants and, in its reclaiming, their interpretations of their past. They reveal how the past is lived in the present. As with much oral history, the interviews make public the private, but, as with other examples of oral history relating to the legacy of Nazism, the interviews mark a break with a past silence. They turn the unspoken-of past into the spoken-of present. Finally, I hope that, through the acts of remembering and interpreting, the opening of the windows onto the past, the interviews helped to empower the participants.

ETHICAL ISSUES There were, inevitably, ethical issues arising from such interviews. Indeed, I wonder what sorts of restrictions I would have had placed on me doing such intimate interviews if this had been a part of university-led research into some form of intergenerational psychological transference because of concern for the interviewees’ well-being. The refusal by three women to let me use their testimonials also raises the question of how best to interview people on such emotionally charged and tender terrain.

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My questions/prompts were essentially the same for everybody, with inevitable variation depending on what was being said, but the responses varied significantly. I had the impression almost everybody positively enjoyed the opportunity to talk about themselves in a safe environment and on a subject that they get little opportunity to air, though a couple of respondents gave the impression that they wanted to protect their emotional underbellies at all costs. How was I to behave? I had to be aware of my role in the interviews as I could not aim to be neutral: I anticipated my role being that of the ‘collaborator’, while having to maintain some distance. But I suspect I presented as a cross between an empathetic interviewer and some sort of counsellor. Indeed, after the first time I was refused use of interview material, I wondered whether my encouraging near silences were putting me too much into the role of a counsellor where the women were ‘confessing’ truths to me that they themselves subsequently could not cope with. I started to take a slightly more interventionist, rather than sympathetic, role. I found some of what was being said deeply upsetting, and on one occasion, I could not avoid showing distress. This narrowed the participant’s ‘space’ to be emotional, but he also noticeably did not like my revealing too much feeling. What I also learnt during the interviewing process was how important it was to reassure the participants that there was a range of responses to my interviewing them, which included their getting upset afterwards, thus, I hoped, normalizing any subsequent emotional ‘disturbance’. I let everybody know they could contact me if there was anything they needed to talk about that arose from the interview. Finally, though I had in every case spent many days on the interviews and transcripts, I had to accept with as good grace as possible that people had the right to withdraw their permission for me to use their material, and that I had no right to assume otherwise. I offered everybody the possibility of adopting a pseudonym. I make no distinction in the text between those with a pseudonym and those who chose to keep their own names. As Sarah died soon after the interview before she had a chance to check the transcript, it seemed only appropriate that I should anonymize her, and I adopted that name for her. I have also deleted even mildly negative references to other people and family members from Sarah’s transcript, as I cannot know whether she would have wished these comments to stay in.

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THE DESTRUCTION AND CONSTRUCTION OF MEMORY One small but significant warning about interpreting these interviews: as became clear in many of the interviews, it was not just that the participants often did not know about their families, but, sometimes that they could not know. One feature of the Holocaust is that, despite its reputation for efficiency, the details of who was murdered were not always recorded. At least some of the names of people taken straight to be gassed were not kept. Some records were subsequently destroyed either by the Nazis themselves or as a result of Allied bombing. Thus uncertainty about the accuracy of records is an inevitable feature of the Holocaust. People cannot always know the exact places and times of death. Mike explained that he had looked for years for a certainty about when his grandparents and aunt had been taken first to Terezin and subsequently to Auschwitz. The issue of certainty came up repeatedly in his interview. He scanned Nazi films of Terezin for his relatives. He worked out the date when his family would have died from the coded postcards written in Auschwitz but sent only after they had all been killed. Mike writes that date every year in his diary. He said he only felt certainty when, quite recently, he visited the Jewish cemetery in Prague and saw, high up on a ceremonial wall, the name of Buchbinder. This unknowing compounds the characteristic fragmentation of recollection and reconstruction. Uncertainty, not being completely sure, can lead to the unreality—and opacity—of relatives’ deaths. My hope is that the interviews included here reveal the peculiarities of different experiences of those whose parents fled Nazism and allows us to unpack the different meanings of living as part of the British second generation. The testimonials stand in their own right, independent of my ‘Reflections’, for the reader to understand and interpret. Any case study approach tells the reader about the interviewees’ experiences, which can be depoliticized and ‘experiential’ rather than analytical. But I do not see this study as only specific to the children of refugees from Nazism. Too many wars have occurred over the last hundred years that have caused millions to flee for their lives: from the millions who were displaced after World War I to the tens of millions displaced following World War II, not just in Europe and the USSR, but also in and from India; the millions who became homeless as a consequence of the imperialist possession and plunder across Africa and elsewhere; the creation through the British mandate and then dismemberment of Palestine between 1919 and 1948 and the more recent imperialistic adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Too often we see that the places that politically or economically implode are in what were British/European colonies or near colonies whose boundaries were artificially created by colo-

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nial powers. Those who then flee for their lives have too often not been welcome in the UK. The government, as it did in the 1930s, at least prior to the pogrom of November 1938, point their fingers at would-be asylum seekers and refugees, condemning them as non-British or, even worse, as undermining all that is good about Britain. It is hoped that this study sheds some light on how tyranny, and not only by the Nazis, continues to affect as yet unborn generations. This study is written to counteract racism and to help us, the children of refugees, understand that we are not alone.

NOTES 1. Finkelstein’s position in The Holocaust Industry, although presented in the US, has received some attention—and sympathy—in the UK, which most of the participants in the debate about the new dominance of the concept of the Holocaust in academic and popular consciousness have not. Finkelstein argues that the ideological assumptions behind the ‘Holocaust’ have been in Israel’s interests. Novick (see next endnote for details), often erroneously coupled with Finkelstein, argues that the major cause of the shift towards making the Holocaust mainstream after the Eichmann trial of 1962 in Jerusalem was Israel’s success in the 1967 war, backed by the US government, which enabled Israel’s leadership to feel able to legitimate its existence, and the Holocaust became part of that. Holocaust consciousness, Novick continues, has served to present the Jews as unique, exclusive victims and has come to be perceived as an increasingly core part of American Jewish identity. Finklestein’s (2003, 7, 8) stress is more than Novick’s on the intertwined power of the Holocaust industry and Israeli and American Jewish elites; Finklestein (2003, 33) also sees the Holocaust as having become a central aspect not just of an American Jewish identity, but of American identity in the round: ‘The Holocaust is more central to American cultural life than the Civil War.’ 2. Einsatzgruppen: mobile killing units were squads composed primarily of German SS and police personnel. From late 1941, they had the use of mobile gas chambers. 3. There is a significant debate as to the degree to which the medical profession, without which the T4 programme could not have been developed or operated, were under pressure from the Nazi state or how far the majority cooperated with its aims, even initiating and implementing the programmes. The increasing evidence from the published records of the medical profession among other sources, argues Proctor, points towards the latter (Longerich 2012, 6). The Association of Socialist Physicians was one of the few medical groups to resist. The euthanasia programme is often confused with the earlier, more common programme of sterilization, which then continued alongside euthanasia and sometimes provided the grounds for the killings. Sterilization was for those

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‘unworthy’ of having children for the ‘motherland’. Yet again, this reveals how these policies developed in stages. 4. Thanks to the hard work of Dr Astrid Ley, in autumn 2012, a commemoration was finally held for the victims at Brandenburg. See Astrid Ley, The Euthanasia Institution of Brandenburg an der Havel, Murder of the Ill and Handicapped during National Socialism (Berlin: Metropole, 2012). This is where my aunt, Annamarie, was murdered. 5. Indeed psychiatrists and consultants from the euthanasia programmes helped set up the extermination camps and staff them. One of the first commandants, Christian Wirth, who supervised the euthanasia centre at Hartheim, was designated supervising inspector in the early stages of the extermination camps, including at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Wirth’s successor at Hartheim, Franz Stangl, later became commandant of Treblinka. This experience provided ‘good practice’ for later extermination (Ley 2012, passim; L. Alexander 1996, 39–47). 6. Pohl comments on the historiography of the Holocaust and argues that the first systematized modern killing that was both state driven and had popular assent started in 1939 in Poland. Nineteen thirty-nine signalled a quantum leap and the start of the Holocaust. The importance of German-occupied Poland as the key laboratory for Nazi experimentation in racial persecution has not been given sufficient attention; it marked a further step towards the mass murder of Jews and non-Jews. 7. Ian Kershaw (1991, 7), presenting the intentionalists’ perspective, has argued that Nazism is seen as the history of the programmed and consequential implementation of Hitler’s ideological intentions. Unlike the functionalists’ emphasis on the overriding impetus derived from the Nazi state despite its anarchic character, the intentionalists place greater emphasis on Hitler’s role and psychology, at its extreme, his neurotic psychopathology, as well as the coherence of Nazi ideology, which, it has been argued, can be dated to the very beginnings of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) (Kershaw 1985, 60). Hitler’s importance is illustrated by his speech in January 1939 predicting the annihilation of the Jews or by his later speeches in 1941 (Browning 2005, 105; S. Friedlander 2002, 422; Longerich 2012, 261). The functionalists/structuralists on the other hand, whom Kershaw is perceived as broadly associated with, offer a fundamentally different analysis of Nazism: it emphasises the significance of structure and structural constraints as more determinative. Hitler’s ideology was not so much a programme as a ‘loose framework for action’ (Kershaw 1991, 7). This analysis rejects the concept of the Nazi state as monolithic and instead posits that there was a chaotic collection of rival bureaucracies in a power struggle with each other (Kershaw 1985, 63–66). The SS and the Nazi Party gained increasing ascendency, resulting in the growing radicalization of the Third Reich, which culminated in the Holocaust (Kershaw1985, 63–66). 8. Browning is seen as presenting a subtle form of functionalist analysis, which highlights that though the overriding impetus derived from the Nazi state, its anarchic character—the space for local initiatives—needs to be recognized. While the intentionalists emphasize the role of the centre, Browning observes

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that the local administration, for example, of the police, allowed middle-ranking functionaries a crucial level of ideological independence and improvisation, which also challenges the idea of a coherent central ideology. Kershaw (1991, 117, 118) similarly presents an analysis of a dualism between state and party, which lessened the state’s control, allowed Hitler a sought after room for manoeuvre and gave the space through the party for local initiatives. 9. Bauman (1989, 1, 2) argues that the systematic nature of the annihilation of the Jews makes it a one-off, not an extension of previous Jewish history, even if that history is peppered with pogroms and anti-Semitism. Alone, anti-Semitism offers no explanation for the Holocaust (33). He argues for the importance of a sociological analysis of the Holocaust (3). 10. The Holocaust was not a product of the criminal or insane (Bauman 1989, 19). Bauman expounds the position that instrumental rationality is inherent to the modernity that resulted in Auschwitz, a ‘mundane extension of the modern factory system’, the choice of physical extermination, the right means for the desired goals and a product of routine bureaucratic procedures, the rational solution to a problem (15). 11. One criticism of Bauman’s position is the absence of agency associated with the essentialist pessimism of his analysis. The active racism of Nazi Germany cannot be reduced to bureaucratic processes. And though it is unlikely to have been his intention, Bauman’s macro-analysis goes against Browning’s emphasis on the incremental stages towards a policy of genocide. 12. Browning (2003, 6, 7) sees Germany’s brief moment of advance into the USSR as the point when the decision to exterminate was made in September/ October 1941. It was Germany’s victory, not their subsequent defeat, that precipitated a decision not just to ghettoize, but to exterminate European Jewry. Others, such as Jersak (2008, 304), emphasize instead that it was after the Nazi’s Russian campaign had ground to a halt by the end of 1941 that the Nazi’s plan to deport Jews to the East—where they would perish rather than be murdered—could no longer be seen as viable; it was then that Hitler acceded to Himmler’s intent to step up the extermination of the Jews. Thus, expulsion ceased to be the preferred option and mass murder increasingly became the chosen outcome, a mere stepping up of the existing piecemeal annihilation programme. Jersak (2008, 303) adds that the decision to eliminate the Jews only can have been made meaningful from 1940/1941, after Germany had occupied parts of Eastern Europe. 13. Browning diverges from historians such as the German historian Christian Gerlach, though Browning states that he agrees with much that Gerlach argues. Gerlach’s emphasis is on the centrality of the US’s entry into the war after Pearl Harbor, and consequently fixes the date of the ‘final decision’ later than Browning, in early December (Browning 2000, 28). Gerlach’s argument is that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent declaration of war by Germany on the US deprived the Jews of their value as hostages for US neutrality and ‘inaugurated the world war that was the condition of Hitler’s January 1939 Reichstag prophesy, dooming the Jews to destruction’ (Browning 2000, 34). Hitler invoked his Reichstag prophesy the day after declaring war on the US:

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‘The World War is here, the destruction of the Jews must be the necessary consequence’ (Browning 2000, 29). 14. Mann concludes that the vast majority of the perpetrators was men, had some Nazi record, came from parts of Germany that had already been threatened and from white-collar/public-sector professional groups and were Catholics. 15. The fate of black people (students, former soldiers, entertainers, ex-colonial officers, American and British black military) in Germany and in Germanoccupied territories ranged from isolation to persecution, sterilization, medical experimentation, incarceration, brutality and murder (USHMM, ‘Blacks during the Holocaust’). 16. Mike Haynes and Rumy Husan (2003, 2, 18, 80) present the current estimation of deaths in the USSR, both military and civilian, as a result of World War II as over twenty-six million, suggesting that though such figures cannot be precise, this is, if anything, an underestimate. The figure of sixty million who died as a result of the war includes the roughly four to five million German civilian and military dead, including those murdered by the Nazis, plus the millions of deaths in India and as a result of the continuing war in the ‘Far East’. Two to three million Germans alone died on the Eastern Front. 17. Anybody interested in this area can refer to Michael Zimmerman, ‘Intent, Failure of Plans, and Escalation: Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies in Germany and Austria, 1933–1942’, in Roma and Sinti: Under-Studied Victims of Nazism, Symposium Proceedings, 9–23 (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2002), accessed 14 February 2013. 18. Even words like transmission or transferred are disputed, as are the uses of words such as intergenerational or transgenerational. I am not conducting or critiquing the primary research and try to adopt the phraseology of the authors themselves. The emphasis on the importance of attachment to the mother is in line with attachment theory. The debates about attachment theory can be read about elsewhere. One of the earliest proponents of attachment theory was Bowlby, who contended that the primary attachment was with the mother, although more modern attachment theory accepts that attachment does not have to be with the mother. 19. Kellermann was the chief psychologist in the Jerusalem branch of the National Israeli Centre for Psychosocial Support of Survivors of the Holocaust and the Second Generation (AMCHA). 20. The official figure for camp survivors who entered the UK, according to the Board of Deputies Demographic Unit, was two thousand according to Glassman (2013, 235); in other words, a tiny fraction of the total number of refugees in the UK. 21. Marita Grimwood (2007, 3) refers to the ‘hierarchy of suffering’. It is far from unknown in second-generation meetings for there to be a discussion about who has lost the most family and under what circumstances. Death camps score the highest.

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22. I do not explore the relationship between the creation and subsequent expansion of the State of Israel and Jewish identity(s). This and the Holocaust have both changed the meanings of Jewishness, indeed, arguably the existence of Israel, as much as the Holocaust, has both shaped and standardized modern conceptions of Jewish identity. 23. One easy source of confusion is that many of the studies I am referring to use a different categorization from mine. ‘First generation’ is used to apply to the first generation of people born in the new country. But that is not the vocabulary used in the UK. Here, the word used for this group is ‘second generation’. To avoid confusion, which, as I have discovered, generates easily around these different categorizations, I shall wherever possible refer to ‘second generation’ for this group, even if the author uses ‘first generation’. 24. Kellermann advises that we should focus on the specific characteristics of the children of Holocaust survivors. Kellermann (n.d., 8–12) distinguishes between four different approaches to transmission to the second generation: the psychoanalytic, socialization, the family and communication and finally the biological or genetic. I do not go into any of these debates. 25. For anybody who would like to follow up on such notions, a good place to start is Charlotte Delbo’s writings. I wonder sometimes whether my writing this book is not a protracted and painful act of mourning for the dead. 26. Gabriella Rosenthal, Bettina Voelter, Nogo Gilad and Yael Moore, ‘The Intergenerational Process of Mourning: The Families of Fred, Lea and Nadia Weber’, 171–98; Gabriella Rosenthal, ‘Similarities and Differences in Family Dialog’, 8–14; Gabriella Rosenthal, ‘Traumatic Family Pasts’, 20–32, are all found in Gabriella Rosenthal, The Holocaust in Three Generations: Families of Victims and Perpetrators of the Nazi Regime, ed. Gabriele Rosenthal (London: Cassell, 1998). As these articles all form chapters within the same book and the authors of the chapters all include and are associated with Rosenthal, I shall refer to these different articles by referring to Rosenthal’s book plus page numbers. 27. There is much current debate about the issue of collusion and collaboration between Jewish leaders and the Nazis in local communities but especially in the camps, for example through the Judenräte—or Jewish Councils, established by the Nazis. Primo Levi, in The Drowned and the Saved for example contentiously identifies a ‘grey zone’ in the ghettos and the camps where some of the ‘privileged oppressed’ became oppressors, blurring any distinction between victim and perpetrator. 28. Although Rosenthal’s (Rosenthal et al. 1998, 3) approach to the interviews was different from mine, nevertheless there are common themes. She writes that she first just said to the interviewees to talk about whatever they wanted, and that generally the interviewees—her word—would develop their own narrative, with occasional prompting over details. 29. Rosenthal (Rosenthal et al. 1998, 25) suggests one reason for strong Zionist views among her Israeli sample was to justify their ‘abandoning’ their relatives for a new life. 30. Unfortunately, although Rosenthal and colleagues make a point of comparing the children of Holocaust survivors with the children of forced exiles, and

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are very aware that there may be consequent differences in the second generation, the families are drawn from the British mandate of Palestine/Israel and/or Germany, situations that are so profoundly different from the UK as to make the analysis insufficiently applicable to the children of those who escaped to the UK. Nevertheless, she highlights an important distinction: that for families of camp survivors, the main theme was around death; in families of ‘forced migrants’, it was around emigration. 31. In a longitudinal study of Israeli Army combatants by Soloman, he suggests that the Israeli Army children of camp survivors were more vulnerable to stress, just like their parents. They reported a greater number of PTSD symptoms, similar to their camp survivor parents, that endured over a longer period of time than Israeli soldiers whose parents were not Holocaust survivors. 32. Kellermann (2001) emphasizes the controversial nature of any definitive conclusions about secondary traumatization. He highlights the discrepancies and disagreements over the degree and character of transference. His conclusion is based on his analyses of thirty-five published studies on the transference of trauma from the mid-1960s to the 1990s, most of which are drawn from the US and Israel. 33. Aggravating characteristics that increase the chances of camp survivor transference to the second generation, Kellermann (2008, 264) argues, are that the children ‘were born early after the parents’ trauma’ and immediately after World War II; that they were ‘the only or the first-born child’ early after the parents’ trauma; that ‘both parents were survivors’; that they were ‘replacement children to children who had perished in the war’; that ‘parents had endured extraordinary mental suffering and significant loss of close family members’; that ‘family relations were characterized by enmeshment without sufficient corrective periods of disengagement’; when a symbiotic relationship dominated between parents and children and that ‘the trauma was talked about too little or too much’. 34. Lurie-Beck’s sample of ‘survivors’ were not just Holocaust survivors but included those in hiding, including two out of the approximate total of seventy, from the UK. Her study is also unusual in that she contacted political organizations, who might have had members persecuted for political reasons. Her approach was a quantitative one, as opposed to my case study approach. LurieBeck (2007) ranks different modes of transmission for the second generation; the most influential factors were the level of attachment between parents and child, especially with the mother, then family cohesion, then encouragement of independence, especially by the mother and finally the level of family communication. She sees the second generation as manifesting similar patterns of trauma to their parents: depression, anxiety and paranoia. 35. Lurie-Beck refers to the work of other scholars who show that Canadian Japanese prisoners of war showed better postwar adjustment than camp survivors. They had been actively involved in fighting the ‘enemy’ and knew why they were in the prisoner of war camp, which the camp survivors, who often had no rationale for what had befallen them, did not.

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36. Lurie-Beck lists other variables that she argues have been underassessed in explaining parental psychological trauma and variations in transference: the exact nature and length of parental Holocaust experiences, the extent of family bereavement and country of origin, the age of the person in the camp and the time lapse from being in a camp to the birth of the child. Although Lurie-Beck recognizes that she did not have the resources to follow up on her initial analysis, her initial conclusions were that both women camp survivors and their granddaughters were more likely to be depressed, anxious, have worse coping skills and see the world as less meaningful. 37. Scharf compares the pyscho-social functioning of the adult offspring of Holocaust survivors with a comparison group and with adolescent third-generation grandchildren of Holocaust survivors in middle-class families. 38. My feeling of sympathy towards this study may be in part because it is a qualitative, not quantitative study that allows the reader to hear the survivors more clearly. Hass also emphasizes the resilience of the survivors. 39. Written after her time in Auschwitz, Charlotte Delbo’s After Auschwitz creates the best portrayal I have come across of the impossibility of somebody with such experiences to communicate meaningfully with those who did not go through such barbarities. Delbo also brings to the fore—in her foreword—that her ability to tell the ‘story’ is based on her not reentering into her experiences. 40. Kassai and Motta’s study has been criticized for its small sample size. In addition, Kassai and Motta’s sample of grandchildren of Holocaust survivors largely consisted of members of the modern Orthodox community, which cannot be seen as representative of even the larger Jewish community, let alone Holocaust survivors more generally. 41. Yehuda et al. compared those who had been in hiding with camp survivors and suggest the importance of age. They are critical of studies that suggest that survivors who had not been in camps showed lower levels of PTSD, arguing that, at least in 1997, there had been hardly any comparative studies. Instead they emphasize the stress of being in hiding, always fearing discovery and the isolation involved in not being able to contact family or friends (1997, 454). 42. Rosenthal (1998b, 13) suggests that Jewish families in both Israel and Germany appeared to want to lay claim to people in their family who had been ‘related to fighting’. She suggests this was to show they had not been compromised by the Nazis. I wonder if it does not also indicate an ideological shift away from seeing their loved ones as victims. 43. This paradox could be seen to encapsulate too many in the second generation who are paralysed by their self-perception as traumatized and unable to conceive of the possibility that they can change the future for the better in the light of the past. 44. The only male interviewee who refused me permission to use his material had a different reason from the women. He objected that there was too little in the interview about his parents, in spite of having talked persistently about them and little about himself. He was an extreme example of someone who did not see his own life as worthy of interest.

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45. For an elaboration on this perspective, see Howard Feather’s review of The Language of Silence in Sociology of Everyday Life (blog), November 22, 2013, http://www.kehfeatherfsmail.blogspot.com. 46. My thanks to Rudolph Moos for this point, made in a personal conversation. 47. Following a conversation with Professor Charmian Brinson, I found reference to John’s father, Georg Knepler, in Charmian Brinson’s article ‘A Very Ambitious Plan: The Early Days of the Austrian Centre’, in Marietta Bearman, Charmian Brinson, Richard Dove, Anthony Grenville and Jennifer Taylor, Out of Austria: The Austrian Centre in London in World War Two (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2008), 11 passim. I would like to thank Professor Brinson for making contact with John possible. 48. I found Tom’s mother’s name in Marian Malet and Anthony Grenville, eds., Changing Countries: The Experience of German-Speaking Exiles from Hitler in Britain, from 1933 to Today (London: Libris, 2005). 49. While technically Austria was invaded, its position is more ambiguous as, with the exceptions of a brave and committed opposition, much of Austria welcomed the Nazis. 50. I use the conceit of a small p when I refer to people who were broadly political, a capital P when referring to people who had a consistent and active attachment to a political organization. In practice, in this study, the only Political people were Communists, though being Political could equally apply to Social Democrats. However, I came across very few people whose parents had come from a Social Democratic background, and when approached, they were either not willing to be interviewed or did not consider themselves as British second generation. My unverified assumption is that many German and Austrian Social Democrats returned home, that is, to where they had been born. 51. Ilse Meyer in her personal correspondence refers to one thousand Communists alone coming out of Czechoslovakia after the Nazi invasion, but I have not been able to find corroboration of this. I wish to thank Irene Fick for showing me Meyer’s letter. 52. The Second Generation Network (2GN) was set up in 1995 for the children of exiles from Nazism, and therefore often, but by no means always, the grandchildren of people who perished in the Holocaust. 53. British government policy in the 1930s militated against the working class, peasants or farmers getting visas to enter the UK, most of whom also would not have had professional backing. The British government did finally save some men, initially mainly working class, who were brought to the Kitchener camp, though many of their—second-generation—children have been upwardly mobile. I want to thank Claire Ungerson for this point. But those children were not visible in the second generation or left political networks, and my attempt to contact them rapidly fell apart. (Maybe they felt a need to conceal their pasts.) 54. There are other strata of the British second generation whom I did not encounter, for example, people from a Polish background. While I did not want to interview people from this group, it is still of interest why there are so few in

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the Second Generation Network’s or my orbit. I suggest that many Jewish people who did get out of some of the occupied countries joined people who had arrived in the UK in flight from earlier pogroms in parts of Poland, Russia and the Ukraine around fifty years earlier; they therefore found a community in the UK, even a relatively easy sense of identity, which in some cases will have included an affiliation to Jewish orthodoxy. Thus this may well be a group who see themselves as Jews for whom the label and concept of second generation is not a pressing one and who would therefore not be involved in the 2GN or be likely to attend meetings that raise issues relevant to the British second generation. 55. Although Kushner in ‘The Holocaust: Critical Historical Approaches’ is discussing testimony about the Holocaust, he argues that an understanding based on testimony was seen as too partial until it started to gain favour after Gilbert’s study of 1986 (33–38). This section has also drawn on Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds., The Oral History Reader (London: Routledge, 1998).

II

The Testimonials

The order here is alphabetical based on first name. The sections in italics are my comments or questions. I use only an initial for most of the names the participants referred to, for the sake of confidentiality, unless it was agreed I include the full name.

INTERVIEW WITH HENRY, JUNE 2011

Henry was born in Hungary, and he and his parents miraculously survived the Nazis. They got out in 1946 when Henry was very little and came to the UK. The rest of the family were decimated. His parents, like many others in this study, did not talk to Henry about what had happened, and they did not have an easy relationship. Henry sees himself as falling into the category of British second generation. Orthodox Judaism, though it has to be negotiated, is nevertheless key to his life, which has at times been troubled. An ellipsis is used here to indicate that Henry paused, rather than that his words have been edited. I have left Henry’s description of the effect of the Holocaust on his family in the text, though it falls outside the main purpose of these interviews, because of its poignancy and the effect it had on Henry.

Could we start by you telling me . . . the basic demographic facts? I was born 24 January 1946 in Miskolc in Hungary. My parents were both, in a sense, survivors. My father was deported twice. The second time was with a number of brothers and a nephew to a labour camp, I guess, late ’43, or early ’44. My mother was in Budapest during the Nazi deportations. My father would have been in Miskolc. Apparently, at the time I was born, it was a relatively small market town, but under the Communists . . . It became the second-largest town in Hungary. 109

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My mother was in Budapest. Hungary was an ally of Germany until 1943, and then Horthy saw the way things were going and wanted to make peace with either the Russians or the Americans, so the Germans took direct rule in late ’43, and then they rapidly started the deportation of the Jews and the mass industrial system at Auschwitz, which is why the Hungarian Jews were killed more quickly than any other Jewish group. Until then, they lived under discrimination but not physical persecution. My father and the other able-bodied men in the family . . . at least eight or nine siblings, were deported to labour camp from Miskolc, the others went straight to Auschwitz and were killed. My mother came from a very poor, highly assimilated Jewish family, and she was living in Budapest at the time the Nazis took direct rule. She was passed off as a part of the family by a Christian family so she survived the war. My parents had had a relationship from before the war. But they came from very different backgrounds. My father’s father strongly disapproved of the relationship. My father came from a very Orthodox family. He . . . became an atheist, very free living before the war. But still very much under his father’s influence . . . My mother had managed to get a place in a teacher training college in Miskolc and became a teacher in English. She was born in Barcs, a tiny village on what was the Yugoslav border, as it was then. The railway line is the border, and it goes right through the village. A really tiny village. Very poor. Her father had been a soldier in the First World War and died from his wounds. Nineteen fourteen/nineteen fifteen. But somehow she got a scholarship or something to this teacher training college in Miskolc and that is where she got her first job and that is where, in the ’30s, my mother and father had an affair. But his father broke it up. My mother was not Orthodox and was too poor. They broke it up and they weren’t together during the war. In about 1942, a lot of Hungarian men were drafted into the Hungarian Army, fighting with the Germans, and he survived that time because he was fluent in a lot of languages, and so the Nazis used him as an interpreter. He never talked much about that time, but I know it caused him a lot of guilt. Partly survivor guilt, but I’m sure he didn’t do anything as an interpreter; but he witnessed things. He must have facilitated it in some ways.

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How did you know? He told me. Later I filled out a form and I mentioned it and he said, ‘Please don’t tell anybody this.’ He lived with that . . . Anyway, they had a relationship and it broke up. Then my mother was in Budapest during the war, and my father was in Miskolc. Her particular guilt. She died of cancer in 1973, and I remember I was with her on the last night in hospital and they pumped her full of morphine because she was in great pain and she was delirious all night and she was talking only in Hungarian and she kept on saying: ‘Mummy, please forgive me. Mummy, please forgive me.’ And I asked my dad what this was all about. He said she felt terrible because her mother had come to stay with her in Budapest, and shortly before the direct Nazi takeover, she was supposed to go back, but she didn’t want to go back to Barcs and my mother forced her to go back against her will. And she was deported from Barcs and taken to Auschwitz. In fact, all the Jews in the surrounding areas around Pecs—and there’s a synagogue still there—that was where they were rounded up. They brought people in from all the villages. So she [Henry’s mother] was very guilty about that. Though the fact of the matter is that if she’d [Henry’s maternal grandmother] have stayed, they would both have been picked up and died. The family [in Budapest] would never have hidden both of them. My mother would have died as well. My mother only survived because she was a young single woman and could be passed off as a part of the Christian family. Anyway, she felt terribly guilty. My father, he survived but most of his family didn’t. But he wasn’t instrumental in that in a way that my mother felt she was. I suspect my mother, she, they must have had a premonition. But the Nazis weren’t yet in control. It’s the view of hindsight. The Nazis ruled through something called the ‘Black Arrow’, the Hungarian fascists . . . I’ve speculated a lot about it later. They came together. I was born in January ’46. That’s just about the story: they came together, got married and I was born. I suspect they got married when I was on the way already. It was very tight . . . There’s barely eleven months between the time the Nazis were driven out and I was born. I was born in Miskolc. I don’t know why my mother was back in Miskolc. It may be she met my father in Budapest. My guess is that they would both have spent the time searching for people they knew who survived. I don’t know how they met each other again.

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Did you ask? No, I never asked. It would have been a good question, except that they didn’t get on. They quarrelled ferociously throughout. My father left my mother and took me with him when I was about three or four. They came back together. I’m sure they weren’t going to get married but for the war. I’ve always thought. They’d separated before the war. Then they came together in that emotional situation. But they knew they weren’t suitable for each other. According to the literature I’ve read, it is very common that the parents, the survivors, have unhappy marriages because they got married in unsuitable circumstances, as it were. But they never split up . . . They reconciled, as it were, and stayed together in an unhappy way. So they never really split up till my mother died. After she died, I couldn’t ask my father because he changed his tone completely and he became: ‘What a wonderful woman’, as if there had never been any trouble between them. I should have asked my mother because she was much more open about these things. I didn’t know she was going to die so young. I would have got a romanticized version of it. She was very much in love with my father. I don’t think he ever realized that until she’d died. It was a bit onesided. My mother talked to me a lot more than my dad. My dad only talked about it after she died. We went to Holocaust Memorial Day together a couple of times. By then, I was married and had children. I didn’t know this until I read the literature; I don’t think I knew anything about it. I can’t begin to date when, but probably late primary school, maybe early secondary. But the other thing about it is that I grew up in a survivor community. My dad, who had been an atheist, became very Orthodox again after the war. They were determined they would leave Hungary. We left illegally. Apparently on a bus for illegals. They got passports from the Swiss, not the Swedish; I think the Swiss were doing the same sort of stuff. But they were illegals, really. My mother has often described to me how on the bus, the other people wanted to kill me because they were afraid I might start crying, going across borders or whatever. The bus went all the way to France. This was 1946. There were times when they went through borders when they shouldn’t have had a child on board. My mother had to swaddle me, in a blanket as she described it, so I didn’t cry out. Now, everybody in that group has died so I couldn’t find out why. I had a cousin who was with them who was fifteen years older than me, but he’s dead now. So I couldn’t find out why. I know they had no permission to leave.

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My father’s hope was to go to either England or the US. My father had a sister in each place before the war. I have a file of correspondence between my father and the Home Office trying to get permission. We were in France for two years. The only reason we got here was that my auntie here had married an Englishman who had strong connections with an MP, Samuel Fisher, who eventually was our guarantor. Forty-eight/ forty-nine. I was nearly three. On the Internet, it says there were two deportations, one was to the army, without genocidal intent, the second time was in late ’44. He [Henry’s father] got back in between and was living in Miskolc with the family. I don’t know how he got out of the army; they did release those who weren’t killed in combat. He didn’t talk about that. Very occasionally something came up. For example, when we went to see Schindler’s List, there was a scene where they showed from a hilltop looking down, you see a Jewish ghetto being liquidated. He said he’d seen exactly the same . . . The second deportation he has described much more . . . in the town, Miskolc, when the Nazis rounded up all the Jews and they separated them out: the old, women and children went one way and the able-bodied young men went the other way. He and two of his brothers were pushed into the young men line. My cousin was young. Only about eleven at the time, but he was very big, and his mother, with some sixth sense, pushed him into the young man’s line. And so he survived. Was sent to labour camp. When they were released, they were put into the care of a Czech officer who was given instructions to shoot them, but he didn’t. He let them go. I met him several times. I don’t know what he was doing there. My father tracked him down and brought him over to London a few times. I met him a couple of times. A very similar incident is at the end of [the book] Maus—survivors were released on instructions that they should be killed. When I say Czech, there were these borders that kept shifting. Of course, this could have been a borderline. My father knew a man who said he’d had six nationalities over twenty years! [Because the borders in Middle Europe kept changing between 1918 and 1939.] My father’s father, my mother’s mother and a lot of the women and all the children were taken to Auschwitz. The ones who went from Miskolc were all killed straightaway. My mother’s older sister lived in Montreal. She went out in 1956. She had had two children, both still alive, my cousins. They are somewhat older than me. They’ve told me they remembered what happened at the end. My girl cousin was a baby at the time of deportation. My boy cousin was ten years older than me . . . He has a shattered left arm, and he told me what happened was that right at the end, the Nazis didn’t have trains to take

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people to Auschwitz. So they were rounded up and shipped off to walk to Auschwitz. And they were walking to Auschwitz. My aunt had the foresight of placing the baby, my girl cousin, with a Christian family, and they looked after her. But my aunt and her son were marched to Auschwitz. But my cousin and some other teenage young boys passed a wheat field and decided to run for it and were pursued by cavalry and they shot them all. They shot all the boys and left them in a heap. He was shot in the arm and was bleeding profusely. He passed out and they assumed he was dead. Later in the day, some peasants passed and found him alive and nursed him back to health. His mother was marched to Auschwitz but it was closed, so they never got there, and she was returned and she found her baby and though she’d seen her son shot, she somehow felt she couldn’t give up on this and searched the whole area again and again and finally found him. I love British war movies but not about the Holocaust. The ones I like are the ones made during the war when the outcome was still in doubt. I grew up in a refugee community. My father was Orthodox and the agreement between him and my mum was that I would be brought up Orthodox. I actually went to the Hasmonean School, a modern Orthodox school, in Hendon at primary and secondary. We went to a variety of very Orthodox schuls. The children were mostly the children of Jewish survivors, and most of the teachers were Holocaust survivors, though there were some English Jews. I spoke with the worst English accent. Throughout my life, my parents spoke to me in English. My parents did not want me to learn Hungarian. My mother was an English teacher and my father spoke lots of languages, though if they didn’t want me to know, they spoke Hungarian, but I did understand it anyway, though they didn’t teach me it. They never told me anything about it. Nothing. Later, when I look back on it, I realize my first memories, of my mother picking up the rations of orange juice and cod liver oil, as any postwar child remembers. This would have been two or three years after these events. But nobody ever spoke about it. I had the strongest foreign accent. Loads of the kids had parents with foreign accents. Most of the teachers had foreign accents. Most of them had come from Germany or Austria. Many of the teachers had come over before the war so they spoke with a German accent and were very proper Englishmen. But I had a Hungarian accent. Most of the children had been born in England. I was the most foreign of them. I was bullied terribly. By the children and the teachers. By the children because of my accent. They said they couldn’t understand me. I didn’t want to go to primary school at all. I used to follow my mother home, which was only a few minutes away.

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Then she would return me to school. Then at secondary school, a lot of emphasis developed on my being academically successful, so I was sick every morning, literally every morning, I was so nervous about not performing well. If I didn’t perform well enough, I’d be hit by the teachers. I didn’t do well at primary school, partly because my English was so poor. My mother was determined to make me successful, so she practiced English writing with me. When I went to secondary school, the Elevenplus year was taken on the first year at secondary school. Mr G., a German refugee, was renowned for being extremely strict. ‘I’m G., the terror of the school’ [said in a mock heavy German accent]. He was terribly strict. I don’t think a day went by when I wasn’t hit hard, and this went on for two or three years. He thought in the first year that I was there that I was able. He kept me down for a year. I was young for that class. The second year then he became my form master when I entered the grammar school as well, so he was my form master for three years. And he hit me all the time if I made mistakes. It wasn’t usually a formal caning with the stick; it was usually a slap in the face. All sorts of ingenious ways. I was scared stiff. My father knew I was being sick every day before I went to school, and I told him I was being hit, so he arranged an appointment with Mr G. in his house, and we went there and he said: ‘Henry is making an awful fuss about nothing.’ And he pretended to give me a [playful] slap. And I was too scared to say anything. In a way he was my favourite teacher: he favoured me. He used to call every child ‘an ox’ if they made a mistake, but me, he called a ‘capital ox’. I remember one of the few times I got hit on the bottom, formally in front of the class, was when I got eighty-six and the previous test, I’d got ninety-five . . . In sixth form, they no longer used physical punishment. It was still the case that if you do something against the discipline of the school, they gave you a formal caning, but no more than other schools. The kids used to get me to do their homework. I developed friends with the other ‘capital oxen’ in my stream and the parallel stream. In fact, we went to university together and we remained lifelong friends, though one is dead now. And others befriended us because they got things out of us. I had a lot of friends at sixth form. Your home background must have been quite fractious, from what you’ve said? When I was three or four, my father and mother quarrelled all the time. My father was quiet, didn’t shout; my mother was very hot tempered. My mother shouted at me a lot and hit me a lot.

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My father thought I was being mistreated. His two brothers—his younger brother had come here before the war—my father’s sister and my father’s other brother were always talking against my mother, and they persuaded my father that he should leave her because she was being bad to me and hitting me all the time. So he took me away. We went to live with the younger brother, who by this time was very rich. And we lived in his house in luxury for six months. And I asked and was told she’d gone back to Hungary to see her family and would be back in ninety-nine days. By that time, they got back together. I later discovered what happened. My cousin who had escaped with my father became a Chosid. Most of my family were modern Orthodox, in current jargon, knew quite a lot about Western culture and dressed normally and so on, so they weren’t separate from it. The Hassidics are the ones who lived in Stamford Hill. Had your father really adopted Orthodox Judaism by then? It’s paradoxical. Technically, but I think he had lots of doubts. My mother had much stronger beliefs but had been brought up half Christian. A lot of people had intermarried and so on. She was very favourable to religion. There was a mix of Christian and Judaic beliefs in her family. She was much more spiritual than my father, who was much more of a rationalist. However my cousin, the Hassidic one, was very much against the separation. The main charge against my mother, apart from mistreating me, was that she wasn’t Orthodox. He thought it was all wrong. There is a leading Hassidic figure who came from Hungary. My father had tremendous regard for him. He’s now in Golders Green, a big spiritual leader there. My cousin went to him and . . . much against the advice of my aunt and two uncles got him to reconcile my parents. My rich uncle never accepted the idea that my parents got back together, my mother said. Very soon afterwards, he and his family went to Canada, apparently because his name was dirt for standing out against the reconciliation. She always wanted reconciliation, but I have vague memories of her coming to the house looking for me, I could never tell if it was a dream or not. I was seduced. My uncle was very rich. He had two children, one of whom was a boy my age. I was a lonely child. He was my best friend. I loved being with him. He had all the toys I could have dreamed of. A train set and so on. It was a great life. My father was not rich. I was then a single child. I was very happy to be with my cousin. I went there for a birthday party when they told me my mother had gone back to Hungary. I was delighted at first because it was like a holiday. It was only much later that I realized, that I realized what had happened.

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I have vague memories of the whole period because I was about four, but the actual story I didn’t know till later. My cousin who was ultraOrthodox, he had tremendous regard for my mother even though she mocked the religion. Outwardly she kept to the rules, but she was always breaking the rules behind his back. I became an atheist when I went to university. Last time I saw her on my own before she became ill and she came down to Bristol where I was lecturing, she hadn’t eaten ham and bacon for decades, and we both went out to have a bacon sandwich with great joy. I grew up with greater empathy with my dad. Tremendous identification between me and my dad. And my mum was different because she was volatile and shouted, hit, screamed. Very sociable. My dad and I are not. He was quiet, never raised his voice even when he had a row with my mum. It was asymmetrical. My mum brought me up to revere my dad. My dad did everything nice to me. He was the kind parent, as it were . . . Later on, he became successful. The family trade in Hungary was timber. When he came here, he became a professional box maker. Set up a box factory. He would leave the house to go to work by 6 a.m. throughout my childhood. But when my dad was there, he spent all his time with me, very hands on. He lived to nearly ninety, but his health was never good in my lifetime. My mum was very strong but died young of cancer. Looking back, I didn’t know anything about the Holocaust. I do remember going to see World War II movies: the Dam Busters, all from the English point of view. Everybody went to those. By the time I was in secondary school, they talked about it, but not much about their experiences. I knew in general from reading in vague terms what had happened to them. I do remember asking my father how he had emotionally survived given the knowledge that his family had died, and he said I’d been born very soon after and it was only because I was there that he wanted to survive. I didn’t think much of it at the time; it was very common in the other families, a pretty gloomy existence. You didn’t have a lively life like the non-Jewish people down the road who went to pubs. There was a big split between my mother and my father. My father was not sociable. He had no friends. Most people go to synagogue for the Kiddush. When my father went to synagogue, he took me away before the last prayers so he didn’t have to socialize at the end. If my mother came, she insisted that we stayed there. Until I was about ten, we went to a very small Orthodox synagogue. There was no role for women at all. Then my mother said she wanted to go to a proper synagogue, so we went to a more modern synagogue; but that more modern synagogue was on the extreme right wing, very ultra-Orthodox, in a Germanic and proper way. Very punctil-

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ious about the rules. Dressed normally. Highly educated people. Dour culture. We got the TV to watch the coronation, but before that we went to an auntie who was rich to watch their telly. My father didn’t like comedies or pop music. He’d pull a face and walk out. My mother was quite different—she liked pop music. M., my first wife, always pointed out that although I identify with my father, my taste for pop culture and films comes from my mother. My mother was full of life, and she went out a lot with women friends to see films. She went two or three times a week to the pictures, as she put it. I said, ‘Why can’t I go to the pictures?’ So eventually they took me to the local cinema and they took me to the vestibule and showed me the stills and said, ‘Here are the pictures.’ I thought my mother must be crazy to spend all those hours looking at these. She loved Hollywood films as I do and pop music. Still I listen to old pop music knowing that she liked them. My dad liked classical music. What else do you see as the other effects of your unusual background? The main thing is that I have incredibly serious problems with anxiety and fear. I have problems flying. For years I haven’t flown. Though I have just flown to America to see our oldest son get his PhD. I had to go for cognitive behaviour therapy [CBT] for a long time. The treatment cost more than the plane. It helped me enough that I was able to go on the plane with the help of Johnny Walker as well. I’m afraid of escalators, though the CBT also helped me with that too, although I found Archway [tube station] quite challenging just now. But leaving aside those concrete fears, I’m just constantly anxious. Free-floating anxieties. It’s physical, but it’s also social. I’m retiring in September after forty years as a lecturer. When I say this to my students, they like it, but they don’t know why it is. I’m still scared every time I stand up and lecture. This is to PhD students. At the beginning of the year. I suppose there are two or three things I’m scared of. People may laugh at you. I lose track of what I’m saying, which doesn’t happen very much anymore because I use PowerPoint and that acts as a safety net. I still worry every time I write an article. I have three hanging over me right now. It doesn’t matter what it is, I’m scared of it. I’m scared of people. I had hardly any friends at primary school, certainly none at the school. I became friendly with a Polish Christian boy who was about fifteen when I was seven or eight who lived across the road from us and he befriended me. His father had been a pilot in the Battle of Britain. On one occasion when the boys from school, the bullies, said they were going to come and beat me up, I went home terrified and I went to see

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Angus. He was gentle, but he also had friends with the tough boys in the street, and he brought them around and they said if anybody comes for you, we’ll defend you, but they didn’t come. Obviously it does affect relationships. Having said that, I have to say I’ve been married to my wife J. for fourteen years, and I was married to M. for nineteen years, though we had a lot of problems right at the beginning. But we are still friendly, after some bad years in between. I’m scared of girls is what it comes down to; I’m also scared of boys, but less so. I’m particularly scared of girls. I assume they will reject me. My wife and I go to a therapist together, which has also helped me a lot, and he recommended we read the book by Skinner and Cleese. There’s a cartoon I identify with, with a man falling under the table and the woman across the table says, ‘But I said yes.’ It comes from my upbringing so much. My father brought me up in the Orthodox world. You never had anything to do with girls till you get married, that’s how I was brought up. Never socialized. It’s more than fear. It’s the laughter at my accent. I had a recurrent nightmare when I was at primary school, which was that I was trying to speak to people, but they couldn’t understand me. I was screaming and screaming, and nothing came out. That did actually happen to me. People said they couldn’t understand what I was saying. If they did, they laughed at me because I talked in a funny way. The girls were the ring leaders. But after primary school, I had nothing to do with girls till I was in the sixth form. Then I went to an Orthodox mixed social club, much to my father’s opposition—opposition to the ‘mixed’. I overheard my mother when I was about fourteen saying to my father, ‘We must get Henry dancing lessons so he can start to mix with girls.’ And my father said, ‘No, he isn’t going to meet girls at dances. He’s going to be introduced to girls.’ I was seething inside. Then I went to this mixed social club and I didn’t know how to talk to the girls at all. Then when I went to Cambridge, I determined I was going to get out. I did everything possible to meet girls. Not the best place [low ratio of girls to boys in the mid-1960s!]. My wife is amazed that despite all these fears, with the exception of flying, I pass. I have trouble sleeping. Before I even try to go to sleep I watch a movie. Then I’ll try to go to sleep. It usually takes me a quite a long time. An hour or two. I used to feel panicky, but I don’t anymore—things used to whirl around. But I don’t do that anymore. It’s free-floating fear now. It’s not about specific things. Then I can’t get up in the morning. I didn’t know about the murders and the deaths till I was about ten. Getting to know the details was much later, both in general terms and in terms of my own family, and I never really got to know the details of my own family. Not really. Just the general outline.

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I didn’t know there was anything to ask until a certain point. We never had a big set-piece discussion with either parent. Bits came out at different times. Later, towards the last years of my father’s life, he got angry with me for not asking. That’s the paradox. When I went to see the town Miskolc I’d been born in, I said to my father, who then had mild dementia, and I said, ‘You know, I’m going to visit Miskolc.’ I was actually going to a conference in Budapest, and he said, ‘Why? Why do you want to visit Miskolc?’ And I said I came from there, the family came from there. And he said, ‘Oh, yes, you do, don’t you. But the family didn’t come from there. We came from Verpelét. That’s where I was born and I grew up,’ he said. And I said I didn’t know that. And he said, ‘You never asked.’ I went to see it; Verpelét, as well. It really is a tiny hamlet. Almost nonexistent. Like in a Western film. A tiny hamlet. A church. Hardly a main street. No Jews there except for my father’s family before the war. Thirty miles from Miskolc, which was probably a long journey. The family moved there in the ’30s because of economic problems, and their business was in Miskolc, so they moved. My father never wanted to go back to Miskolc. He didn’t want me to go back. He was incredibly, emphatically anti-Hungary. He wouldn’t let me to go back until the Soviet Union had collapsed. As he pointed out, and this was probably true, that on my passport we are naturalized, but it says the British government does not protect you in the country from which you came . . . Because the Communists would arrest me, no reason, and I’d have no protection. Afterwards I talked to him, and he was very pleased I’d gone after 1990. But he still had no patriotic feelings towards Hungary. My mother was a strong Hungarian patriot even though she was a lover of England. But my father had always hated Hungary. He was an atheist and also a socialist before the war. He told me he was thrown out of school for setting up a Fabian society. Obviously in a quasi-fascist country . . . My parents would have called themselves British here and were very proud of it. I call myself British. I might add Hungarian to make it exotic, but I have no positive feelings about Hungary whatsoever. I see myself as British. I also see myself as Jewish. British comes first. I don’t see a tension between them. If it was a question of Britain or Israel, I think Britain comes first. If asked where I come from, I’d say Hungary, but I am British. What does Jewishness mean to you? That’s a big problem. I find difficulty to say because the parts of Judaism I am proud of . . . I practice a lot, because it was ground into me. The adult values I’ve got stem from Judaism, but they aren’t exclusively

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Jewish. They also draw from Christianity and Islam. I find the particularistic parts of Judaism hard to justify. In terms of how I pray, I practice; I do it in a highly Jewish way. It’s largely just rote. For me, one thing I’m proud of in Judaism is that my values come from Judaism. I practice constantly, pray far more than once a day. Normally I pray without much thought. But dealing with these phobias, I said I’ve been to CBT. But with J., my wife, we’ve been seeing a psychoanalytic therapist who is Jewish. They gave diametrically contradictory advice on how to deal with phobias and flying. The CBT said don’t use any defence mechanisms, though he knew I will. You haven’t had a drink. I said I will say a prayer for a journey. And he said, ‘Don’t keep saying the prayers, not again and again.’ The analyst suggested that a way of dealing with the escalators is that J. and I go up and down the escalator together. He suggested that we both develop a common prayer for going up and down. J. is technically Jewish, though she wasn’t brought up Jewish . . . In her mind she was brought up Christian, not Jewish, but she always knew in her mind that she was factually Jewish . . . We chose a psalm from the Old Testament which she also was familiar with . . . Similarly when we go on the flight. That helped me a lot. We chose an extract from the Psalms that both of us were familiar with. We developed a series of things that became a common mantra. I’m not sure it’s the deaths. It’s the fear. When I went to the CBT, he did lots of tests to start with. It became very clear: I’m not frightened of the end result, of dying. I’m frightened of fear, of being up in the air. If I thought I was going to have a heart attack in thirty seconds, it wouldn’t worry me. My father had no fear at all . . . My mum was full of fears, same as I’ve got, of heights, of snakes. Probably aggravated, but she’d always had them. But my father was very frightened for me. I said he told me the only reason he wanted to go on living was when his children were born. He wasn’t frightened of anything for himself. But if I coughed, if I was on a chair: ‘Oh, careful.’ I was eventually allowed to ride a bike, and he wanted me to swim because it was a safety thing. He was full of fear and anxiety for me. He was very scared for me . . . But I think what really was transmitted through the Holocaust experience was not death itself but the fears that went with it. I couldn’t speak to either of my parents about it because it only occurred to me much later. I feel the anxieties are so deep ground, it’s almost as if it was inherited. If I think about the circumstances in which my mother carried me, in the period she would have been rushing around finding out who had survived, and the incredible ups and downs, fear hormones rushing around her body, and then preparing to leave and getting the papers and all the rest of it and then the early months, on the bus, whatever. Shortage of food. Anxiety about where the next meal is coming from . . .

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I’ve got food phobias, very closely related to sex phobias. I was aware of food phobias when I was a child. It’s a self-hating thing. When my first wife and I got divorced, I went to a counsellor for some years. She kept strict timing, but when I started talking about my food phobias, I talked well beyond the allotted time. I don’t like food I associate with Eastern European women, unless I’ve cooked them myself or a man has cooked them. When we went to restaurants when I was younger, I made my father go into the kitchen and reassure me there wasn’t a woman cook. It’s something to do with my love-hate of my mother. I don’t want food cooked by anybody in any way like my mother, in any way associated with Eastern European–looking women except her. Being an English Jew is not enough. It’s if they look Eastern European, are dark, Jewish looking . . . Elizabeth Taylor sort of looks. My first wife was blond and Germanic, Anglo-Saxon looking. So is my present wife. I hated me and people like me. I always ate my mother’s cooking with enormous gusto and by extension my aunt’s, my father’s sister, who was like a second mother to me. When it came to my mother’s other sisters or my first wife’s mother and they cooked food lovingly for me, I found it incredibly difficult to eat her food on a Friday night. It’s also a question of what they’ve cooked. The more homely it is— chicken soup, stews are the worst, she always made chicken soup on a Friday night. It’s such an ordeal to eat. In fact, my late mother-in-law was born in Manchester, but she looked Jewish . . . All the people in the community that I was with, a very mixed thing. You hated yourself, had contempt, it was disgusting. You were disgusting; you were dirty, sweaty, smelly. I have a phobia about garlic and onions, though I force myself to eat them sometimes. I don’t like them if I can taste them. It’s not hate, its contempt, shame for the body and its sweats and its odours. My mother was still the source of home. The ambivalence is that you love yourself; you know you know you are fundamentally a good person; you are persecuted and bullied by others because you are disgusting. You assimilate that. When I was a child I wanted to have food that was out of a tin or frozen, cooked by a super-chef in a highly scientific way. English food. Women and sex was the same. I always only fancied Anglo-Saxonlooking women, a sort of Portnoy’s complaint. Jewish-looking women, however beautiful, women like my sister, say. I can see they are attractive. They are too close. They are like me. Was there a bit of you that felt ‘I shouldn’t have been born’? It is true. I later began to think, for all the fact that they said I was the only reason for them to stay alive, that they wished I hadn’t been born. I had a

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daymare rather than nightmare. I used to imagine that I’d come home from school. And a stranger would come to the door and say, ‘Yes. What do you want?’ And I’d say, ‘This is where I live.’ And he’d say, ‘I don’t know you.’ My parents had gone away. They hadn’t really wanted me. I was a burden in the end. Maybe a burden because I made them live. They made you responsible for them? My mother didn’t. She was full of life. She enjoyed life. My father had no other pleasures besides me and his grandchildren. He didn’t enjoy anything else. She didn’t experience the Holocaust directly so much. She witnessed things, but only the beginnings of the process. My father told me once that they were in her flat in Budapest and her flatmate wanted to go for a bottle of milk from the corner shop and she couldn’t be bothered to wear her yellow star and she went out. They were watching from the window. And she was stopped and shot on the spot for not wearing the star. But in general, she [Henry’s mother] didn’t see the worst of it, but my father did . . . My aunt appeared to have actually seen her son killed. In her case, her flat had about fifty locks on it, and when you rang the door [signing of many locks being unbolted] . . . What does being second generation mean to you? I’m second generation in terms of survival, but I’m first generation in terms of being a refugee. I’ve always thought of myself as a refugee. A few weeks ago I met somebody I’ve known for a long time, a friend of my sister’s. I said, ‘I’m a refugee’, and she said, ‘You’re not a refugee because you’re only a refugee if you leave in immediate threat of your life.’ I looked up the UN definition, and I do fit in quite clearly . . . I am anyway a refugee. There were pogroms in Miskolc at the time I was born. There were people returning apparently who were shot because they were trying to get their houses back, by the people who lived in their houses. They killed them. Fortunately, my father never tried to reclaim his house. You will be appearing in a study on the second generation. Is that OK for you? That’s fine. I am second generation. I’m a child of survivors. Though they wouldn’t describe themselves as survivors because for them survivors are people who survived a concentration camp or death camp and lived through that. My aunt and uncle in Montreal had been in Auschwitz. They are the survivors . . . They [Henry’s parents] called themselves

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‘aliens’ . . . They didn’t see themselves as survivors; they didn’t come near enough to death or exterminatory death. I’ve become intellectually aware that a lot of my fears and anxieties come from this background. There are two things I’m directly aware of. But I’m terribly proud of being British. I buy into the Battle of Britain, Churchill’s finest hour. I use these phrases in my writing all the time. I’m completely into that. I’m very proud of what the British did and of being British, and that’s my main identity. But the second thing is I’m also a sociologist, well, more a criminologist. If I’ve got any special talent it’s that I’ve never been very wedded to one thing, one ‘-ism’; my ability, which comes from these experiences, is to see different points of view. I think both my wives would say that the negative side of that is I never make up my mind and I’m indecisive and not assertive. But I’d rather be that way. I drill into my students again and again, ‘There isn’t a right answer.’ In real life, I’m about to discuss the terms of my retirement with my head of department, but J. [his wife] says don’t go in losing. Already having conceded what is reasonable for you to ask for. I’m selling myself for half of what I’m doing. I’ve been lucky. I’m not very good at interviews or applying for jobs. All the jobs and promotions I’ve got I have done without interviews. That wouldn’t be possible now. [The interview ended suddenly when Henry said he had to go to work.]

INTERVIEW WITH JOHN, APRIL 2011

John’s father was Austrian and Jewish, his mother English. His father was arrested in Vienna in 1934 because he had Communist newspapers in his briefcase during the uprising. His parents met in London through the Communist Party (CP). After the war, they first moved to Vienna, where John was born, then to East Germany, where John grew up. Having visited his mother’s family frequently in the UK, John permanently moved to Britain as a young man and has lived here ever since. He sees himself as a socialist and as Jewish.

Could you start by telling me some details about yourself and your parents? K. [John’s surname] is an Austrian Jewish name. I was born 1947 in Vienna, and I moved to East Berlin along with my parents. Then I moved to Vienna in 1973 and then came to London in 1974. I’ve lived here since. My father was born in Vienna in 1906. My mother was born in 1910. She is English. She is still alive. They met in 1944/45. She moved to Vienna in 1946 to follow my father. My father studied music, conducting and composition in Vienna. Then he went to Germany in 1931 where there was more work. Austria was a very small country. And he worked in different German towns. Ended up in Berlin. He returned to Vienna after the Nazi victory in 1933 and then fled to London in 1934, following the Viennese uprising. Mother and 125

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father left the UK first to live in Vienna in 1946, then to East Berlin in 1949. My father probably joined the KPD [German Communist Party] in Berlin in the early ’30s. When Hitler came to power, he had to leave, of course. He was working with Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel at the time. They left the next day. My father left within a few weeks. He went back to Vienna. He got caught up in the Social Democratic uprising in Vienna in ’34. He was arrested as a Communist. He was caught carrying Communist newspapers during the uprising. He wasn’t part of the uprisings. He had them in his briefcase, taking them somewhere or other. He had decided to go to the library to work, and somebody looked into his briefcase and found them. He ended up in prison for just a few months. He shared a prison cell with fascists. Anyway, his parents probably got him out. Probably through crooked means. Money. This is Vienna. He had to move back in with his parents. He was already twenty-eight. Already a refugee, so to speak, though he was in his own town. A very good friend of his had just moved to London, and he decided to move to England. So he was here from ’34, very early, to ’46. He was already relatively well established in ’38 when Hitler invaded. He managed to get his parents out in 1938. His brother also got out. A lot of my relatives didn’t get out. My father was here and worked as a musician and helped to set up the Austrian Centre, in London, Ladbroke Grove, which was a kind of cultural centre, kind of headed by Communists, a bit of a CP front organization. It provided theatre; it had, of course, a coffee house, being Viennese. And a restaurant and a library and whatever. He was its secretary. He met my mother just before the end of the war. My mother’s big love had just been killed in Italy in 1945. She was also in the CP, and that is how they met, and my mother decided she would follow my father to Vienna in 1946. They moved to East Berlin in ’49. My father was offered a very good job there. A friend of my father’s, who was also here in London, an émigré, also a Communist Jew, Ernst Hermann Meyer, went back to Berlin. My father was working for the party in Vienna back in ’46/’47, became a party functionary. He hated it. It didn’t suit him. It wasn’t his kind of thing. He started writing. He was in correspondence with Ernst Hermann. Ernst Hermann had been to London and then to Berlin. They’d met in Berlin in ’32/’33. Hermann said to him, ‘Well, you know we need people like you. We need people at the radio station to set up an antifascist, cultural—whatever—station, we need someone at the university, but we also need a conservatoire.’ After separation in ’48 the old Berlin Conservatoire was in West Berlin, and they needed one in East Berlin.

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Which isn’t bad when you’re forty-two years old and have just spent twelve years not doing not very much during the war. So within a year, my father actually set up the conservatoire. He had to start off looking for a suitable ruin. Within a year, he had opened it. Then he stayed on. Never on very secure footing. A Jew. A Jew who had been in Western emigration. Not a safe thing to be in Eastern Europe. But we stayed. We never were sure how long we would stay, but in the end, he died there, in 2003. I left in ’73 and went to Vienna. I went to school and college there in East Berlin. But because I was ‘politically unreliable’ . . . I studied architecture there and I just didn’t have a chance there really. I always loved London. I always came here during the holidays with my mother. After my father’s death, I brought her over here. She’s spent most of her life in East Berlin and Vienna. Did your parents talk to you about their pasts? Gradually, everything emerged. He didn’t say much at first. What only emerged very gradually was that he had been really badly traumatized by his time in prison. Sharing a cell with these fascists. The fascists taunted him. I don’t know exactly what they did to him. He had a terrible, terrible time in prison. Then he came out, still ’34, and had to move back with his parents, who were very bourgeois and did not approve of his politics. For instance, he had a little rubber stamp with the hammer and sickle which he could stamp on posters as he walked past. He asked his mother where his stamp was, and his mother said, ‘Where it belongs. In the toilet.’ In other words, she had flushed it down the toilet. As a well-known Communist and Jew, he had no chance of work in Vienna. No prospects really. He got one engagement as a conductor, but that was it. A very close friend of his had married an English woman and come to London. Also Jewish. And so he saw an opportunity here and he came. My mother was a member of the CP. That’s how they met. She came to London as a young woman, a sixteen-year-old, from a village in Cambridgeshire. Her mother was a Londoner and always talked about London, so she knew she wanted to come here. She was the first in her family, quite a big family, to get to grammar school. She came here and got work at Whiteleys. And met all sorts of interesting people. Lefties, bohemians, journalists. She very soon ended up in left-wing bohemian circles round Soho. My father didn’t talk to me at first about being Jewish. I think, like most Communist Jews, he hoped it would be irrelevant. He saw himself

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as Communist first and an antifascist and a human being. I had very little inkling of all this. I knew there was something strange about us. I knew our family were different. But that we were Jewish? But I became suddenly aware of how important it was that I was Jewish when a class mate, when I was nine, ten or so, made an anti-Semitic remark. He put a provocative question to the teacher, and although he was sitting in front of me, so wasn’t looking at me, I knew he meant me. He was the son of the local vicar. Bastards. Yeh. So I went home and told my father, and he grew pale and started talking. I’m sure he went to my school and said something, though that I don’t know. I would have said I felt Jewish by the time I left school. Gradually, as my father got older, the fact he was Jewish became more and more significant to him. He realized it was hardly irrelevant. He started talking more and more about his childhood and parents and started telling Jewish jokes. It was self-evident that it wasn’t irrelevant. It was fascinating. The one thing my parents did successfully was instil in me the conviction that being different is not just OK, but good. You know, I was the only foreigner in my class, the only Jew for miles around. I started school eight years after the war had finished. All my classmates’ fathers had probably been in the army. My classmates’ mothers had probably been raped. Here is this son of Communists, you know, Jews, who had a cushy time abroad, ‘while we suffered and now they are coming back here trying to tell us what’s what.’ I was in a precarious position. I only realized this years later, and it wasn’t easy. I dealt with it by being quite arrogant and proud of what I was. I was always the best in the class, including in maths. I was the tallest, I was the fastest runner. So, fuck them. I knew what I was. What language did you speak with your parents? I spoke English with my mother and German with my father. They mainly spoke English to each other. It was a mixture. I speak neither language very well now. Somewhere between the two. It’s an interesting subject. I’m sort of different. The languages are so different, and the ways of thinking and expressing yourself are so different. I read German. What I would miss if I didn’t have German is literature and poetry. You spoke German with your father? Do you miss that part of you now? I have very close friends with whom I still speak German. It’s true. It hadn’t really occurred to me. My relationships to my two parents were utterly different. Very good with both of them. Very harmonious with both of them . . . With my father, I had quite an intellectual relationship. I

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really learnt a lot from him. He was incapable of small talk. He just couldn’t do it. Although he liked to pretend, to insist that my mother was his equal, and he would put all his ideas to her first and would read everything he’d written to her, they’d discuss it. But really she was not an intellectual. She was an interesting and emancipated and forceful woman, but she was not an intellectual. She did not think like that. I always had a very close relationship with her. We came to London together. She was wonderful. It’s a different relationship. My English was formed in my conversations with her and on a more emotional level. And my German was formed in my conversations with my father. I never spoke a word of German with my mother. And rarely spoke English with my father. My mother was also an exile, of course. She spoke no German when she arrived in Vienna. We stayed with friends who had also been here during the war. His friend’s father’s villa and factory was returned to him. That’s the story. We stayed in their house and we spoke English, and we, of course, were integrated there. They were CP. Like-minded people. In East Berlin, there was quite a large community of foreigners, of Communists, who stuck together. All my friends were the children of Communist Jews. Returnees. How was it for your parents in East Berlin at that time? Our basic needs were looked after. But otherwise, it was utterly precarious. When we arrived in autumn 1949, it was just the time of the first show trial in Hungary. Rákosi. It was a trial against traitors, all of whom happened to be Jewish and had been in the West during the war. And there we were, just arriving in East Berlin, my father with protection from other Jews. For two months, he wasn’t allowed to do any work. He was kept at arm’s length. He had no idea what was going on. He wrote back to the Communists in Vienna, ‘What’s going on?’ Anyway, there were other trials, not in East Germany. Yeh, yeh. Every now and then my father was called to the Political Bureau and had to justify his existence. Had to tell them what he’d done during the war. ‘Did you know so and so.’ Nobody was killed. Nobody was shot in East Germany. Of course, the next thing was the show trial in Prague. The Slzánský trial. So, yes, we were sitting on . . . we didn’t know how long we would stay. Might have to go back to Vienna. How do you think your parents’ experiences affected them? I wasn’t aware of my parents having any sense of paranoia. Ulbricht, for whatever reason, was not a very nice man. He was Moscow trained dur-

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ing the war, etc., but he never put on show trials in Berlin. There were show trials in Prague, Poland, but not Germany. My father was a very sane man. But there was an element of paranoia. For instance, he periodically destroyed his correspondence. I found no personal correspondence after he died. There was nothing. His parents had kept some, and his friends, of course, had. He periodically buried it. We lived at the edge of a forest. In 1989, when the wall fell, he was very worried because he’d been in the same city when there were similar upheavals, 1933, and again there was the destroying of personal documents. He considered coming back to London. He seriously talked about it. Of course, he was eighty-three by then. But he decided he couldn’t do it. He had a huge library, and he was in the middle of a book. He had so many friends and colleagues there. But after that, he never went on public transport there again, because of the emergence of the neofascists, people being beaten up on the train, foreigners, the disabled and so on. East Berlin had been quite a safe place. I’ve got some of my grandparents’ letters. Those my father must have kept. He got them when his father died. Those he didn’t destroy. I’ve got a few dozen. Written in the 1950s. My grandparents stayed in London till ’55/’56 and then moved back to Vienna. They were writing to their son from London to Vienna in German. It was about me and stuff like that. I knew them. They were lovely people. They died in the late ’60s. We visited them in Vienna, Christmases and summer holidays and times like that. I’m pleased to have those letters. My grandparents were lovely, charming, warm people. My father told me about the people who hadn’t made it. He drew diagrams. Who died where and when, yes, of course. It must have weighed on him. That he didn’t talk about. And I didn’t ask him. That kind of guilt. He never revealed any emotion, just diagrams. He wasn’t exactly an underground fighter in Berlin. He was a conductor and a piano accompanist, Helene Weigel in her public appearances. He left about the time of the Reichstag fire, but I’d have to look up the exact date. He was very aware of what was happening. After the war, he went back from London because he was a Communist and his duty was to build an antifascist society. He was very tempted to stay here. He thought the English were quite admirable in the war. He wasn’t particularly fond of the Viennese, of the complacency and complaining nature of the Austrians. On the other hand, moving to East Berlin gave him the challenge and chance of becoming active again.

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How do you think your parents’ experiences affected you? When people ask me, ‘Where are your roots?’ I have no answer. In fact, I answer with George Steiner’s saying, though I think he may have taken it from somewhere else: ‘Trees have roots, human beings have legs. And that is an advantage.’ It’s not just a stance. I certainly don’t feel German, although I went to school there, and I have lovely friends there. Some of my best friends live in Berlin. I don’t feel German. I don’t feel Austrian. I don’t particularly like the Austrians, though I’m very fond of Vienna. The Austrians are quite reactionary, and they don’t like foreigners. I couldn’t possibly say I’m English. I feel at home in London, and my kids are English. I would have thought they would see themselves as English. They were born here. They are very interested in that [whether they are Jewish]. It’s too soon to tell. They’re too young. I’ll have to ask my daughter who is twenty-three. The mother isn’t Jewish. Although they [John’s parents] were [peripatetic], I was only three when we moved to East Berlin, and I was twenty-three when I left. I went to the same school for years. I didn’t change primary or secondary school. I went to college there. They were twenty fairly stable years, despite what may have gone on in the background and my fathers’ struggles. It didn’t affect me directly in that way. For instance, when I was quite young, somebody asked me why we didn’t have net curtains, and I asked my mother and she said, ‘Oh, we don’t know how long we are going to be here.’ She didn’t say we don’t like them, which is what was true. But they gave me so much security, and there was such stability in our family. We lived on a little housing estate which had been built after the war to attract the intelligentsia, so our neighbours were writers and scientists and whatever, and my best friend was the daughter of an American writer who lived across the road. Stefan Heym. Four writers within a hundred yards. So I was friendly with their kids. Not my school friends . . . Only a couple of them I was close to. My best friends were all from a similar background. They are still my friends. There were a lot of rabbi jokes, but my father was an atheist. My father didn’t go to synagogue. There weren’t even trappings of cultural Judaism. His mother kept just the high holidays. Not his father. They were already entirely assimilated, bourgeois. There are many ironies to anti-Semitism. My parents’ experiences, of course, affected how I feel. Entirely. I’ve always felt an outsider, and being an outsider does, I suppose, create a degree of insecurity. On the other hand, what I mentioned earlier, they managed to instil in me a feeling of security. So these two sides fight in me. Yes. I always feel an outsider. Even now. I’ve lived in London now for thirty-five years. It’s difficult to reflect on it because I don’t know

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how other people feel. I don’t know how integrated one can feel. I certainly don’t feel integrated, though I certainly feel at home here. I live in a lovely community. I’m in a reading group, a Jewish book group, and we recently talked about how English people felt, and I was really surprised because these fellow book members, they are English Jews, so their families have lived here one hundred years, they sound entirely English to me, and they are part of its culture far more than I am, though after thirty-five years, you know, yet none of them would define themselves as English. I found this very surprising and interesting. They defined themselves as Jewish or maybe English Jewish. I was astounded by this. I recently spoke to a German friend of mine about if he felt like an outsider, and he said he always felt like an outsider. He’s very sensitive, a bit of a dreamer, artistic guy. Lovely guy. My closest friend in Berlin. He said he was always an outsider, at school. Had no class mates. Always had his own dreams. You don’t have to be Jewish to be an outsider. Of course, I’ve been profoundly formed by all this, but I don’t know how exceptional that makes me. The Jewish book group is based in Muswell Hill. They are North London Jews. Many book groups read middle-brow best sellers, and I don’t want to read that. My group is more interesting. My parents’ Communism rubbed off on me. I would define myself as a Communist. I was never a member. I could never have joined the East German SED [Social Unity Party]. They were just terrible. But I moved to Vienna in 1973. The Communists there were still too Stalinist, and I could not have joined them. So I joined the SPÖ [Social Democratic Party of Austria], who had a very good left youth group. When I came to London, again the CP was just so Stalinist, and so I went to all the Trotskyist groups, IS [International Socialists] and IMG [International Marxist Group]. IS was good. I thought their analysis of Eastern Europe was the most profound, so I went to their meetings, discussion groups on Eastern Europe and USSR. And demonstrations. It was great. It was really good. Very exciting. I nearly joined the Labour Party at one point, but they’d never even read Marx! I’m very active in my local community, which I consider political. But no, I’m not organized. Of course I went on the demo [against the coalition government cuts] and all the antiwar demos. Of course. One does like one’s childhood food, and I do like German food. We had housekeepers because both my parents worked, so often, not always, women who came in the daytime to look after me after school. They did some of the cooking. My mother was not a passionate cook. My mother worked, as did my father. So I got used to German food and Viennese food.

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I never joined any of these [second-generation] groups. I read a few newsletters. And what didn’t ring a bell with me was this idea of being a victim! [Laughter] I never saw myself as a victim. Maybe there was some suffering somewhere along the way, but it was certainly unusual, and it was unsettling at times but certainly profoundly influencing. You see, at home, I had three close friends in this estate where I grew up, one was the daughter of the American writer, but the other two boys were German. We spent all our time together and stayed in one another’s houses. What struck me was that there wasn’t talking in the German houses. Meals would be pretty silent. There didn’t seem to be a very warm relationship between parents and children. In my family, I was an only child, we always talked. Our mealtimes were like political round tables. My father always needed to know where I was when something political happened. We had huge disputes and arguments, and sometimes he got very worried about my political positions. Nineteen sixty-eight, for instance. I’m utterly shaped and influenced by all this, more shaped by my parents and their background than maybe other kids. My mother: lovely, warm, caring woman, but also a strong mind of her own. I guess my personality was just as influenced by her as by my father. Intellectually, I was more formed by my father . . . My mother used to talk. About her childhood. Absolutely. Used to talk about the past. She too came from loving parents and families. Both my parents came from loving parents, as far as I could see, well adjusted. I never had any shortage of love. They utterly shaped me. The other thing that shaped me is the fact that my family is so small. The few that survived did not have children. It’s strange. It was a huge family. When he [his father] was a child, his parents used to test him: ‘Who is the auntie of so and so? Who is the cousin of so and so?’ There were so many of them. In a bourgeois family, you had to know who was who. They’ve all gone. They were killed by Hitler. There are a few remnants in Brazil, who didn’t have children. An uncle in Australia who didn’t have any children. I’m in touch with a few relatives in Chicago. My mother was one of five sisters and brothers. Only one of them had a child. A sister and a brother died from TB when they were teenagers. One brother left the family and was never heard of again. One brother didn’t have any children. One brother had one son. I’ve made my friends my family. I really value my friendships. I have many close friends, most of whom are Jewish. Jews are more interesting, aren’t they? They have a sense of history; they have a sense of humour. It helps . . . I went to a meeting, unfortunately they’ve stopped happening, but until about fifteen, maybe twenty years ago, there were regular meetings of left-wing, German-speaking Jews. They were usually held in Frankfurt. A friend of mine suggested I came along. Couple of hundred people.

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Interesting people all with strange names and biographies. I felt so at home. Just walking into the room. The faces. They all looked like family. It was really wonderful. Went on for two days. The position on Israel. What does it mean to be a left-wing Jew in Germany? It was just wonderful.

INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR BY T.W., JUNE 2011

Tom Wengraf did me the favour of offering to interview me for this book. He interviewed me twice, drawing out in the second, longer interview some of the issues from the first. The interviews focused on memories about my life as a whole, which was therefore broader than my interviews with other participants. What follows is a compilation and abridged version of both interviews; however, every attempt has been made not to alter the structure and meaning of the originals. On occasion, Tom’s question may make reference to a point not included in the transcript, which I then clarify with brackets.

TW: It’s [the interview] about the story of your life. So can you please tell me the story of your life, all the events and experiences that were important to you personally? I have virtually no memories of Oxford [where I was born]. And I remember arriving in Durham and it was terribly cold, and my mother and I were sitting on this rolled up carpet. This was a house built in the 1860s, no central heating, no heating at all. And it was just before Christmas. We sat in front of the cold, unlit anthracite [coal] stove, and I hated it. Those are my first memories. TW: You then went to a Church of England primary school? Tell me what you remember about that. 135

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The bus [that I caught from infants’ school back home] was always crowded, and I was always frightened that I’d miss the stop. I was always terrified I would not be able to say, ‘The Hospital’. That’s where I got off. I was really scared that the words just wouldn’t come out. And I remember my parents offered to make me a sign saying ‘The Hospital, please’, to wear round my neck. Can you imagine a five-year-old with a sign round her neck saying ‘The Hospital, please’? I often used to have terrible nightmares that I couldn’t get off the bus and it would take me to places I didn’t know. TW: You said you kept on being sick. And in the playground you didn’t have any friends and you acted as the storyteller. I liked the first teacher, but I say that but I remember being sick. There is an inconsistency there. I was, of course, though I shouldn’t say ‘of course’, way ahead of everybody else in the class, and that probably made for the teacher to quite like me, but I used to be sick on the way to school, and I used to be sick at school. I was very frightened. And I wasn’t frightened of the teachers. There was no reason for me to be. I think I was frightened of being with other children a bit. I wasn’t used to playing with children . . . Looking back at it, and I hadn’t thought of this till this moment, maybe I was just frightened of leaving my parents. I was so frightened they were going to die. So my parents had to take me out before lunch every day because it was deemed I couldn’t cope with the full school day. But then it was decided I could. I didn’t have any friends at all. None. I was used by the teachers to kinda teach the other kids, and as I grew older, I just used to spend my time sitting in the playground telling stories to the other children who were younger than me. So I was the storyteller. And that’s how I survived. Where other people had friends, I would sit on the steps and tell stories. Then we got into the third year, and at this point, we were streamed. This is the late ’40s, early ’50s. I was in the higher stream. I remember there was a poster on the wall, and it was for Germany. I remember having terribly mixed feelings about it. I could read it. It said something like ‘Welcome to Germany’. A strange thing to have up there at that time . . . But I could read the poster, and that made me even stranger. And the kids used to say to me, ‘You talk funny. Where do you come from?’ And I hated it . . .

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TW: Do you remember any more detail about the children surrounding you and calling you ‘Doubting Thomas’ [in primary school] and how it all happened? We had the missionaries come in all the time, and I can’t actually remember which exposition we’d been exposed to [which I had criticized]. But this group of children surrounded me and started to shout ‘Doubting Thomas’, ‘Doubting Thomas’, and I didn’t know who Doubting Thomas was. And then I became ‘Doubting Thomas’. I didn’t like that. I couldn’t turn it round and see it as a compliment. Of course, it wasn’t meant as a compliment. I just felt the hostility . . . TW: You passed the Eleven plus. You came home by yourself. Every time you came home you expected your parents to be dead. Do you remember any moment where you felt that more strongly? I was coming home by myself from a very early age. That’s just the way it was. From about five. This doesn’t sound like an event, but I was always frightened my parents would be dead. Sounds absurd. Always frightened. Every time I came up to the front door, and I knocked at the front door, I thought they’d be dead. No reason for this, by the way. Just dead . . . I think I started falling out with my parents, I don’t know actually . . . My father was remote. He praised me when I was clever. My mother shut herself off often in her bedroom and didn’t come out. I think by the time I was at grammar school, I fairly much hated them. I remember, I just wanted to run away so much. I just wanted to run away. I was unhappy. TW: Was there any particular moment? No. It was quite absurd. We lived close enough to the A1 . . . and I used to think [inaudible] I’ve got to hitch a lift. I never did though. So there was a certain play-acting. But I didn’t feel like I was play-acting. I just felt I wanted to get away from them . . . It’s not true they never talked to me in the sense I would be asked what you are doing at school. So subjects that were external and safe. My father much more than my mother. The good side of that is that they put no pressure on me whatsoever. They were so distant from me. Where other children had pushy parents, I didn’t have pushy parents, I was just left alone . . . At grammar school, I did make friends, but not close friends. Basically, I made friends with Val, whom I’m still friends with. She was as

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strange as me. She was a bookworm. I read books. She read books. She came from a mining family, so of course the teachers didn’t like her [because they were class snobs]. They loved me, needless to say. Bright little thing. I was again basically very lonely. I worked hard. That was the only thing I could do. Fortunately, I enjoyed it. I positively enjoyed academic stuff. Everybody became interested in boys, except me. That separated Val and me, as Val had become interested in boys at the normal age and I didn’t. Then I did become interested in boys at sixteen, seventeen . . . and that was a catastrophe. TW: Do you want to talk about ‘catastrophe’? I met A. [when I was seventeen]. Then my father started to freak out. This was probably one of the most significant events of my life. He started locking me in a room with him. He . . . told me about how immoral . . . it was to hold hands in public . . . And how immoral it was to have any sort of physical contact with a man at all. And how I was letting him down, you see. I was letting him down terribly if I would be seen touching a man. Umm . . . He didn’t touch me. He just berated me about my sexual looseness. I was completely chaste. He forbade me from seeing A. This was really serious. Because he was a university lecturer, he threatened A. [who was a student]. He’d have thrown him out of university if he saw me again . . . We are talking about somebody who is being really threatening, not just using threatening words . . . I was petrified . . . I never forgave him [my father]. Not true. I forgave him when I was pregnant. That was over twenty years later. That totally defined what happened in my relationship with my parents. I just didn’t want to go anywhere near them. TW: Do you remember any moment of extreme anger with your parents? . . . My mother used to punish me by not speaking to me. That’s a dreadful thing to do. That would go on. She would refuse to speak to me for days. Because I had done some incredibly minor transgression. We are talking about years before I became angry . . . I started to shout at her, and I said something like, ‘You will speak to me in the end, you know. Why don’t you stop this and speak to me now?’ And she said something like, ‘That’s different.’ I got very, very angry with her because she didn’t speak to me. I couldn’t bear it . . . It had taken me a very long time to pluck up the courage. Anger wasn’t allowed in our house. There was never any expression of anger. In fact, emotion wasn’t allowed in our house. I wasn’t expected to cry; I wasn’t allowed to cry. It’s absurd to say I wasn’t allowed to, but it was

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clear it wasn’t approved of . . . And I’m still not good at shouting at people, at getting angry . . . I don’t know if it was after that [my shouting at my mother] that my father said to me, ‘You must never talk to your mother like that again.’ I think I said to him something like, ‘I hate her.’ And then he wrote me a letter. Wrote a letter! I can’t remember how I got it. Whether he put it in my hand or what he did. I remember opening it, and I went to the bottom of the garden as far away from them as I could. And he said in his letter, ‘If you ever talk to me like that again, you will kill me.’ . . . Then I went to Oxford [University] where I met R. I loved Oxford. It sounds pretentious, but I finally met people who were interested in ideas. My parents were very interested in ideas, but not my peers. I thrived. I wasn’t brilliant, but I thrived. R. picked me up, and that was very significant. This was in the day before mobiles. So he [R.] was phoning me [during the vacations] on the landline. First of all, they [my parents] were covering the phone with cushions. That was quite common. They did that all the time. That wasn’t just to do with R. They thought the phone was a listening device . . . The phone was an issue in the family. R. was not allowed to phone me because R. was an undesirable . . . They used to take the phone off the stand, but I didn’t know that because you can’t tell if it’s covered. Once R. got through, and my mother snatched the phone from me. ‘You are not to talk to this man.’ . . . They were crazy. And then something terrible happened . . . He [R.] met my parents, and they were just terrible to him. Terrible to him. They threw him out of the house, apart from anything else. They wouldn’t let me have anything to do with him. I was influenced by that. I let that get to me. So I never really quite accepted R. . . . There was always this voice in my head which said, ‘You shouldn’t be going out with him. You shouldn’t be going out with him.’ Then they had to meet R. again. They thought he was a spy. [My mother said,] ‘Why would he go out with you? The only reason he would go out with you is to spy on us.’ . . . This is after we had been going out for about three years. [I said,] ‘That’s so stupid.’ She was absolutely insistent. I remember thinking she’s off her head. Umm. ‘Who’s he spying for?’ [I asked]. She said it made no difference who he was spying for. [Laughter] It wasn’t funny! It was USSR, America, Britain. What difference does it make? I never thought my father was crazy. Other things, yes, but not crazy. My mother I thought was crazy. The trouble was I never forgave. I didn’t forgive either of them. After that kind of upbringing, it’s quite hard. I got my good second. Moved to London . . . I got work at Kilburn [a further education college] . . . Kilburn was a good place to teach. There

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was a strong left [in the union branch], which I helped build . . . There were lots of nice people there. And that was all important . . . Then I [got very ill and] almost died . . . At that point, I’m now about thirty-five, I decided enough is enough, because I had been really very politically active; it’s time to settle down. And I happened on F., or F. happened on me . . . My father died when my son was one. The only good thing is that we had become reconciled in the year before his death. He was so happy I was pregnant. I didn’t know he was going to be. I was terrified telling him. My mother was indifferent. But he was delighted. Then he died. Then my mother became suicidal. They were very hard years. I had a small child. I had a child of one and a mother who attempted suicide and was playing games. Poor woman, I understand she was feeling desperate . . . I had to care for both her and my son. It was very, very hard . . . She [my mother] was very, very unhappy but [after my father’s death] she saw me as the person who was there to keep her alive, I think, and I did not want this role at all . . . She was never responsible for anything . . . I [often] tried to phone her without success. Then I used to . . . go ‘bang, bang’ [with the knocker], and she would finally come to the door [of her house]. The whole thing was torture, really, for me. If you look at it from her point of view, she was probably very depressed, but she led me a merry dance, and I mean, you know, sometimes I would arrive with the police . . . But the two times she attempted suicide were both times I had dared to go away for the weekend. She was punishing me . . . She said, ‘What about me? How can you leave me? You’ll be sorry.’ . . . [But I felt] I had to be there for her [when my mother was dying]— which I wasn’t—because nobody had been there for anybody else [in Nazi Germany]. It seemed to me so important that I should be there for her . . . My goodness; I was upset about it . . . . . . It’s impossible to know how far my parents would have been strange if they hadn’t had such a terrible, terrible [pause]. It doesn’t get anywhere to ask anyhow because they did have a terrible time. One of the things that I’ve thought is that when my mother was pregnant with me they were finding out about [pause]. And then when I was born, they found about more people being murdered. So my first years, it’s like there’s a filament of grief just running through everything all the time. I think they wanted me for all sorts of reasons, and I was part of the celebration of a new, post-Nazi world. There I was, and I suspect as they found out about what had happened to their families, it became interwoven with their pleasure or whatever at having a child. My father was apparently very Victorian from the very beginning. Amazingly, my mother has actually told me this, and it kind of makes

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sense to me. The Truby King [approach to child rearing in which the baby is only given] four-hour [feed] thing—apparently my father was absolutely adamant about it. My mother told me this. In the years before she died. She actually said to me how sorry she was that when I cried, she didn’t pick me up. So when I cried, I was left to cry. Put outside. They had use of a garden. So I was put outside and left to scream. Though I imagine I would have learnt quickly, so I stopped screaming when I realized it had no effect. And one wonders how far that failure to receive comfort, reassurance, didn’t help . . . [I then said I was sorry.] TW: Why ‘sorry’? Because I’m sitting here crying all the time . . . That’s my life. TW: That’s one story of your life. That’s absolutely right. That is a story of my life. TW: Do you want to tell me more about any other stories of your life? I’ve given you this bleak picture. I haven’t exaggerated it, but, of course, there have been nice moments. I had a nice time with R. until things started to fall apart. I enjoyed many aspects of working at Kilburn because there was a community of like-minded souls there. There were also students there who liked to learn—we are going back sometime—it was quite fun. I had a wonderful time at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. I loved being pregnant . . . Of all my experiences, that’s been my most important experience. Being pregnant . . . I’ve had some really joyful moments with my son . . . tremendously life-giving times with my son. And I suppose at the end of both my parents’ lives, there was some rapprochement, some increased intimacy, even with my mother. That’s another story . . . [I talked about how anxious I had been with my son.] I remember one time when there was a school trip. He was eight or nine. The coach was very late . . . and I just assumed it had crashed. And I was crying. Even though I make strenuous efforts to almost push him [my son] out [from home], I did the opposite deliberately to my parents, I always encouraged him to look outwards, but I was always anxious. He had this contradictory mother. I still am, I was always scared he’d be killed. He got into so many scrapes, I had some reason for it. But that isn’t what happened. What happened was that I was just scared he was going to be killed. He

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had an anxious mother, very loving and caring, but very anxious. And his response to that is to be angry . . . History has a long arm . . . . TW: Anything else you’d like to add? . . . Writing my book [The Language of Silence] was very important to me. It . . . took such a long time. Five, six years . . . The process of writing it changed me . . . I started to find all these documents. My parents had never talked to me. It was life shattering, the stuff I was finding. There was so much. It wasn’t just to do with my grandparents and the camps and being murdered. My mother having, I think, a very serious relationship with somebody other than my father, after having been married to my father. And that whole dalliance with, let’s call it Communism, as we aren’t talking politics here. That was all extraordinary. Of course, I also discovered stuff about my father. Things I’d discovered about my father were more positive than negative. I discovered that he had been a really active anti-Nazi. That was quite risky between 1929 and ’33. He always denied being in the CP [KPD]. Well, I’ve now established he was in the CP [KPD]. I refused to believe it till recently. But he was in the CP [KPD]. Very much so. In fact, I suspect he was paid by the CP [KPD]. The whole process changed me, and it made me focus far more on my roots, whatever that is. How I became who I became. How my parents were the way they were. I became much more aware of being second generation . . . I also had to rethink the whole question of Judaism as I had been brought up as a non-Jew, and I, of course, discovered that on both sides on my family, people were murdered as Jews. In fact, they were murdered for a wide variety of reasons. They copped it for many reasons . . . Some of my friends find me more difficult . . . And there’s almost a kind of, they haven’t wanted to follow me where I’ve gone. [Pause] TW: What are you thinking? . . . We were at [a party of a friend]. And V. [somebody I knew] came up to me and said, ‘Oh, you Jews look all alike.’ TW: What happened then? I don’t think I said much. I will have said something like, ‘Absolute nonsense.’ And then she said, ‘Oh, you don’t look alike, but you have a similar look.’ . . .

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I don’t adopt a Jewish persona. I was not brought up to be Jewish at all. It only struck me very, very recently, now I’m talking about months, when I went to Berlin with I. . . . I. came from a Communist background, has family in Germany. I met some of the family. And that was a terrible shock, and for the first time I realized I don’t have any family in Germany because they were seen as Jewish. My parents came over very early because my father had been an active anti-Nazi. And they’d always been able to hide behind that, and it was more than hiding because that is what they identified themselves as. And so I was brought up entirely within that paradigm. And suddenly, I became aware that I. has family because the Nazis did not kill the family of Communists, but they did kill the family of Jews. All of them. How significant being Jewish has actually been to who I am. It really has brought it home to me in a way that nothing else has brought it home to me before. That is why so many of my family were murdered. That was a shock. I was sitting at the doctor’s the other day, in reception. This doctor came up to me and whispered, ‘I see you were speaking at Jewish Book Week.’ I don’t mind people knowing I spoke at Jewish Book Week. I haven’t got that problem. But I think that was a symbol of the fact that people feel there is still active, or maybe just [subterranean], anti-Semitism around in terms of people’s reaction to you. In a way, V.’s comment is an example. She made a comment . . . which wasn’t anti-Semitic, but given her other comments, I thought, ‘Oh, yes.’ . . . [I told her I was speaking in Germany at a conference.] And she said, ‘Oh, is it a Jewish conference?’ . . . Do I want to take on the fight that there is an assumption that if you come from a Jewish background, what you are more than anything else is a Jew? Have I made any sense? TW: Perfect sense . . . You were talking very generally about how being second generation has shaped you. I was thinking how far being second generation, using the term loosely, really was defining in terms of who I became. It wasn’t how I experienced it, but in terms of my parents’ paranoia, and you know, they really had a double dose of paranoia. I think my mother was more afraid of the CP than she was of the Nazis. Of course, there were very many different aspects of paranoia. I wasn’t allowed to have friends . . . I wasn’t allowed to have girlfriends; I wasn’t allowed to have boyfriends. That world, that little cut-off world, absolutely edged with paranoia, obviously affected me, and, you know, did not increase my sense of self-worth. Such was their level of anxiety that when I was sixteen they both blocked my exit through the front door so I could not go out to meet friends one Saturday evening . . .

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I think there is a question how on earth I’ve managed to mess up my life. You know I’m bright; I wasn’t unattractive. So theoretically I had an awful lot going for me. I came from a high-culture family, incredibly so. I went to Oxford [University]. So what the fuck happened? If I’m looking at my life, how the hell did I end up where I did? And I was a woman. If I’d been a man, and everything else being constant, I’d have had a different purchase on all this. Being a woman intensifies the sense of lacking worth . . . This really is a lamentable story, but it’s true. Had they [my parents] been in Germany, had they been in Berlin, had they been part of a family, had Nazism fallen or never succeeded, they might have been much better parents. Who is to know? Who is to know how these things weave together, contribute to how I was moulded? They were very impressive people. They were terribly impressive, but they weren’t very impressive parents. When I think about it, as opposed to sitting here weeping, in a way they did amazingly well . . . Considering that my father managed to establish a completely new career for himself, he did very well. My mother didn’t do as well as she deserved to do. But she had a play put on in the West End; she had books of poetry published. They managed to establish a life for themselves here. They managed to have a daughter who was relatively successful. So in a way, they did remarkably well considering what they’d been through. It’s just not the way I feel about it. I feel sorry for them in a way; they had one daughter, and she ran away. Poor people. But I did. I ran away. I’m second generation because my parents were left-wing anti-Nazis. That’s fundamental to my story.

INTERVIEW WITH MIKE, JUNE 2011

Mike’s father, who was Jewish, came from Prague. In his student days in Britain, he became close to the Communist Party (CP). There he met Mike’s English mother. Mike has spent much of his adult life ‘commemorating’ his Czech Jewish family, who were virtually all murdered. Mike started to speak before I had said anything or he had even sat down.

OK. I just wanted to show you, that’s the only picture saved of my family [showing me photo]. That’s my dad as a young boy. That’s his family. None of those people survived. They are his parents. Do you know their names? Oh, his father [pointing] was Ernest, his sister was Eva, and his mother was Edith; no, his mother was Emma, his sister, Edita. Since when did you know their names, for you say them with hesitation? Well, they were known as ‘the three Es’ in the cards from AuschwitzBirkenau, and I had to think, ‘Do I remember the names of “the three Es”?’

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When did you know their names? Quite late. Difficult. I really only had proof when I went to the Jewish cemetery in Prague where they had a wall of names of the families who had disappeared. And there was the name Buchbinder, my family name, and the three Es; then I had definite proof of my family from Czechoslovakia. When was that? After my father’s death, I went with my Czech father-in-law and we went to see the wall. It showed the names of Czechs, well, Prague Jews in particular. There were my family names. Buchbinder. There was the proof, really. My father never talked properly about the past. He wrote a book about his life, without dwelling on this part. He wrote about the day he left his family, but not about his previous life. Only about when he left Prague at the station in 1939. He starts his memoirs saying goodbye to his parents and his sister at the station and that he came to England. He talked about becoming a town planner and postwar life. How did he get out? A bit hazy, his story, but via Italy . . . Genoa . . . You could get out that way, and then via Paris. It was very complicated. But he eventually managed to get to England. He got out because he had a school friend who had joined the Nazi Party in Prague, and his school friend met him on the street and exclaimed, ‘Why are you still here in Prague?’ This was in early ’39, before the Germans marched in. He got a visa; the important thing was he got a visa via this ex–school friend. Absolutely amazing. An extraordinary thing to do. So we owe this future to a Nazi! He advised him how to get a visa. Did he have to say he was Jewish for the visa? Don’t believe so. The family were assimilated. They were not practicing Jews. Certainly my father was not a religious person then or afterwards.

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What language did they speak? They spoke Czech, German, French. Which would have been his first language? Czech. I did hear him speak Czech to his Czech friends over the years, but I never learnt Czech myself. The times I went to Prague, people pleaded, ‘Speak English.’ But Dad spoke German, Italian, French, Spanish and later some Chinese. But he could not get anyone else out with him? No. Not his family. He was a student, so he could go to England to study. He went to Cambridge University. He arrived with almost nothing. He had been at university in Prague and then presumably managed to get into Cambridge because he was halfway through his architecture degree. When did you find all this out? Gradually. Bits and pieces over many years. The real revelation was not until he summoned his three children for a meeting a few years before he died. And I thought he was going to tell us he had got some money from the Czech government because of our losses, which sounds mercenary! He sat us down, and he showed us family postcards from AuschwitzBirkenau, from the two Es (my granddad had already died), writing in camouflaged language that the time was up. That they were going to die. In order to get these cards out, one had to write it in such a way that they could pass the Nazi censors. He did tell you his family had died? I knew by osmosis that his family and relations had ‘disappeared’. I only understood the magnitude of the loss, the lacunae, when he died. I helped organize his memorial, a celebration of his life held at the Architectural Association in December 1999. I inherited a mound of his documents. I was clearing out his study and found a lot of documents in German and Czech. I got them translated by the one living relative, who lived in Vienna. She sent them back. I suddenly had an insight into what had been going on . . .

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He never showed them to you, but he had kept them? He had never shown them to me, but he kept them in a box addressed to me. I was a professional historian and gave lectures on the 1930s and ’40s. I inherited his CBE and most of his old photographs. A town planner, he’d taken an awful lot of photos! And there were these documents from the war years and after; I’d never seen them before . . . on very thin paper. Typed. About family relations and hardship. Pleas for money, food parcels, despair about the loss of relatives from the one relative who had survived. So Dad had this meeting with the three of us when he was writing his autobiography for the British Museum when they were commissioning memoirs on émigrés to England, and he offered his. That’s when he said, ‘I’m giving these postcards from Auschwitz-Birkenau to the museum, but you should see them first.’ These were family cards from the two Es: Emma and Edita. They were shakily scribbled in pencil and ended ‘Love from the 2Es’. These cards had been sent to a friend in Prague. I’d never seen them before. There was this one moment when my father photographed us staring at these cards from Auschwitz-Birkenau, the family’s last contact with the world. It was revelatory but very painful. What Dad then said was very interesting. Everything about the use of language by the Nazis was distorted. Everything you are reading is a distortion. What the two Es were writing is not the truth. They were trying to get a message across about their fate. They wrote in these cards ‘We want to be like Uncle Bert.’ Uncle Bert had died. Whoever had received the cards would have interpreted that they wanted to die. They had been in Terezin maybe two years. These cards cemented something for me. It made things more real and true. Instead of rumour and supposition and ‘was Dad telling the truth?’ . . . Here was the proof. At his funeral, his best friend, Herbert Lom, the actor, delivered a eulogy during which he commented that they were at school together and my Dad had never in his subsequent life referred back to what had happened to his family and relatives, fourteen of whom had died before I was born. Herbert saw that as great courage and determination, that Dad had got his life together, had moved on and had become a famous international town planner. I was always pained and that’s why I read so much Holocaust literature all my life, from university days onwards. And I wanted to direct Hoffman’s The Representative.

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You knew you were Jewish? I had an affinity, though I had no faith. Dad had many Jewish friends, but he was an atheist. He had no interest in religion per se, although he loved photographing the designs of cathedrals all over the world. Did you have any cultural trappings? Yes . . . My dad’s exotic Jewish friends and Jewish foods, taste of which he’d obviously inherited. I was very conscious of having a Jewish heritage in my teens. My mother, she was English, committed suicide when I was eighteen . . . I hadn’t lived with Dad since I was a young child. My parents were divorced when I was three. I was fostered. I ‘knew’ Dad as an exotic foreigner in my life. I knew he was Jewish because my grandparents on my mother’s side were terribly English and unconsciously anti-Semitic in their attitudes, and he ‘looked Jewish’. They didn’t like him at all. He was a foreign Jewish Communist intellectual. My mother’s parents were petit-bourgeois suburban little Englanders who didn’t like him; he was a foreign Jewish Communist intellectual! He and Herbert read the Daily Worker and were involved in left-wing politics in England. In later years they both became middle-of-the-road Labour Party supporters. Was he a Communist in Czechoslovakia? I don’t think so, although he read a lot about Marxism, Plekhanov, etc., as a student. If he was already twenty-two when he left, he could already have been political? I think he was more interested in his career as an architect. I got the impression that you could either join the Nazi Party or the opposition, and the only opposition that was viable at the time was the Communist Party. With the Cold War, that notion became sidelined. And the Soviet Union became increasingly anti-Semitic. My father was very well read and very keen to debate politics. Whether he was actually a member of the party, I’m not sure. I think he joined in England. My mother was a CP member. There was obviously a hiatus during the Nazi-Soviet Pact; Dad was in England then, which must have been a very strange and awkward time for anti-Nazi Communists.

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Were his parents Communists? I think they were Social Democrats, though I have no party-card proof of that. During the war, Dad and Herbert supported the Second Front, when the CP had over fifty thousand members. They lived with a delightful Quaker called Clara Macaroni, who was a Communist at Cambridge and used to sell the Daily Worker to everybody. They lived as students in her house. Can we just go back to Prague for a moment before the war? Did your father know any other adults who got out? Yes. He had a girlfriend, Kate, who got out and ended up in London. Dad was twenty-two, in the middle of his degree. His best friend was in London. There was a community of Czechs here, and they cobbled together enough money for Dad to survive. The others had arrived in ’37/ ’38. They’d left for jobs, opportunities in their professions, not because of anti-Semitism. So it was almost chance [that others had already left]? Yes. But his wasn’t though. He had to leave his family in Prague. They begged him to get out. The last thing on their minds was that they were going to die: ‘It’ll blow over. He’s a crazy person [Hitler]. I give him six months.’ They were looking forward to Terezin! ‘Oh, that’s a nice place to go.’ I have been trying to find out when they went to Terezin and when they left. I spent years trying to find out. I wasn’t going to get that detail from Dad. I felt that he was too vulnerable to ‘open up’ in that area. If he wasn’t going to volunteer to open up, I wasn’t going to go there. So I searched other sources, hence the reading. Dad was very focused on the future and spent a great deal of time all over the world. Did you feel in some way responsible for him, for protecting him? Protecting him from the pain of reliving his past or his losses? Absolutely. I wasn’t going to go there. I feared he’d break down. He had two photos of his family that I have shown you; both were on his desk in front of him every day of his life, always. That was my image of the family. I had no others.

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Did you ever ask him about it? Tentatively, I remember I once remarked, ‘That’s a lovely picture. You must have been a middle-class family’ because of what everyone was wearing. Very smart outfits. Did you ask about his sister? Yes. Edita was his elder sister. A genuine beauty. Had a boyfriend who was not Jewish. He was prepared to go to Terezin with the family. He did go, and he died. Dad told me about that, one fleeting moment. We never sat down and discussed things. He remarked that Edita had a boyfriend and that he was very loyal and brave. Did the fact that he left so much unsaid act as a block to your relationship with him? Yes. I always doubted of the ‘truth’. Firstly, don’t forget, my parents divorced when I was three. I never worked out actually why they divorced. I got one version from my mother; then when she died—I was eighteen—I talked to Dad, and I never got a sense that they sang from the same hymn sheet. Why did she commit suicide? Why do people commit suicide? She had a number of mental breakdowns in her late thirties. She had had perpetual psychosis after I was born; postnatal depression at that time was not diagnosed sensitively, and she was sent to a mental hospital for two years and I was fostered. My father was working full time and wasn’t available for child care; I ended up in a commune with him in Epsom, and he would come at the end of the day and I would be there with other children. I have idyllic memories of this extended commune-style family time. Your father was still in the throes of finding out what had happened to his family when you were born [in 1945]? Absolutely. He was in the Czech division of the British Army. He went back to Prague to find his family, to find his flat, and found there was ‘nothing there’. It had been occupied by German soldiers/officers. But it had been bombed. His intention was to stay. My mother was in hospital struggling to learn Czech, reading a Czech dictionary, trying to learn Czech so she could join her husband. By the time the Communists took

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over in ’48, he was back here. He came back to look after his wife. He never implied to me that he left Czechoslovakia for any other reason. He never suggested any other reason why he came back. Others did not go back [to Czechoslovakia]. I can’t remember one. Dad kept in touch with a few friends who had stayed in Prague. The realization that there were no family members left, during the one or two years when he was there, I think he decided there was nothing for him there. He had a wife, a little boy and possibly a good career here with the LCC. He was involved in planning the new Barbican area and redesigning the East End. Do you think the tragedies that were unfolding indirectly affected you at the time? No. My father did not know when he went back to Prague that everyone was dead. I always saw him as a sad, contemplative man. There was emptiness there. Children chatted about their grandparents. On my father’s side, I never could. ‘Where’s Granny? Where are my relations?’ I didn’t ask. Why didn’t I inquire? I probably had said when I was four, ‘I’ve got friends at school, and they have grandparents.’ I probably got the message from Dad’s eyes not to go there. What would my family tree be? Two parents who had divorced. Finish. I had grandparents on my mother’s side. I lived with them for a while. My mother was unwell for the first three years of my life; I then lived with my grandparents, which was fairly unhealthy, I gather. I played with my grandmother’s shoes. It was not an ideal environment for a little boy. I saw a lot of pictures of the First World War and what had happened to their soldier relatives. I thought that must have been ghastly, the First World War. Nothing about the Second World War. Did your mum ever tell you stories about your dad? She was often mentally unstable and belittled Dad’s achievements. She’d been ill, the marriage had collapsed, she’d brought me up and he’d gone off and married someone else. So I received a skewed version of ‘Dad’ from her. Did the fact that he left her straight after your birth to go to Czechoslovakia affect her? Yes. She thought/fantasized that he was having lots of affairs with women. That was her interpretation. That he was gallivanting around with other women. When I presented this to him many years later in a row we

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were having, I said, ‘Mum said you’d had lots of affairs with other women. Did you?’ He went pale with fury and said, ‘That’s absolute rubbish and nonsense.’ Who did I believe? It only confused me. What is the truth of all this? But when he died, I found lots of pictures of his nice lady friends from the mid/late ’40s when my mother was mentally ill. So he probably did. People were desperate after the war. They had survived! So of course they had relationships, many short term. I’m still in touch with Herbert’s first wife, Dina Lom, who was involved in the German film industry here; she knew my mother and claimed my mother would never have coped with my father’s dynamism, his determination and ambition to succeed. She would have been broken by it. She was a gentle, sensitive soul. I talked to Dina often; she knew me as a baby. We have a lovely friendship. Do you see yourself as Jewish? I don’t go to synagogue, but I’m very sensitive to any comments antagonistic towards Jews. Culturally I’m very much drawn to Jewish people and always have been from adolescence. As I said, my father had many Jewish friends. I could never quite work it out. None of them were particularly practicing, but they were Jewish in spirit, style, mannerisms. If somebody says to you, do you see yourself as Jewish, how do you answer? I perceive myself as an English Jewish Londoner. I was born in St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. I think I’m most proud of my Jewish background from my father. It means more to me than whether I’m English or not. What I’m proud of is his thinking through things, his intellectual abilities, his artistic talents, his determination, his survivalism, his ability to get on with things and not to dwell on the past. I’m the one who dwells on the past! He started a new life and career. I’m very proud of that. I don’t think he ever used the word victim. I think he saw post-’45 as a massive challenge. The whole thing before had been madness. He was a rationalist. To base anything upon whether your grandfather might have been Jewish, and therefore you might be stigmatized, seemed barmy to my dad. Are you circumcised? As a child I was unaware of circumcision and was not circumcised. 1 However, I ‘looked circumcised’, and three of my four boys have been circumcised. I married twice; both women are Jewish, not in a practicing,

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religious way, but culturally. I wanted my sons to appreciate a Jewish background and identity, in an anthropological sense. The funny thing is that I wanted more and more when I was an adolescent the notion that I had been circumcised. It was very important early on to see myself that way. I feel myself circumcised. That was my identity rather than the English identity. I wanted to be proud of that. Of course, I saw my dad naked later on. I didn’t say to him ‘why wasn’t I circumcised?’ What about food? Dad loved what I dubbed ‘German foods’. Assorted sausages, gherkin, sauerkraut, mustard, rye bread and onion . . . I eat like that. Not only that; it’s been inherited by my children. Gone down the generations. It’s not because we told them to . . . In the Epsom commune, I heard so many wonderful foreign accents from all these refugees. My father learnt German at school, so that was his second language. He communicated with his relative at the end of the war and wrote in German. I remember teasing my father very early on. He would say he was ‘naturalized English’ in this Czech accent. And I would say, ‘Naturalized English! You have no idea how you sound!’ [Said with a Czech accent.] I was a very English little boy, though I have Slavic eyes, unusual in Streatham in the late ’40s. So I was aware of being ‘not local’, not quite ‘one of us’. I wasn’t bullied at school. I was a social joiner. I wanted to be part of whatever there was. Always very keen to fit into the environment I’m in. Probably picked that up from my dad. Your experience of the past has not separated you out from other people? Well, it has in a way. You are the first person I’ve ever spoken to in detail about this ‘second-generation’ phenomenon. I’ve been reading about this since my adolescent years fifty years ago. I’m fascinated by this. And I have heroes, Primo Levi, Weisel, American and European Jewish writers, but I’ve never spoken to people about it. I felt they wouldn’t be on the same wavelength. I feel this is my field alone. I’ve tried a bit with my half-brother and half-sister, my father’s second wife’s children. When I was three, a psychoanalyst said the best advice he could give my parents was to get divorced, because my mother would never recover her mental facilities until she’s no longer feeling guilty about not learning Czech. That was the reason given in ’48. My father stated how shocked he was that he was ‘told’ to divorce my mother, but it suited him rather well. It didn’t suit my mother. He claimed the divorce was on her behalf. There

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were advantages for him, no longer caring for a vulnerable, mentally ill wife. I’m sceptical about my parents’ accounts of what went on then. I admired my dad more than my mum. I spent so many years living with the mental illness of my mother, the highs and lows, the ecstasies and depressions in her state during my teenage years. As an adolescent, I was tired of it. When she died, and it’s a shocking thing to say, there was a sense of closure, of finality, that there wouldn’t be another mental illness for her. That’s an adolescent’s approach. There is an element in which an adolescent thinks, ‘Oh, it’s going on and on with these illnesses and it’s only going to get worse’, or so I was told. And she would end up in a mental institution. Which would have been dreadful. So for me, my father was a success, and my mother was a mess. How did you think the Holocaust has affected you? It’s coloured my whole life and reading. Whenever people talk of uncles, aunts, grandparents, nieces and nephews on my father’s side, I can’t help thinking, ‘What does that mean to me?’ I remain enraged about it because of my relatives’ complete innocence and vulnerability. I happen to have a German girlfriend now, a wonderful person, great support, part of the Green movement. She’s read all my writings on Holocaust literature and is very keen for it to be published. Yet, when I visit her in Germany, I see ninety-year-olds and think ‘Where were you in the early ’40s? What were you doing? Whose side were you on?’ It’s inside my head all the time. But I can’t talk about it, not with the majority of people anyway. Do you think it has affected your relationships? It has enhanced them because it is about genuine emotions and the deepest feelings and concerns. It has added something. I have a spiritual home. After going to Israel with my first wife, S., I wrote a book about Sir Moses Montefiore, her distant relative. I felt, I’m at home here. I was relaxed. It’s a strange feeling. But I felt I know these people. I felt more at home there than here. I used to go to the synagogue for family occasions. I could have imagined, especially after I’d written this book when I was invited to speak in Jerusalem, I could imagine I could have lived here. I could have lived here [Mike’s emphasis]. But I would have been torn. I would have been one of those people who would have been a pain in the neck to the Israeli authorities, arguing about Palestine. I do think it’s an impossible place really. When it came to the crunch, it wasn’t going to happen. Bringing up the children here. But there is an affinity. One is constantly torn about the situation politically.

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Do you feel any identification with Czechoslovakia? Oh, yes. When I walk round, I see people who look like me. OK, they are in their sixties now. But when I first went there, I thought, ‘Oh, God, this is where my dad came from. They have the same sort of eyes as me.’ Prague is also a beautiful city. It’s a great place. Part of me feels an identity elsewhere. Israel is also such a fascinating place but fraught with intractable political problems. When you saw the wall with the names [in the Jewish cemetery], how did you feel? It was about 2004, a few years after my father’s death. We went there [to the Jewish cemetery] not knowing what was there. I was in Prague for a family visit, mine and my father-in-law’s family. We were going to Kafka’s museum, Mozart’s house, plays, etc. In the cemetery I just looked up and it was an A to Z. It was pretty high up. ‘B’. Oh, my God. A sign stated, ‘No photographs’. Of course, I broke the rules and immediately pointed my camera. I wanted this record. These are my grandparents and my aunt. There were other Buchbinders, and I assume they were linked in some way. It’s a quite common name. Have you wanted to commemorate them? I am commemorating them. In my writings I am commemorating them all the time. Even though I don’t know the exact details, apart from knowing exactly when they died. Their postcard was sent. Rudolf Vrba wrote a book, I Escaped from Auschwitz, and in it is a chapter on postcards that were sent cynically by the Nazis, from inmates who, by the time the postcards were sent, were dead. I knew the date put on postcards from my grandmother and my aunt, but by then they were already dead, because those people from Terezin had died two weeks before. I cross-checked. Every year, when I get a new diary, I put in March 7, when they died, although the last card was dated the twenty-first. It’s very poignant to me, very important that I record that for my family history and posterity. Some things are very deep, deep in one’s soul. The monumental fact is they died without ceremony, without knowing what they were going to face. It’s supremely shocking. Not to know or have forewarning that you are about to die is the ultimate sacrilege to me. What I’m doing is commemorating them, the memory of them each year. What all my reading is about is trying to keep it in the memory. Once you lose that, we lose everything. I’m doing it for my family. Then it spreads out to friends, others who are interested, they will get a sense of what I’m doing. It’s

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taken fifty years. I really wanted to keep it to myself in order to have a very clear message of what I wanted to retain. It’s in the writings, condensed into the essence of essential sentences, to sum up, a book, these sentiments, what it meant to me and what I want to say to the future of my children. How do you think it affected your attitude to yourself? I have always felt I had a mission to explain, to make sense of the family catastrophe. It gives one’s life coherence. And because my dad couldn’t, was mostly silent, I’ve got to speak out. Say I’ve got another ten to fifteen years; I’m going to get it all on paper as a record to be consulted. It has given me a structure. I could go barmy. Sometimes, I think I could possibly become ill like my mother. It worries me. But I also think, because I’ve got this damned mission, I’m not going mad, I’m going to stay as rational as I can. This book will be done. It’s eight hundred pages at the moment, and it will be eventually published. If I drop dead, I’ve said to my sons, get it published. It’s not just about family. I’m doing this with philosophers, literature, particularly Shakespeare. Those writers who have sustained me I want to treasure and cherish in my life; one wants to pass that on. I got a terrible shock the other day. My oldest son casually commented, ‘Dad, the world has moved on. People don’t read books anymore.’ My response was, ‘I’ll put it on the Internet, then.’ I’ve written books, that is my world. That is what sustains me. Reading other people’s fascinating thoughts. Through the depressions and uncertainties of life. And marriage breakdowns and relationship screw-ups. I go back to what I most love, reading and interpreting the most wonderful pieces of writing. And that sustains me. Having said that, I was a history lecturer for twenty years, then a film censor for sixteen years and a TV regulator for six years. A lot of my time has been spent watching films, which has also had a big influence. The most profound experience I’ve ever had was watching Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah. Nine and a half hours about the Holocaust; that had a shattering effect, profoundly affecting my thinking. How does it all fit together? How does one ‘fit together’? With difficulty . . .

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Were your politics affected by your father’s politics? No. I was not brought up by my father. I was always much further to the left of my father. Once he became a town planner, he joined the LP [Labour Party], and eventually the SDP [Social Democratic Party]. I was livid, and we had a furious row about it. I was a CP member in my teens. At university, I was in the IS [International Socialists], and then I joined the CP historians group, Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, Hill, etc., all heroes. When I met such people, it was my heaven on earth! I had a wonderful debate with Hobsbawm over the Falklands War. He supported it! I didn’t. My final question is going to be what being second generation means to you? I’ve just managed to hold back the tears. I wanted to hold them back. I wanted to explain. I’ve got to carry on the Buchbinder family history, the knowledge of that history and anything that was saved from that history. I’m proud that my father survived things to tell just a little bit of the story, even though he didn’t want to talk about it. It’s up to me now to carry that tradition on, and I have, with my half-brother, who shares my interest. I’m also much more serious than I make out to friends and family. Do you think second generation is a useful concept? Yes, I think it’s important to acknowledge the impact that the second generation have had, has a great deal of potency. I do. When I meet people who have had a similar type of experience, there’s a sense of something we need to discuss, stuff that wasn’t discussed properly. Those who lived through the ’30s and ’40s were too pained, too in shock. I can’t imagine what people went through. The ‘not knowing’ must have been the worst. I was looking through these writings to augment what my mission was. For example, Hannah Arendt quoted Eichmann, ‘I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, when I felt free of all guilt.’ That was Eichmann talking at the Wannsee Conference, January 1942, arranging the Final Solution. And I thought, ‘You were “free of all guilt”.’ That must rank as one of the most obscene statements in history. I do make links with those mad wartime years, and the madness I have personally witnessed in my family; the opposite of the truth was going on. Primo Levi noted that ‘We the survivors are not the true witnesses’ . . . ‘To lose one’s memory is to lose oneself. To no longer be oneself.’ . . . ‘The memory of the offence falls upon the survivor.’ . . . ‘The injury cannot be healed.’ Another book profoundly influenced me. Tadeusz Borowski:

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This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. He wrote, ‘There is no crime that a man will not commit in order to save himself.’ He watched a football match ‘between two throw-ins, 3,000 went to their deaths’. Did your father feel guilty that he left his family? I have no doubt my father felt guilty. But did he ever say it? Never. That is why he worked himself so hard. He was totally tunnel-visioned. He felt immense guilt that he had left his sister and his parents, who were in their early fifties. Do you tend to feel guilty if you’d upset your father or let him down in some fashion? I never had a proper discussion with my father about any of this. I don’t think he ever made me feel guilty. About what? I was so detached from my father. When I saw him I was so pleased to see him, because he was my dad. It wasn’t like an ordinary adolescence. He was an awesome figure. I’d have loved to have lived with him. He was an intellectual. I could have been inspired by him, but I was looking after my mother. I had to live with her. I would have loved to eat his foreign foods, meet more of his fascinating foreign friends. He was living in Highgate. I was living a dull existence, looking out of curtains in Morden. I hated it. Getting to university was my goal. I will never return to this petty place. When I went back there to sell the house, I felt so relieved that I would never have to return. Were your politics influenced by your father in any way? No. My mother, with whom I lived, was a Communist, and she was married to a Stalinist (my stepfather). At the time of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, I went to school and I was the only person who said there are people fighting the Soviet Union. We have to support the Soviet Union. That was the party line I’d been taught at home. I longed to know what happened in Terezin between 1942 and 1944 and what happened to my family when they were shoved off to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Then I read this wonderful book, which illuminated what happened in Terezin—Sebold’s Austerlitz. 2 He wrote, ‘We have appointments to keep in the past and we must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time.’ I viewed films of Terezin made by the Nazis, and I look at them, searching for any member of my family. It wouldn’t resolve anything if I recognized them, but again it would have been proof, if proof was re-

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quired. But I had the proof when I got the final cards. They wrote from Terezin before they went further east, ‘We are going east. We’ve been told we are going east.’ When I read that phrase, I realized they had no idea what was in store for them. All the writers say nobody who ended up in Auschwitz had any previous notion of what was happening there. What an amazing ability to keep such a secret [by the Nazis]. How come nobody knew? Then historians started digging and found that some diplomats did know halfway through . . . and locals knew, etc. In my family the first secret kept from me was my name. When my mum died, when I was eighteen, I found my birth certificate in my mother’s cabinet. And I thought, ‘Who is this bloke?’ It said ‘Michael Buchbinder’. And my stepfather admitted it was my father’s surname. And he had changed it when I was three [to Bor]. It ‘sounded too German’, I was informed. British people, being a bit insular, didn’t like Germanic-sounding names. That shattered me. Why haven’t I been told? Nobody talked about these things. My mother was ashamed of her mental illness; she was ashamed about her past. She had also been ‘Buchbinder’, but then reverted to her maiden name, Allen. Now I call myself Bor, which is my father’s name before he changed it. I once said to my father when I was angry, ‘I feel like honouring my name’, and he said, ‘Bor is your family name.’ He was pretty hurt by that. I was stabbing him. Anyway, I’m glad I found out my real family name [Buchbinder], otherwise I wouldn’t have known, when looking up at that commemorative wall in the Jewish cemetery in Prague, that ‘That’s my family there. Those are my relatives.’ Who would have told me? I think that’s the trouble, trying to work out why don’t people tell me the truth. And you know they are bloody lying. It’s almost so ingrained, I don’t believe a thing. Is there anything you would like to add? Coming from a ‘broken home’, as it was called then, there weren’t that many children of divorced parents in my first schools, or children who admitted their parents were divorced. I had no self-confidence and failed the Eleven plus. I had one talent—I was good at acting and accents and mimicking teachers; I was the class clown. I did very badly at school until I was sixteen, then realized I needed to get some qualifications if I wasn’t to end up stacking shelves. Actually, my first summer job from uni was stacking shelves in Bentalls, Kingston. During that time my mother was mentally ill and being carted off to mental hospital at regular intervals. I managed to get GCEs and began A levels. Then my mother committed suicide, and the shock of my mother’s death compelled me to reassess everything. That was the point at which I

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suddenly went into myself and studied and forced myself to think about what I wanted to do. I was living with my stepfather, and we didn’t get on. I wanted to get to university. How do you get to university? Pass your A levels. So I studied seriously. I got my A levels, went to Bangor University to do my first degree, LSE to do my master’s. It was at Bangor [university] that they daubed ‘Yiddo’ on my door. Pathetic.

NOTES 1. Circumcision is often, if not normally, seen in even liberal Jewish communities as a key ‘sign’ of being a Jew. It distinguishes the Jewish male from the non-Jewish male, making the person one of ‘us’ and not one of ‘them’. Noncircumcision is a profoundly significant statement, though, as can be seen by comparing the different cases, it may be that it is not done for a variety of reasons: to protect the child from anti-Semitism, because the parents do not actually see the child as Jewish, a desire to integrate and so forth. That all but one of the male participants had not been circumcised raises issues worthy of further exploration. 2. W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2002).

INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT, FEBRUARY 2011

Robert’s father had been born in what was Poland, but Robert hardly knew any details. His mother came from Hungary/Austria and had grown up in Vienna. Robert had been told very little about his family, many of whom had been murdered. Robert had realized very young that he was Jewish but, for reasons the testimonial reveals, calls himself a ‘hidden Jew’. This is another family where ‘Jewishness’ did not have an ordinarily lived meaning. Another tragedy, which does not appear in the other interviews, is that both his mother’s brothers, Robert’s much-loved uncles, were killed fighting for the British in Palestine. Robert elaborates on an awareness of death. Although I am aware of the importance of hearing the ‘voice’ of the participant, to make for smoother reading, I have at points edited the text. I signal this by the use of ellipses, and I have also on two occasions moved the order of the text. I state this at each point in brackets.

Could you tell me the names of your parents and, if possible, your grandparents , and, if you can, where and when they were born and died? My mother was Josepha Anna Smargt, but was usually called Anna, born 20 August 1916 in Budapest. She grew up in Vienna. Born to a workingclass artisan family, she became a shop assistant. My father, Max, born 3 163

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January 1920, came from Galicia. I was born on 26 July 1943. I do not know his mother’s parents’ nationality—or much else about them. What do you know about your parents’ pasts? I don’t know my mother’s mother’s or father’s nationality. I always had this view that perhaps my mother’s side of family were Sephardic. My mother had a fairly olive type of skin, and certainly when I was younger, I took more after my mother than I do my father . . . I don’t know because I never asked, and they never told. You didn’t ask questions like that. Or should I say, as I get older, I realize the subtleties of all this. I have some really quite painful things where I think one of the reasons I wasn’t told was because I didn’t ask. I made the assumption that they didn’t want to talk. I will tell you a story to clarify that . . . One of the things is that when we left Kilburn [in northwest London], or as my mother liked to call it West Hampstead, in 1951, when I was about nine, and we’d moved from there, I got beaten up, not terribly badly, by the little Irish boys, as I called them, for being Jewish. ‘Bloody German. We won the war.’ I’d say, ‘I’m not German, I’m Austrian.’ And then they’d say, ‘Bloody Jew.’ So when we left and moved, my parents said, ‘Don’t tell anybody we are Jewish. Don’t even tell your [younger] brothers you are Jewish because they are too young and they’ll let it out.’ How I believed nobody would guess with a name like K., and I freely admitted my parents came over in 1938. I regard this as a kind of form of hiddenness. It was quite important not to speak about such things. And the rows I had with my parents about Israel. One night we were watching Tonight with Cliff Mitchelmore on the TV. Robbie Hall and Julie MacGregor . . . were on, two Scottish folk singers . . . and they did haverneguyer and I thought it was wonderful. I realized it was Jewish. It was so vigorous. I also realized I mustn’t show this. I mustn’t show my enjoyment or that I’d figured out that it was Jewish . . . My mother would have been sensitive to this rather than my father. One never knows with body language. I didn’t say how wonderful it was . . . I suspect my parents thought I wasn’t interested, though I thought it was wonderful . . . One of the things I should do is to go to the various organizations in this country that have records. What I haven’t said is that my father came to this country, at some stage he became a gunsmith. He couldn’t become a doctor like his father wanted him to be because of the Nuremberg Laws. He wanted to be a civil engineer. When he came to this country, he was happy to be a gunsmith here, but then he got interned in the Isle of Man. I have a wonderful drawing of him there. It’s so disturbing . . .

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[This paragraph has been moved from later in interview.] He’d [Robert’s father] been in Dachau in 1938. All the men from Lodz were deported to Dachau. At the time, Dachau was a straightforward concentration camp. [Dry laughter] In that period, they were still encouraging Jews to leave, and he got out. I think you had to be sponsored, though I don’t know who sponsored him. I know my mother came over as a domestic servant for English Jews whom she hated because she said they treated her so badly . . . He was interned twice. Once in Dachau, where he was almost, where he saw people from his village being killed around him. Although they didn’t do systematic murder, they hit people with rifles and kicked them. He thinks that the thing that saved his life was a German Communist, and he stressed that this was not an Austrian or Catholic, saying, ‘You must go to the middle and not be bruised. If you are bruised or damaged, then they won’t discharge you.’ And I thought what is it to push against the other people from Graz, and for them therefore to be further out. And my father, I suspect. I think I’m a fairly timid person, and I’m always taken aback when I do things, not brave, I’d probably say foolhardy, do things I don’t think I can do in dangerous situations, and I think my father was more timid than me, and whatever he was before he went into the camps, after having those two things and not having any strong ideology. They weren’t socialists. They voted Labour till quite late. Remember, he was a toolmaker, and that sort of respectable working class did not get the benefits or the tax breaks. We had the Mirror and Reynolds News and the Sunday Dispatch and the Sunday Pictorial and the Co-op and Labour papers. My father was a non–trade unionist . . . He stood up for a man who was being harassed by the employer. My father then was harassed, and the trade union did not stand up for him when he was being victimized. After that, he worked in non–trade unionized places of work. Did you ask your parents about their past? One thing I became aware of when I was quite young, was my mother being in dreadful grief and a number of times saying, ‘I wished I had died with my little mother.’ Being in dreadful grief. Screaming. In pain. Something would happen, maybe on the radio. Tauber would come on the radio. Just before we moved from London, she had had two brothers, one left Austria well before, in the mid-’30s; one joined the British Army, one the American Army. I remember them, because I was born in ’43. They both went to Israel, or Palestine. They both died in what the Israelis call the War of Independence. The nachba . . .

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I think that’s one of the things that completely devastated me. What it did to my mother I can’t bear to think. And my father must have been pretty upset as well. But I still have the book of Schimerl’s [written by his mother’s younger brother], and I still have a kangaroo book of short stories, extraordinary short stories which I took to school. The tea chest [with his dead uncle’s possessions] arrived, and I remember it being opened in our flat and that’s all I remember. I don’t remember them [his brothers] being present . . . All I remember are the bay windows of the first floor flat and the tea chest being in the middle of the room and the lid of the tea chest, which was in use in those days for removals . . . I don’t remember things being taken out. I remember still having Schimerl’s book . . . I’m not sure I still have the book . . . [Moved from later in the interview. Long after university, when Robert had to move out from a lover’s home.] Many of my books, including Schimerl’s, were put into a cellar, and I suspect were destroyed by the damp and the rats. Do you know what happened to your grandparents? My mother’s parents were murdered. I found out when I and my friend S., who now lives in Berlin, and I went to Austria for the first time about two years ago. We went to the Jewish Museum, and S. helped me get the information about Leah. I have a really bad memory for these things, which I think is very suspect. It forms patterns. But I know that Irlan—in English, Julius or Julian—was taken to be deported, and he was kept in the Palma House [presumably a ‘transit’ site] in Vienna, which S. and I visited, and then he was deported to Lodz. He was killed in Lodz. From the date, seems likely to have been killed in one of these early gassing experiments in the vans in 1940. Leah was in Theriesenstadt for a time, and she was murdered in Auschwitz. That was quite a bit later. I don’t understand. The IKJ in Vienna, I made contact with them to get some more information, but I didn’t follow it up because the guy’s English was terrible and my German is terrible, though I think German was probably my first language. I don’t speak German. And I’ve steadfastly refused to learn German. The guy in the IKJ who would have been helpful was going on holiday, and I haven’t got back to them. I pursue this with great reluctance and difficulty, partly because of technical difficulties, partly I’ve always found something else. Although in some sense it appears not to be painful to me, but I know it’s extraordinarily painful.

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And there are no records of my mother’s family in Vienna. Which is weird. Nothing on the microfiche in the state library, the equivalent of the municipal library. That may be something to do with the fact that her father became a very fundamentalist, I assume, type of Hassidic, and refused to, and stopped work. He was working on the bridge in Budapest. He was a mason of some kind. There will be some record, and that’s why I want to go to the Jewish Cultural Organization because I’d have thought they’d have some sort of registration there, though he may have regarded that as too assimilated. I remember one of the stories my mother told me was that he threw a rabbi down the stairs . . . You only started checking the records very recently? One of the reasons it took me so long, I never had a problem with telling myself I was a Jew. I always regarded myself as being Jewish, though I didn’t know about what that meant. As a kid, I couldn’t really believe that people were religiously Jewish. When I came across friends of my father’s relatives and they were more prosperous and had left earlier and had gone to Israel, I’d say, ‘What!’ and they’d take their children away from me and that upset me dreadfully because I liked G. I can’t give the reason. Till I identified myself as a socialist. Then, I didn’t want to play the Jewish card. My distaste for the state of Israel, and I would say, ‘It’s a genocide. Of course there were large numbers of people who were killed, but there are other genocides. Why is this being privileged?’ I’m suspicious about that. Looked at rationally, you understand that, but there’s also this thing, quite an important thing, I can’t stand this idea of being privileged. I know some Jewish people, Russian Jews who came over in the 1890s and this guy had been active in the Cable Street defence, you know, or attack if you want, and he said, ‘Can I shake your hand as a son of —— ?’ I can’t remember what term. I was so astonished, and I let him shake my hand. I was so startled. And I said, ‘Jack, this is absurd.’ He wanted to shake my hand as the son of survivors, as a second generation. I’ve come across that kind of thing before. It’s rather like Roman Catholics and kissing relics. What disturbed me was the reverential attitude . . . I used to be a member of IS [International Socialists], and I was horrified by the rallies we used to have in the late ’60s and early ’70s. ‘For God’s sake, this reminds me of Nuremberg. We must stop this.’ What changed?

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I knew nothing about my parents. I remember saying this to the rabbi at university that I was Jewish. Because I was distant from my parents so that I could not bring harm to them, or more importantly to my brothers. There was still a degree of NF [National Front] violence; there were NF demos in Trafalgar Square when I was a kid. So it wasn’t completely unrealistic. That was when I started to say to myself I can now come out of the closet. When you talk of people being in the closet, it’s often because they are ashamed. But I wasn’t ashamed. Why should I be ashamed? It was very, very slowly that I started to find out about the past. It was through the two women that I’d lived with . . . , who talked to me about Israel and their Jewish relatives. And it didn’t seem to me such a crazy . . . I’ve got nothing against Jews in particular. My concern is with Israel. When I came across Catholic shrines, I was horrified, and I remember the first time, I thought, ‘They are as bad as Jews.’ But then I came across Jews who weren’t like that, who weren’t crazies. And I came across the idea of secular Jews. And I got to know A., and she was a just a very straightforward secular Jew. They did a lot of the food and some of the rituals, but they were secular rituals, like English people call themselves C of E and celebrate Christmas, and I came across Jews like that. I didn’t have an internal resistance to finding out. [Pause] I revise that. I suspect there is a resistance, and I know that I’m overly reflexive about these things. Because I’m not aware of the resistance in a very conscious way, I suspect it’s very deep. I say that because I’ve come across things where I’ve thought at the time, ‘I’m blasé about this.’ But afterwards I was in deep pain, and I realize I’m just fooling myself. I think it comes out of the idea being a hidden Jew. When I was a child, I practiced not to show any reaction when people talked about Jews. Just like a spy must do when one’s taking a role. Mustn’t be too nonchalant because that gives it away. That I think is terribly destructive of one’s emotional fibre. Therefore, I’m aware that a lot of my reactions, to all sorts of things, certainly in the past, much better now, have become quite stilted and distorted. Then you went to Vienna and found out about the deaths of your parents’ parents? In one sense, my immediate reaction was kind of nothing, a kind of horror at a distance. I suspect this is a little bit like that rather stereotypical various stages of grief. I think it’s a degree of shock which doesn’t manifest itself as shock, but manifests itself as a kind of ‘Oh, yes.’ Though that isn’t quite right.

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I looked at this blue screen with the white writing on it. I can see it. And I thought. [Weeps] And I hadn’t seen their names. [Weeps] I can’t remember how we did it. But I also got the information about my father’s mother because my father’s father escaped to Italy and survived . . . My father’s family comes from Galicia. I only know that from some photos I found after his death. A postcard his father sent to a girlfriend who then became his wife. It’s in the Polish surname, then was Zosha. Then became Sophie . . . An extraordinarily nice-looking woman. A staged photo, but nevertheless she has an easy smile, grin. [The postcard had been sent from somewhere] which I think is now in Ukraine and was then in Poland. They [his grandfather] settled in France, and as he said, whatever money Opa had had before the First World War, he didn’t have any after, and he cycled around as a peddler and he became some kind of merchant, but I don’t know what. I used to think that they became relatively welloff, but that was probably due to my misunderstanding of the significance of having a servant. They had a maid. But relatively poor middle class or even artisans [had servants]. I mention it because it’s the only episode [that suggested what his father’s family did]. Did your parents’ response to being refugees affect you? I told my parents I’d joined the Labour Party. It was bad enough I’d joined CND. My mother actually said, ‘They’ll come for you in the night’, and I kind of laughed. I had this memory that there were the yellow star demonstrations, John Tyndale maybe at that time as well, and my mother said, and this was in the kitchen. And I said, ‘No. It won’t happen in England.’ And she said something else. And my father was there . . . Father said, ‘Oh, Anna, they weren’t socialists like we were. Not like at home.’ I remember when there was the fighting between the socialists, and I think he said, ‘The fascists in Grasz and we were sheltering under the table with the maid . . . and the bullets came through the walls.’ And I’m looking at him and thinking, ‘This is true.’ You don’t behave like that. You don’t make up such stories. But this is beyond my comprehension. This is not like the hunger marches or Grosvenor Square. This is absurd. This is crazy. And I didn’t ask anything further. I was so shocked that I did not ask anything. I didn’t say what was that all about? It wasn’t about Jewishness. He just said this. This was something that happened. It was a shock that this had happened to my dad, and I always remembered this. When people talked about demos, and of course these were antiracist demos in the late 1960s, rather than about the Industrial Relations Act. I used to say to people on antira-

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cist demos in the late ’60s, I would say, ‘I haven’t got this experience, but I know.’ My mother never said anything. She lived in a worker’s area in Vienna. Of course, these areas were shelled by the fascists. She didn’t talk about anything. She was furious when my father did. Did your father or mother ever mention what happened to their parents? My father’s parents escaped to Italy, though I don’t know how that happened. But when Italy surrendered to the Allies, the Germans marched in, took over. My father, I’ve heard this twice in slightly different ways, not different versions but different angles, my father, no, my father’s father, Opa, went with the partisans into the mountains. I don’t know where. My mother, no his mother, went into a convent, but the Germans took her from there . . . And she went to a number of camps which I can’t remember. That’s what it said in the museum, but I didn’t know any of the details till then. I didn’t know any of the details; I don’t want to think about Lodz. [Weeps] You were talking about your father telling you things. My father once showed me a photo of a large family—there’s Zilla, there’s Doja. [Robert was unsure of its spelling.] I was at uni. I said something to him, and we went to his secretaire. We’d left London . . . What I was going to say was we were able to leave London because of the reparation money from the German government, and the money from my mother’s brothers, which they left her. And I remember us going along Kilburn High Road and possibly buying Gplan furniture and a secretaire, a bureau, I think they say in English. The key things in there, my uncle’s books in there, Aneurin Bevan and Churchill’s English Speaking Peoples and Cecil Roth on Jewish Ubermenschen, which I used to read. My father had obviously locked up the photos, and he was laughing [in the photo]. He was a very kind and tender man to his death. But he was very brusque. It was so nice to see him laughing, smile [in this photo]. We walked from the front room, and my mother must have known, and she went into a tirade, and she said, ‘You think you’ve suffered.’ And he had not been saying that, and he clammed up immediately. And I knew so we don’t talk about this. It was only after her death that I managed to get him to talk about some of this.

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Did your father tell you anything about the people in the photo? I probably said something [for his father to get out the photo]. So who were Zilla and Doja? I knew about them. We’d met . . . This was no problem . . . We had somewhat distant relatives living in Cricklewood. He married one of father’s cousins. Doja. I always thought that name didn’t sound German or Austrian. Doja’s sister was Zilla. I loved Doja. She made wonderful strudel. I can’t believe that when I was a little child I was sexually drawn to her. But certainly I knew her when I was fifteen. We didn’t break with her then. Us working-class people would go cap in hand up to their middle-class home, with their back garden the size of our whole house. I don’t think my brothers noticed they [the relatives] were Jewish. They must have thought they were just Austrians. How to reconcile all this? [Robert and his brothers visiting Jewish relatives while their parents did not want them to know that they were Jewish.] Sometimes they can’t be reconciled. I think some things are contradictory. There may be flaws in my memory. You behave differently with intimates . . . Discussing things like that with intimates cuts more deeply. [Pause] Tell me a bit more about your mother and you. The more I think about this, the more I am so sad about my mother’s life. My mother was basically an extraordinarily damaged woman. My youngest brother hated her. I kind of successfully escaped, and I deliberately use that word. Not geographically. But I kind of managed to successfully fight her. My political views, which I’m a bit suspicious of, about how rational they are. At least in part, just a way of getting at my mother, at least in origin. My mother wasn’t academically intelligent but was probably just a natural intellectual, always curious about politics, and she liked talking about my A levels and my studies, out of curiosity though also out of status striving. She would talk about how when she was younger, she just loved dancing and she was very happy, and she would look after her little brothers . . . She was a very affectionate woman. Overly affectionate. I found it suffocating, but when I now think about it, I think she was just a normal woman, perhaps a little bit more protective because of her experiences. It would irritate me when she said, ‘Your hair is out of order’, and she would lick her hanky and wipe my face, and I’d think, ‘Aaa’. That’s the sort of thing that’s always happening to children. But I’d interpret it in a different context and magnify it out of proportion. There were three brothers and a father. Late in her life, she said, ‘I wish I’d had girls.’ And I felt so sorry for her. I never knew that. I felt so

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sorry. I never knew until quite late that my father didn’t want her to go out to do paid work. I’d always thought my mother hadn’t wanted to go out. She always thought English people were disgusting. So stupid and vulgar and unclean. We kept a good home. We didn’t go for holidays. Good food and fruit. That’s what was important. The important thing was to look after the children and have fruit on the table. My father, toolmaker and a foreman, your wife mustn’t go to work. So I misunderstood my mother terribly. She may well have ended up as a harridan. But I’m afraid we probably [contributed to this]. She would always cut dead anybody who said anything against the children. There were no second chances. Except for one. S. was born in the bed next to me. I had a very difficult birth. I was in an incubator. It never occurred to me till recently, that they [S.’s family] were Jewish. We used to visit them in Golders Green when I was little. And then we never had anything to do with one another till I was thirteen. My mother invited S. and her mother over when I was thirteen, and I was so embarrassed and S. was so embarrassed . . . That’s somebody else I have to get in contact with, and I’d be devastated if she was dead. She was the only person my mother was close to. Everybody else my mother had arguments. And I don’t think we helped. My mother destroyed everything soon before she died. I suspect ‘because Bobby didn’t make enquires. Bobby wasn’t interested.’ I hate the name Bob. Bob is the name the English gave me. I was always Bobby at home. She must have destroyed things shortly before she died. My father had a number of things. I have nothing. I only have my uncle’s book from long before she died. My father would never intervene with my mother. He might have argued, ‘Why are you doing that, Anna?’ But my mother would have got very upset. ‘Bobby isn’t interested. Our younger children are not interested.’ The middle brother has changed his surname. The youngest brother is married to a Roman Catholic Indian woman. [Laughs] I never asked her anything. I fought my mother to the bitter end. Ya. [Pause] Now I think about it in this way. My mother wanted me to do things her way. Wanted me to be respectable. ‘When are you going to become a professor? Why are you a socialist? You spit on your uncle’s grave by criticizing the state of Israel. You join CND. You marry.’ One of the most extraordinary things, just before I got married, she was doing something in the sink and we were talking, and she said, ‘I wish you’d married a Jewish girl.’ I looked at her in amazement. [And thought] All my life, you said don’t have anything to do with, don’t admit you’re Jewish, at least don’t tell the English. I suspect the English was a code word for goyim. We didn’t, in fact, know my wife’s father was Jewish, and her mother may have been part Jewish also . . . .

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My mother always wanted me to do things I didn’t want to. She was a very intrusive woman. It started when I was very little. I’d been a premature baby; I suspect I almost died. It was the war after all . . . My second brother also was ill . . . We’ve brought him out a little bit now my parents don’t help him so much. [Pause] So how do you see your parents as having affected you? I can’t identify easily how my parents affected me. I do think about the experience of being, in the jargon, ‘a hidden Jew’. Hidden by Poles or whoever. Sometimes didn’t know they were Jewish . . . I’m a different kind of hidden Jew. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anybody else who knew they were Jewish and had this absurd prohibition and who kept it . . . I think this thing about being hidden, and I became practiced at hiding. It’s a false self. It’s the idea of the false self . . . I once went back to a therapist because I felt I had a problem about rescuing women. I would be attracted to a woman and then finding, as one does in any relationship, this isn’t so significant after all and easily or not so easily moving out. I would always feel this woman has problems. Is a vulnerable person. So I have to look after her . . . It’s my mother. I remember when I met S., who is my most recent long-term relationship, and we immediately were drawn to one another. S. is, she is little and dark. It’s a Welsh background. S. said I looked like her father and . . . that she had lesbian attractions . . . I said, ‘I can’t deny I’m shocked to say you look much more like my mother than A. does.’ She probably would have had the same vivacity that my mother would have had as a young woman, which she would still have been like when I was a young child and even I can still remember that from when I was a teenager . . . I didn’t know about the Oedipus complex, but she [his mother] liked going around with this teenager [Robert, her son], who looked like her husband when he was younger . . . S. isn’t Jewish . . . Most of my relationships haven’t lasted more than six to seven years . . . Natasha Burchardt said, in a section where she writes about me [in a published article], says something that I never hinted at but I think is correct: ‘These refugees got together and married people they wouldn’t normally have associated with.’ I don’t think my father and mother would, under most circumstances, would have got together. My mother would have wanted some fun-loving man. Sure, my father was very good looking. So was my mother. You should see the photographs. My father looks really handsome. Five foot ten . . . He knew how to present himself, and he was quite a vain man till the end of his life. And he knew that women found him attractive. And he had a very easy manner. He didn’t have to put it on. He was a very kind man He washed our hair with

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extraordinary tenderness. He was a toolmaker. He knew how to use his hands. My mother and father had a very difficult relationship. They fought all the time. My bedroom was above the kitchen. I don’t know why they fought. My mother was so much cleverer in most things and probably wiser than my father. She was verbally much more sophisticated than my father. It was always Bobby and the boys. My two younger brothers. When they were out of the way, my mother and I used to argue about Israel. I didn’t know at the time my mother was giving the stock Zionist arguments. What was it? A people who don’t use the land goes to a people who have no land, or something like that. I didn’t realize my mother was quite well schooled in this stuff. My mother would be shouting at my father at the end of the table. My father would say the Jews and the Irish should both be pushed into the Red Sea. What we later called abstentionism. [Earlier in the interview, Robert had said:] ‘Both my parents had been part of a quasi-Zionist group [before coming to the UK]. Neither were Zionists, though my mother was possibly closer.’ What is your attitude to Judaism and being Jewish? I tell you something about Auschwitz. I went on a course a friend, quite a well-known poet, was running. One day I was getting ready to work, and the doorbell rings and I’m in a rush to go and it’s D. ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’ ‘Could you tell me on the way to the bus stop?’ ‘I’ve been to Auschwitz with my daughter’, he tells me . . . ‘But I’ve got something you might be interested in.’ But by now we are at the bus stop, and he gives me this thing at the bus stop. [Pause] So I read it at the bus stop, and right on the back page it says you enter the Auschwitz centre through the K. family home, which is next to the synagogue. [Pause] And I look at this, and my first reaction is horror that I might have something to do with people associated with synagogues. [Laughs] Because I’ve come across Ks in America. There don’t seem to be any in Germany when S. and I looked up K. in the records . . . I used to look up K. in the [UK] phone directories, and there were three of them. I think Dad phoned them, and one of them was some sort of colonel and he got a pretty cold rebuff from this guy . . . When my father died, I phoned these people in Cricklewood, I was amazed to find in my father’s address book or diary, the address of the Ms. And I thought, ‘But we broke with them, surely, when I was at uni for some reason that I’ve never found out.’ And I spoke to D., and I’ve never spoken to her again. This was about 1993. And I said, ‘Max has died.’ And she said, ‘I’m sorry’, but still quite cold about this. I was so taken aback. Every time I do this, I am shocked, I

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think anybody would have been shocked, never mind the barrage of other stuff there is for me. And she said, ‘Well, we’ve never had any contact because at your opa’s funeral, he accused B., another relative . . . , of Opa having lent him some money, but when Opa died, he never paid the money back.’ I cannot believe my father would have been bothered about this for financial reasons . . . So it was probably the principle . . . We laughed a lot with the Ms, H. and P., particularly with B. . . . who told me about that a Communist historian had written a book about jazz, Hobsbawm . . . I got told for H.’s twenty-first birthday he got bought a coffee shop. [Laughs loudly] This is not my type of boy . . . I’ve gone through a number of changes. It’s one of these things of avoiding both extremes. Like in teaching . . . I worked out a way of working out what is important for me but at a distance. I worked out a way of discussing issues, whether in academic subjects or everyday life, not of thinking of things on a continuum but as a horse shoe. And the desired position is at the peak of the keystone, and it’s not, like I’ve always like my mother, despised the English middle way, because it’s in extreme tension . . . My position is that I don’t want to be a religious Jew. So I’m not a Jew. Obviously I knew I was a Jew, but not that kind of Jew. I’m a child of refugees. I’m the child of Austrians. I didn’t realize how Nazified Austria was at that stage. [Laughs] . . . I went to the other extreme. I didn’t deny . . . if a Jew asked me about being Jewish, I’d say, ‘Yes, I’m Jewish’, and to socialists, people I could trust, I’d say that. To people who weren’t going to harm my brothers or my parents. In this inchoate way. I’d tell it. Why should I have difficulty about this? Difficulty about Israel. I didn’t have a sense of collective guilt. I feel I have a responsibility for Israel, about the Palestinians. So I went through this thing that the Shoah was a big genocide, but ‘Come on you buggers. Don’t forget about the others’, and I went too far that way, and it took me a long way in a very inchoate, very jumbled. . . . Of course, there was an epiphany, I’d forgotten, of realizing the significance it [being Jewish] had to me. I never felt then I had to push it down. When I realized I’d buried this Jewish thing, I then started to look at it, but it has taken me a long time. You won’t believe this. It’s from a Jacobsen or Roth novel. I go to an assertiveness [course], many years ago . . . My then partner said she also wanted to go because she was what I call evasive, what this woman called manipulative. I thought it a good idea because I was so aggressive. We went on this thing. It took about two weeks. At the end, the therapist said to me he didn’t think I’d got much out of it. I was rather upset by this. I walked back. I didn’t want to be with this particular partner. It was another rescue thing . . . It did help me break the relationship . . . I was going back . . . [and I] go into [a

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friend’s] house . . . And A. opens the door, says she has got something for you, and she shows me this thing and . . . it’s about Jung. And I think . . . I don’t like the collective unconscious, and I’m a bit iffy . . . And she says I always knew, and she said something like ‘Jewish’. And I was baffled by this. I’m already disturbed that I haven’t been assertive. With this woman or myself. And I go back next door [to the room] where P., my partner, is . . . I am looking forwards to seeing Joni Mitchell on TV. P. is with this dreadful friend who I dislike who is in the room with her. And I say, ‘Would you like a cup of tea’, in this manipulative way, hoping they will make me a cup of tea . . . hoping they would leave me alone with the TV. But P. says, ‘I’d love a cup of tea. Would you make a pot for three?’ So I go into the kitchen and boil the kettle . . . and put the mugs and teapot on the table . . . Pour the water in. I’m standing up to pour the water in, and I sit down. And as I sit down, above my head, somebody says, ‘Fucking goyim.’ I know it means me. It’s a kind of projection. That’s where I was. It feels as if the voice has come from outside of me. [Pause] I know immediately I’m imagining this. [Pause] But what’s interesting is the fact that I used ‘goyim’. What is happening is . . . ‘Jewish’ is already in my mind, and it doesn’t take much and my feathers are already ruffled, and I’ve already got this underlying ambivalence towards P., who is not Jewish . . . All it shows is that I had a deep-seated sense of being Jewish, which I didn’t realize. Later I find when I watch things [on TV] . . . I was horrified when I saw people being interviewed who looked horribly like me. I never see anybody who looks like me in England. But in Germany and Austria, you see people who look like me. And they talk like me. He says similar things. And I turn the TV off . . . I go upstairs. There’s a dressing table mirror in my bedroom [pause] as I pass [pause] I suddenly see this person . . . I saw this dead person. It’s me. My face was completely expressionless. The eyes were almost. Obviously it’s involuntary. As soon as I saw it, I focused. What the hell is that? It was horror. Difficult to tell whether the horror is at the Shoah or whether at the continuing results that it’s had on these people. Partly, also, it’s more horrible to think that I’m not alone. If it was just me having this sort of distress, that’s OK. [Pause] To know there are other people who are distressed as well, that really is really ghastly. [Pause] Do you think about death? My therapist asked me if I’d ever thought of death. In one sense, no; in another sense, yes. I’ve never thought of dying. What did that Austrian Marxist say? ‘We Marxists are all dead men.’ I’ve sort of always lived

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with death. Not in a dramatic way. At the same time, whenever. The first time, actually Opa died when I was at uni, and my father didn’t tell me because I was taking my exams. And I was horrified. It was a good idea. He [Robert’s grandfather] never learned to speak English or made any attempt to do so. He looked like Picasso. He was an impish man. He always called my mother ‘Geneckete Frau’. He thought she had Austrian airs. What right did she have to have Austrian airs . . . He would bring me nice things. He’d bring me Suchard chocolates. Or sea shells. He brought me this water pistol that shot thirty feet of water. He was just always around. Nobody mentored me in this. I’ve a terrible resentment about this. Nobody mentored me about family, about parents. But they would say, ‘You never asked.’ I know that’s what they would have said. Each of us would have said, ‘You never asked.’ And that’s right. That’s the nature of it. Adults have more responsibility than children. But adults are damaged. How damaged they were. There was this frightened little child in them. [Pause] They probably thought because I was not showing anything, that I was OK. [Next four paragraphs moved from later in interview] There’s only been one situation when it was quite likely I would die. In Berlin. I had a heart attack. I was saved by a German, S. I said, ‘If I was a hypochondriac, I’d think I was having a heart attack.’ And we’d all laughed. [Pause] I thought it was just stress . . . Teachers always get unwell in the holidays . . . We’d had a big celebration and we were all laughing . . . Towards the night, I’d gone to my bedroom. I was getting these pains. And I thought, ‘Don’t be such a bloody male malingerer. [Pause] Don’t be stupid.’ . . . I start moaning, and by this time I suspect I’m beginning to lose consciousness . . . S. finds me and throws up her hands and hits the phone . . . When I came out of IT [intensive care] after my heart attack, they put me in this room, a wonderful room with a big glass window . . . It’s snowing. It’s Berlin. It’s Christmas. I then start to look out of the window. I say, ‘Don’t say anything, but just look out of the window.’ Out of the window is this building, in the snow, with a big chimney, smoking. And it’s the laundry. And she says, ‘What?’ And I say, ‘Arbeit macht Frei.’ And S. is so horrified, and I say, ‘You must not mention it.’ . . . I joke the Jewish card. I say, ‘No wonder, I’m used to anti-Semitism. Our people are used to this.’ I do it as a joke . . . I wouldn’t do it with somebody. [Pause] I was quite prepared to die, apparently, although I didn’t know this [when he was in the hospital]. I’ve had six bypasses, though I didn’t know this . . . [He was then moved to a UK hospital.] The surgeon said, ‘I

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have to tell you there is a risk of mortality’; I don’t think he used the word death. And I said, ‘Yes, I know. It’s two percent.’ And he said, ‘My patients: only one percent.’ And I said, ‘Oh, well, I could be the one in ten then, couldn’t I?’ I said it kinda jokingly because I really liked him. He was a Northerner . . . His manner was just perfect. We both laughed. I remember as I went to sleep, I thought, ‘Well, this may be it. I may not wake up.’ It was really interesting. I thought, ‘Well, this is it.’ This isn’t just imagination. A thought experiment. I can’t detect any great anxiety, palpitations, I can’t detect a sense of repressing anxiety . . . Have you always lived with death? Is that why you reacted like that? It’s really difficult to answer. I started to say earlier I’d known about people who had died. I knew my uncles had died. I knew the tea chest had come over. I knew that Opa had died. They were people I personally knew. But A. had visited these two really elderly women who were absolutely delightful . . . They’d shown us pictures of them when they were young women. Very pretty . . . and they were delightful and slightly flirtatious. But it didn’t upset me. They were very intelligent. And then one of them died. And I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t get my head round it. It was horrible. I didn’t want to go to the funeral. I just couldn’t bear the idea. Because there was an intimacy with them that I didn’t have with Opa and my uncles. I’d been older; I’d joked with them. And also, when a number of my men friends died, like D.R., who recruited me to IS [International Socialists] . . . and then he died of hepatitis C, and I couldn’t cope with it. And then another friend of mine. And I felt, we’d divided over IS, over the faction fights, and I felt so guilty that I hadn’t kept up with him . . . And then T.G. We’d been in the politics of health group together . . . and we’d immediately become friends because we were the only men who were willing to argue with the feminists because we didn’t buy this kind of thing . . . and he said he identified with Woody Allen and I said, ‘You can’t; you are a hoy. It’s not fair.’ He died. He eventually got a cold after his cancer treatment. He stayed [with Robert] . . . because his girlfriend said, ‘I can’t bear you. You are dreadful to live with in that period. For our relationship’s sake.’ And I did go to this funeral, but I couldn’t handle it. I never kept up the relationship. I find it very, very difficult. A., I’ve started to explicitly tell myself, that’s different. I found her so vulnerable. She was so terrible to my stepchildren. They called her the wicked witch when they were little, ten and eleven. She was so nasty to them . . . I decided I would stick with A. . . . But the children still talk about her as the wicked witch . . . I found it easy to go to T.’s [another friend’s] funeral.

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What do you see yourself as? They [Robert’s parents] had two other sons who weren’t told they were Jewish till they were in their twenties, and they were quite taken aback apparently . . . I was very resentful about my parents because I thought we had assimilated. I was really resentful. I thought we had English names. I didn’t realize Robert was also a German name, as was Peter . . . I was really resentful that we didn’t have Central European names or something like that. I was resentful quite early. I regarded myself as an Austrian. I’ve never regarded myself as English . . . I’m not English. For God’s sake, don’t call me English. As soon as both my parents were dead, I stopped calling myself Bob. I don’t know what I call myself. I would first all of call myself a socialist. [Pause] I infer I’m a man from my behaviour, from sexual attraction [pause], and then I think very close behind I’m a Jew. I probably think I’m a Jew before I was a man. I was a Jew until I was eight years old. I didn’t go to the Christian assembly [at school] in Kilburn. I’ve not been circumcised. I’ve never been to a Jewish religious ceremony. When I asked my father at one stage, and I think it was after my mother had died, why I wasn’t circumcised, his reaction was a very strange one. He said—there were tears in his eyes, and he found it very hard—he said, ‘I didn’t want you to be hurt.’ And I thought, ‘You are lying.’ And I thought, ‘You’ve been in Dachau, haven’t you.’ . . . When I was younger, there was a period, I looked like Bernard Levin . . . but at uni, my hair grew out . . . My nose is a bit like my mother’s nose, which is quite a little nose. I didn’t have any kind of stereotypical Jewish nose. I don’t really know. I could pass, not that I wanted to. I don’t know if my father could physically, without circumcision . . . What does it mean to you to be second generation? I hadn’t come across it [the concept of being second generation] till A. sent me a magazine. I see myself as second generation. I won’t go to the wall for it. Like many of these things, I call myself a socialist, though I’m not a good socialist. I don’t think I’m a good man, I don’t think I’m a good secular Jew. But they’ll do . . . To me, it’s difficult; to disentangle the Jewish element from this but to me there is no question. I am an outsider. I am in exile from myself as well as from whatever other. I don’t think of myself as a refugee. That would be disgusting, pretentious. I’m the child of refugees, asylum seek-

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ers, whatever. But I have never. People know that the way to offend me is to call me English. Sometimes if I’m being a bit formal, pompous, particularly with women, they say, ‘Oh, you are so English’, and . . . then I’ll do a mini tirade for them. After S. and I split up in the early ’90s, for various reasons, we had a very large house, which S. wanted us to have . . . I then looked for another house, which was difficult . . . I had this huge mortgage. I had lots of lodgers . . . After two years, I sold the house, and it was so important for me to find a real home . . . But I decided, this is the shift, that the way I wanted . . . I thought, I know what I’m going to do, particularly with my front room. I was going to have my house like a late nineteenth-century Viennese Jewish room, and it’s going to have my Klimts in it . . . I wanted that and rich opulent curtains . . . My present house is not a bright house. I’ve moved towards something that is my style, which is modernism. MacIntosh, early Bauhaus. I’m a Central European. That’s who I am. I don’t behave properly. I appear to be foolish or behave foolishly. I express myself halfway. I don’t feel comfortable with small talk. I don’t feel comfortable with the lack of passion. One of the things I find very difficult, and I think there is definitely something strange about me with regards to emotion, though now I am more openly emotional than I used to be, but I think I’ve always been emotional, but for various reasons I’ve not found outlets or channels for it, and some of the channels for it have upset me because they are very often middle-class things, when you are talking about middle-class bourgeois culture, that makes me very uneasy. I don’t want to buy into all that. Some of the films that attract me are bourgeois art films. If I was a real Trotskyist, I wouldn’t be like that. I think Trotsky was good on art. Robert did some further research and sent me the following: My father’s father, my Opa (Simche, although I knew him as Simon) came from [Jasło] in what is now Poland. Not far from the border with Slovakia. And my father’s mother’s name was Zosia Szreier/Schreier, born in Zagwozdz, Bezirk, Stanislau. (It was 1919–1939 in Poland, but over last 100 years, had previously been a part of Austrian empire and subsequently, of Ukraine.)

INTERVIEW WITH PETER, MAY 2011

Peter had a Jewish Hungarian father, who arrived in the UK in 1939 and met Peter’s English mother. Almost all his Hungarian family were murdered. Peter told me before the interview began that he would need to take his time, and I have indicated pauses with an ellipsis. In this case, this does not denote hesitation or editing.

Could you start, please, by giving me some of the key facts and figures in your and your parents’ lives? I’m Peter, aged fifty-four, born in 1957 in Leamington Spa, near Birmingham. My mother was not Jewish but Anglican. She also was born in Leamington Spa and still lives there. My father was born in 1923. He was Hungarian and Jewish and left in August 1939. He lived in London and elsewhere, then met my mother and settled in Leamington from about 1947 till his death in 2010. Did your parents, particularity your father, talk to you about their pasts? That’s a very good question. I think in a way it’s very revealing. My mother loves to talk about the past. You could argue that’s to do with ways in which her life went wrong in the later years. That’s partly because she’s stuck in a time warp. There’s a deep irony. The war years were the happiest years of her life. They were the years of her adoles181

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cence. With the sense of togetherness and ‘we will pull through’. Ironically, she has very happy war memories. The sense of collective and community, I think, is very strong. That’s not that she won’t talk about the awful side, particularly the bombing of Coventry, which was very near to Leamington. Refugees poured out of Coventry. She remembers those moments very well. My father—it’s difficult to think with any kind of objectivity about this. I certainly recall in my twenties thinking that, if you added together the amount of time until I was in my midtwenties or even older, perhaps he’d spoken about his past for a total of five minutes. In other words, the tiniest of references, of allusions. But nothing ever developed. Whatever sentences he uttered about the past, he said in a way which made you feel he did not want to continue. That really, really discouraged you, however much you wanted to try to take him to those zones, if you are met with such a curt answer, if you look at the body language of somebody who really seems to be saying to you, ‘I don’t want to go there’, given the power relationship between parent and child, it is very, very hard to go there . . . The concept of complicity and silence—it does make me quite angry. Because there is such a power relationship involved between parents and children. There are such established patterns. If some sort of authority figure gives out the message that they do not want to go into that space, that they feel desperately vulnerable, then I think that in the moral sense you are not in the sphere of complicity. Maybe later in adulthood the moral balance changes. Certainly, though I would have wanted to know far more about my father’s past, certainly from the time of adolescence, it felt impossible to ask. When he did talk, it was much more about Hungary, not about Jewishness and not about his childhood or parents. Somehow, there was some ability to separate, I suppose, the Jewish side and the very traumatic side of his family. He left entirely because of being Jewish . . . At least according to the family narrative, it was for his own protection, but also as a way of setting up arrangements for the rest of his family to follow. There was a fascist regime that started in the late 1920s. There was [government] anti-Jewish legislation about admission to university, for example, even from as early as the 1920s. My parents saw the war clouds gathering; certainly his parents did. They had experienced anti-Semitism in the 1930s already. His immediate parents were just small shopkeepers, but in his extended family, they were just in the process of getting rich. They had become part of an established middle class, made it good in the cheese production industry. Part of the family had moved to Budapest, where they had the main shop

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and outlet. They were a classic case of a Jewish family that was changing its class and status. He came to Britain on the pretext of studying English. Perhaps Britain was felt to be the most out of the way of Nazism of the immediate surrounding European countries. It was also seen as a stepping stone to Canada, which is where they thought their ultimate destination would be. Britain was just a staging post. How did you feel then about your father’s shutting down on the possible dialogue about his past? It’s a very good question. Curiously, I felt very close to my father in my teens, but I suppose because he couldn’t speak about these things, at the same time, there was this strange distance. It just made it very difficult to make any sense of my father because he was a kind of a Martian who had landed without any context. You had all these fragments of my father around. Like many families in this situation, we sent parcels to the few remaining relatives left in Hungary. I’d never been to Hungary, never met them. You just had these tiny strands, tiny fragments, which don’t cohere into any very full picture. The sense of my father who was out of place, who had done his best to assimilate, in some ways he had done that very successfully, all things considered—to assimilate. And yet he was a square peg in a round hole. There were lots of aspects around him that he just didn’t get. His English was excellent, particularity for somebody from a Hungarian background where the language is so different. But he could never get English humour except in its crudest, most simple forms, and he found it hard to understand other people’s perception of him. He found people very difficult to understand and how he was perceived by English people. It was a strange relationship. In some sense we were very close. I look very like him physically. I think I respected the integrity of what he did professionally, because he worked terribly hard running his own business, a very small private school, of which he was in effect the head teacher, and we lived on the premises. So I saw him in a working environment in all sorts of contexts. How do you see yourself at that point being affected? There are probably a whole range of ways. I want to try to separate the perspective at the time from the later perspective when I started to analyse that more.

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It would have been the last thing my father would have wished for me, to feel Jewish. He wanted us to escape from all that. He himself had converted to Christianity while not denying his own Jewishness after the war. And he wanted to free us from all of that. My brother and I were not circumcised. It’s classic about the ambivalence of it. He insisted when we were bathed, on pushing our prepuce back so as to make it look not quite as if we were circumcised but so that we wouldn’t look like gentiles either. It is something I can remember him explaining to us when we were in our teen years. It’s wonderfully illustrative of this kind of incredible ambivalence. You deny being Jewish for the sake of your children, but you can’t quite let it go either. His name is K.—classic Jewish name. But he can’t quite let it go. He won’t call himself Brown, for goodness’ sake. So he picks C., which is a little bit related to it. So half the time people think I am Jewish because they think my name is K. . . . There’s another beautiful illustration of it. His inability to project how he was perceived from the outside. I don’t know whether he walked round Leamington thinking ‘nobody thinks I’m Jewish’, but he clearly kept it as low profile as he possibly could. When he was about seventy, he was invited to a neighbour’s fancy dress party. My father is not a party animal. He wouldn’t know what to do with himself. This is absolutely not my parents’ world. Being conformist, my mother wanted to go because she was a small-town girl, my father because he was trying to fit in. ‘What shall I go as? As Shylock.’ And he didn’t even see the irony in this. What am I trying to say? You’re getting these tiny snippets of information in which one thing is clear: I am Jewish. My father is in effect saying all of my family were killed in the Holocaust. But that is all you are knowing. I can’t remember not knowing that. From at least when I was seven or eight. That was not a secret. That’s not to say that he ever expanded or talked about any aspect of that to any degree. I can’t remember what the words were, but I can’t ever remember that being a secret. And so the implication that, in spite of being brought up as Christian, we are in some sense Jewish, that’s still present despite all the other messages and fragmented, hidden elements. It’s a very, very confused picture. To go back to your original question of how did it affect me. I couldn’t say why was my strength of identification with that fact, that my grandparents being murdered was so strong, but it was. That was a basic fact about those years. I think, and this is looking at it retrospectively, there was a mass of survivor guilt on my part. From my early teens, I felt I had a duty, not a very precise one, that I had to live life well. I could not justify life being trivial. I could not justify living in a way that did not have a clear social purpose, rescue the world at some level. It didn’t seem

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particularly important what form that would take. There was not permission just to be a child. Just to live. I had problems watching comedy programmes, and I think that as much as anything else has caused me deep, deep problems through life. I felt I had to rescue my father at an emotional level. I think I felt I didn’t have permission just to think about myself, my own needs, my own psychological difficulties. Keeping him afloat felt a duty. I suppose that I internalized some of his need to be protected and my not having a right that the level of emotional difficulty could never be comparable to that he or his parents had experienced. Part of the complexity of adolescence for me, this was the late ’60s, early ’70s, so although this had passed my family milieu by, my brother included, there were currents of this about, including in my school environment. The other side of it was this, that the family atmosphere was so stifling, so prescriptive. My father had such a rigid moral sense of what was right and what was wrong, for someone in my position, that I was only able to cope with that by creating a private world. We were not an intimate family. The geography of the house—we spent a very limited time together, and they were mostly painful moments. My own room was my own world; was my own territory; was the place from which I plotted whatever it was I plotted. So there was this very, very enormously problematic relationship with my parents during those teen years. My mother, a small-town woman, had a very, very conventional concept of what life was supposed to be, very anti-intellectual, very unanalytical. Why did she marry your father? It’s a very fair question. Given she wasn’t Jewish, that question poses itself more obviously. I think from her early teen years at school, she had had other Jewish refugees around her, mostly from Germany, in the late ’30s, and she had befriended them. Whatever that says about her and her psychological makeup and the kind of openness that implies, that’s difficult to analyse. She was in with a lot of Jewish refugees from a very early age. That doesn’t suggest a conventional outlook on the world? I think that’s absolutely right. Her own mother was completely set against her marrying my father. Not because she was anti-Semitic, but because she was xenophobic. It may have been anti-Semitism without it being pronounced, but my mother always portrayed it as a kind if narrowness.

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Her father was not so narrow-minded. He had been through the Great War and to some extent had travelled and had seen life and was quite encouraging about it. But they didn’t marry until her own mother died. They had known each other for about five years when they married. My mother’s own mother had died about a year before that . . . Your mother did not protect you against your father’s moralisms? In a curious way, it was the reverse because the structure of my parents’ marriage was a kind of sexism squared, in the sense that it was very much of the era but reinforced by my father’s desperate need to be in control, because of my father’s own insecurities. So I think the level of control he exercised was probably even more than was normal in that kind of environment. The division of labour within the marriage was very extreme in the sense that my father was completely preoccupied by his role of being head teacher. Everything about the children was delegated to my mother with father as the backer-up, the hitter. Did he? Very much so and not infrequently. She didn’t say, ‘Hold on’? Not at all. Not at all. She didn’t protect you? No. But I think that was to do with her own need to fulfil being what a good mother and wife was about. It was just a very unquestioning environment . . . My father’s own need to feel he had some control over his life, some security, exacerbated the sexism of my parents’ marriage. This generated huge tension and what seemed like a quasi-permanent mood of brooding anger on my mother’s part. This I found awful to be around and led to my withdrawing, in some ways, into myself. [Added by Peter after interview.] The way you are describing it, it is almost as if the effects of your father’s ‘foreignness’ were not mitigated by your English mother. It’s interesting. I think it probably was in some ways. With the exception of gender issues and a whole range of insecurities linked to that, my

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mother was very clear who she was. I’ve a feeling in some curious ways, it was stabilizing because I think my mother in many ways is not an insecure person, and she’s got a sense of rootedness, and that in some way gave me a sense of rootedness. I didn’t need to say I am a complete alien in this situation. Part of me is rooted here. I could say in some way I do belong here. But what it did make difficult—where do you place all this other stuff? The school, social, linguistic environment is all English in these ways and is not confused about that. But all these other strands— we had goulash once a week, my father taught my mother how to cook. My father always spoke to us in English. He loved the German language and would drop in a few German phrases, so we picked up a bit of pidgin German. He spoke Hungarian and German in his family. Elements of his family had German as their first language. Which I think was not uncommon, particularly in the middle classes. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire! Exactly. I had very strongly identified with my father. Maybe there was a sugar daddy element to that, in spite of the beatings . . . Perhaps because the day-to-day conflicts were with my mother as she was basically bringing us up. I think there was an emotional element, maybe, because I could sense the depth of his vulnerability for whatever reasons. So one could argue that the extent to which I perceived myself as Hungarian Jewish is out of proportion . . . How that initial identification gets set up . . . How does that identification manifest itself? In the need to rescue. Laying down laws for myself that I had to follow . . . System of fines I would have if I didn’t live up to them. Whatever activity I was involved in, the excess with which it was done. Even if it was a fun activity like playing football, which I didn’t seem to get that upset about. Playing for ten hours on a Sunday. Not spending two hours or six hours, but ten hours. Overdoing whatever it was I thought I should be doing. The level of guilt felt about any kind sort of wasted time. You could argue that some of that came from my father in the sense that both my parents had high expectations and were themselves completers and organizers and very devoted to whatever they did. But there was no implication that had to be in a social cause. If anything, my father would discourage me from that. ‘You are not Jewish. You have no debt to play. Why make life difficult for yourself.’ The idea that the political implications, the ideological implications if your identity is too difficult

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for yourself, drop it, which is what the message was, what that implied for the future of the world, never occurred to him. Did you ever have that conversation with him? You saying, ‘But I am Jewish’? Later, only later, from my midtwenties on, early twenties, when I’d started to look into issues about my Jewishness and I’d made Jewish friends for the first time ever and I’d started to read about Jewishness and about Israel and so forth. And I had started from a distance, I’d left home and gone to university and started to rethink what had been a very difficult adolescence. I had spent a very long time depressed . . . My father had tried to keep silent the fact of my suppressed Jewishness and the trauma he had experienced, and how that had affected my brother and myself helped me to understand myself much better. He didn’t talk about the people who had been killed? No. Not at all. Even in the period when that had started to ease because of the fall of the wall, because he had started to go back, because I was more insistent about the need to talk about it, even then he would talk very, very little about the individual people who had died, including his parents. He would say very, very little about them. Did you want to find out about them? Certain things I have found out about them, not the tiniest fraction of what I would have wanted. He returned for the first time in 1986, the first time for forty years. The first trip we made together was in 1990. We went back to his birthplace, to the house where he grew up and where he went to school. Unprecedented, he was willing to talk about these things, not with ease, not with joy, at times with bitterness, but at times he was willing to talk about these things. And there were quite a lot of questions; I got some answers at that time. For me, that was invaluable. That was a difficult but formative time for me and for my relationship with my father. It at least opened a book, and it may be my misrepresenting it, but I still don’t think the sentences on that subject he used in the first thirty years of my life amounted to more than five minutes, and yet suddenly we were standing outside his grammar school and he was talking about what he did, some of the people he knew there, about his teachers and who he knew there. And even small bits about his family. Not a great deal, but at least the book was open. Interestingly, when we returned and

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I tried to ask him about these things again, he was never closed in the same way, after we had made that first trip with him . . . He did say he wanted the trip to be like opening a book, it was done and he now wanted to close it. I’m sure we’ll return to this . . . Perhaps naively influenced by certain strands of badly digested psychological theories of trauma, these things need to be talked about. The pain and the silence. There is some kind of process of working through this. Maybe you can get to a more healthy point. Perhaps this, for my father, was the first stage, not that the dam would break, but this would herald a new stage. So I was quite shocked that this didn’t happen. He didn’t continue to talk about it in that way, but when the subject came up . . . , he would talk about it, including his family to a small degree. The least about his own parents. He tended to say more about his uncles and aunts, about the extended family, less about his parents. He would talk about it as he saw appropriate and he wanted to. So the book was not closed again. But it was something that he’d embark upon reasonably frequently. There would be fragments. Was it you who suggested you went together? It was. That must have taken courage. I think it did. By that time, I had already started to read about Jewish issues, gone to synagogues occasionally, had very close Jewish friends, which had a really big effect on me, which is not something I’d had in my teen years at all. Do you think it was more to do with finding out what Jewishness meant to you or finding out about your lost family? Very little of it was about finding out about Jewishness as a religion or a cultural tradition. To some extent, that came later. For me, that was not the issue. For me, it was a moral issue . . . I could not swallow this idea that you suppress your Jewishness because it is too dangerous to be different. There’s something that sticks in my throat about that. And in a sense, whilst not pretending for a moment that anti-Semitism has disappeared, that I was not living in an environment where you could say you were Jewish, and there was something ideologically important about doing that. And in this sense, it really was a Hitler victory, that if you felt so bullied, you were not able to do that. The way my father was as a result of

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bullying, not conviction. I think that the concern was I have a right not to be ashamed of this strand. It doesn’t matter what craziness Jewishness may involve. I have the right to kick out what I want and take what I might want from it, just like I have done with Christianity and Christian culture. Your search for your grandparents was to do with your search for Jewishness? Yes, I think it was. It was about I have a right to this stuff. I think it was emotional too. At that time, too, it felt quite ideological. One of the problems can be of being second generation, and particularly if where you live is geographically displaced, the connection can be very cerebral. And you can create the most awful phantoms . . . I suppose the Holocaust was something in which six million people died, but in which there was hardly any concept of my own grandparents there. My father had had pictures of both of his parents by his bedside. It was another strand of the confusion. We were told nothing about them. It was symptomatic of the confusion. What could be more important than having those photos by the bedside but you know nothing about them. All trips back to Hungary have been about putting a person’s face on all of this. It’s desperately painful, even to this point. For all the time I’ve spent thinking, emoting, talking about the second generation, reading about it, painful as it is in the abstract, when it gets to actually thinking of my grandparents, it gets to be heartbreaking. There’s that completely personal side which goes beyond, well beyond, any issue about ideology. Have you got to know them, do you think? It’s interesting. It’s very interesting. Not really. They don’t feel impersonal, and they don’t feel that distant. But the amount I actually know about their personality is just tiny, I think even more about my grandmother than my grandfather. At least I know what he did. In the sexist framework, it was easier for my father to talk about him. I know what he did. I’ve seen his shop. With my grandmother, it’s even harder . . . I don’t know how far that can go. Not just because sources of information would be very hard—my father is dead. Because there is a level of vulnerability on my part that I don’t know if I can get beyond. I went to a conference about ten years ago, a very famous Israeli psychiatrist concentrating on the Holocaust, Dina Wardi. She was talking about how the first generation fare psychologically as they move into old age, and I just remember her using the phrase ‘There is no rehabilitation from the Holocaust.’ By which I guess she meant, she was thinking more

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of the first, than second generation. There may be better, more healthy ways of coping with that, but that does not constitute rehabilitation. And that set me thinking. What can constitute rehabilitation for me in the second generation? And I’m still grappling with that one. I think one of the easiest ways for me to think about that was I guess we all have our thresholds, what we can cope with about the Holocaust, whether you are Jewish or not Jewish. I think my father just had a complete block about his own parents. Somewhere the loss of them was so beyond conceivable that he couldn’t go there. I remember when he was eighty-two, he said to me that he had tried not to think about his parents. He found it easier that way. How did he find out? I know this, revealingly, from my mother, not directly from my father. Actually, I’m not sure who it came from. He got a letter immediately after the war from, from his surviving aunt in Budapest, and it didn’t mention what had happened to his parents, his uncle, his cousins and so on. It was just signed ‘Your only relative’. And that was it. He then went back in 1948, three years later, I think to try to sew up some legal affairs. He never talked about that trip. And I can’t imagine what that trip must have been like for him. Did he find out what happened to them? My father’s historical sources are that they all died in Auschwitz. And looking at what I do know, which I’m confident about, the deportation of Jews from provincial Hungary was so systematic and they all went to the same place and they mostly all died immediately. So the element of doubt is tiny. There’s such a tiny probability that didn’t happen. Have you ever wanted to know more? There’s an element of me that wants to say that’s not the issue. It doesn’t matter if they were clubbed to death. And knowing doesn’t solve anything. You could have every single detail, and it wouldn’t solve it. That’s right. A few things I have done. A book by Martin Gilbert . . . showing maps with what days people were deported from particular places. So I know within three days.

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But it doesn’t bring them back. It doesn’t tell you who they were. Yes, that’s absolutely right . . . My brother has asked me whether I want to find out. But I don’t feel the need. All the pain connected with the Holocaust, I need to see the point. I’m not just going to beat myself up. I need to see it’s something useful to do. On this issue, I understand the Germans only kept records at Auschwitz of people who were not gassed on arrival. If that’s the case, you can look in the archive for details. But in the case of my grandparents, they were gassed on arrival. Do you sometimes imagine? Yes, I do. Even yesterday, when I was reading an interview with Kertész, and he was saying that the problem that he himself has with Holocaust writing is that it’s all written by people who survived. So Holocaust literature does not tell you what the Holocaust was about. Only the people who died could tell you what the Holocaust was about. No one survived the gas chambers. And at that point you thought of your grandparents? Yes, I have done frequently. I think that thought tortured my father, though I can’t remember him saying it. He could not get his head around what had happened to his parents. We reduce them to their terrible deaths. The person gets lost in our horror at what happened to them at the end? I think it’s a huge danger. If you look at what do I know of my grandparents? The fact that they died in their forties looms as the one large fact about their lives. Everything else I know is only tiny, is utterly shadowed by that. They are not positive qualities about them. Are there any stories? It’s interesting you ask that. I don’t think I could tell you one story about either of them. I could tell you a few facts about them. Do you have anything from them? I do, and I find my own attitude towards that interesting. I don’t really care. I’ve got a couple of little bits of porcelain that were my grandmoth-

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er’s. I was going to say, of course I keep them, but it just doesn’t mean anything. The letters are a mystery which my father has carried with him to the grave. There certainly were letters from my grandparents to my father during the war, but what became of them, I have no idea. Even in the stash of Hungarian papers, which include a school report, photos of my uncle’s factory, birth certificate, a whole range of official Hungarian documents, a birth certificate, where you would expect to find letters. Nothing. I find that very strange indeed. I’ve asked my mother frequently, and I find it highly unlikely that she wouldn’t tell me the truth. I do have a few photos. There are not a large number, but there are a few photos. At the moment, they are at my mother’s house. I suppose it’s just very strange . . . It is strange to only know things about them of a certain kind of formality. There are no anecdotes. Except that I have a sense that my father was very close to his mother, I know nothing. I don’t feel upset talking about this just now, but there are other moods where I can feel absolutely gutted around all this. It came home when I was trying to write for Voices magazine a few years ago. My father . . . could talk more readily about his uncles and his aunts. He was very close to them, I sometimes have the feeling he spent almost as much time with them as his own parents. He was much more able to talk about them. Maybe partly because one of his aunts survived, so that was an ongoing relationship. He could also talk a little about where his uncle had lived, which was about twenty miles from where his own parents lived. There is a memorial in the Jewish cemetery which was erected after the war to the whole of the extended family. A family memorial stone. If you go back to the town where my father was born, there’s absolutely nothing. I think quite frequently about it [some form of commemorialization], and I wouldn’t say I’ve completely excluded it for the future. But that is profoundly emotionally difficult. There is something about that place which is a black hole for me. It’s somehow transferred from my father. It’s the place of utmost awfulness that I can imagine. That’s very hard to talk about. It’s to do with the fact that the actual loss of his own parents, for my father, was unbearable. He couldn’t look into the eye of the storm, so he looked in insofar as he could look to the side. So he talked a little about where his aunt and uncle and where they lived. Not where he was born. A few strands. The same thing with Hungarian and German. German—the language of the perpetrator. He could speak German with greater emotional comfort than Hungarian. It was not so close to the bone. I have taken on all of those strands. My father taught me a bit of German. Closer. More books around. It’s closer. Dealing with German

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people is much more comfortable, doesn’t matter that in some sense it was the perpetrator’s nation. That’s a much more comfortable relationship than mine with Hungary . . . I feel close to wanting to cry every time I think about Siklós, which is where my father is from. That is to do with the fact that if I go back—I’ve been back twice now with him—there is nothing there. His house is still there. But nothing to indicate a Jewish presence. Might be a plaque, but I haven’t seen one. The Jewish synagogue was destroyed. It’s a parking lot or something like that. My father’s emotional void in relation to that, his inability to look at what happened to his own parents, that complete block, the fact that there is no memorialization there, the fact that he could look only to the side, it just feels as if it’s something I’ve taken on. I don’t know if it is worth trying to go beyond that. I may go back there by myself. Whether to research what happened to my grandparents in Auschwitz, I know it’s very costly. After the last trip back to Hungary, which I didn’t do with my parents, when I went there with my partner, who is not Jewish, and I got quite seriously ill afterwards. And generally I’m a very fit person. I find it hard not to imagine there was some sort of connection . . . But I know dealing with that stuff comes at a cost. At the times when it feels so imperatively important to be engaging with all this stuff emotionally and ideologically, just to try and keep a level of awareness, what’s the cost to you. Is it worth it? Will you emerge with the feeling things have moved on? Or are you going to make yourself ill again? That’s not resolved. What were some of the key reasons why it made you so ill? I wonder if at some level I’ve just always been horrified at what it must have been like to learn what my father learnt in 1945. And just not being able to get my head around what that moment must be like. I don’t expect Hitler and the Nazis to have been much concerned with how Jews were traumatized; I don’t know whether that isn’t worse than what my grandparents experienced in the gas chamber. I can’t get my head round what it was like to discover that about your parents, and all the rest of your family had disappeared in that way; I just can’t get my head around it. On my trip back in 2002, when I went with my parents, we went to a Holocaust memorial service. It was complete coincidence. We didn’t go there in order to be there. It was in the county town for the district, but there were representatives from all the Jewish communities from that district. Everyone from the surrounding towns read out the lists of people who had perished in the Holocaust; it came to about three thousand names. The names of my father’s family were read out, but they were not

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from the town where my father was born but where his extended family was born. I didn’t hear the word Siklós. What was going on? Why not? I think nobody survived. There wasn’t even a member of the community who had been left to go back and put back a list of people who had lived there. I know there were a few people left. My father could have done it. With the possible exception of one very old, badly injured survivor of Auschwitz, there was no one there. In terms of emotional identification, that was the nearest glimpse of what my father went through. Everything had gone. Everything. I was emotionally shattered. It was the only time I broke down over the Holocaust. It wasn’t the time I talked about before. I went back the following year on the basis if I didn’t get back into the saddle, I’d never be able to go back again. I went back without my father. I was with my partner, but it wasn’t a specifically Jewish trip . . . We did cultural things. If we came across something interesting that was Jewish, that was OK. It was at the end of that trip I got quite ill. However much I may think at a rational, conscious level, this is OK, in practice, it’s incredibly punishing. You said earlier you had a greater affinity with the German than the Hungarian language. What do you identify yourself as? Good question. I don’t feel an affinity with Germany in terms of identity. It’s more about familiarity. Because I’ve had such extensive dealing with German people, mostly incredibly positive exchanges with German people. Because the relevant extent to which issues to do with the Holocaust are so present in Germany, so talked about. In Hungary, there’s a problem in that 99 percent of my social contacts have been with Jews. I have almost no experience of dealing with Hungarians in Hungary, except at a tourist level. Of course, there’s a presence of historical memory, there are museums and so on, but it’s well known that in most of the former Soviet bloc, the level of discussion and historical narrative is very weak, particularly compared to the West. I guess about 10 percent of my father’s village were Jewish, though in some places it must have been as high as 20 percent or 30 percent. Budapest had about 20 percent of Jews. There is a permission given to anti-Semitism in the contemporary era which is just unthinkable in the German context. I guess that’s another reason why Hungary continues to feel more problematic and painful, though more personal as well.

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Have you ever visited where your father lived as a child? I don’t think my father knocked at his door, although I think on one of his trips he did go inside the house. I don’t know who it’s occupied by. It does have compensation of an albeit trivial kind—the fact that the house became Hungarian government property. He did receive a state pension from the mid-’90s. I do think about going. I’m in the shadow of the last trip and how costly it was. At some point it may be the right thing to do, but I need to feel reasonably confident about why I’m putting myself through that. Who am I? I try in one sense to be very factual. Whom I identify with is a different question. I’ve got a British passport; English is my first language; my biggest cultural influence on me and my everyday culture is English culture. Without question. There’s simply no doubt about that. Am I influenced by my father’s Jewishness? Were any Jewish values transmitted? Yes, without a doubt, though nothing to do with Jewish ritual, or hardly at all. The value he placed on education, it’s no coincidence I ended up in education. Issues about self-reliance. I do say I’m English if somebody asks me, but I’m quite guarded. What I find unacceptable is that that is all there is to it. I might then go on to explain that my father was Hungarian . . . And yet you might find I was the first person to say I’m partly Jewish in a social context. In the Second Generation discussion group, and it happens frequently, you go around and people say, ‘I just feel so un-English’, and another person will say, ‘I never feel English.’ I want to say, ‘You are off your heads. You people are so English.’ I know what they are saying, there are strands of themselves that are not English. But to deny that a huge part of them is not the product of English society seems quite crazy. At a party, I’d be unlikely, unless I feel they could cope with the complexity of Jewish identity, [to say I’m Jewish]. I do occasionally say I’m Jewish, just for the simplicity of it. It’s because it’s such an important part of what has made me what I am, and that would be true if I’d identified with it or not, and the truth is I’ve hugely identified with it. At an age where I had no choice about the matter—that was just a psychological thing about how our family functioned, maybe slightly genetic, whatever, and after that, it’s a conscious choice. The English side of my identity is not a problem. It’s the Jewish part that needs defending. That’s a conscious choice. The Jewish part had nothing to do with being Jewish. It is saying what can the world be if you are bullied out of having a different culture from the dominant one. It’s as simple as that. It could be Martian culture; it could be being gay. I don’t give a damn. It’s the right to inherit the cultural traditions from your environment, whether it’s your family or the

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world around you. And to look at it freely and to say that’s crap and that’s good. To be able to make a free choice. And that’s the beginning and end of it. I’m interested in aspects of Jewish culture, but that’s not the point. I’m also interested in Islam or any other culture. That’s not to say in a dangerous situation I would walk around saying ‘I’m Jewish’ when I’m about to have my head chopped off. I do think about contexts in which it’s safe to do this and not. There’s something that sticks in my throat about being bullied out of what you inherited. I think it’s as simple as that. What does being second generation mean to you, and do you think it’s a useful concept? I think on the whole it is a useful concept. The ambiguities at either end don’t really matter to me. That’s true of all concepts. There is something about stepping into a very difficult, traumatized, fragmented situation that is the situation of your parents. There is something distinctive about stepping into that kind of environment. Being second-generation Jewish does have its own issues. I see many of the issues as relevant to second generation more broadly; if you’re secondgeneration Armenian in France, you’ve still got a lot in common, you’re dealing with power, dominance, the suppression of identity and feeling caught between different cultures and feelings of separation, where do you fit, not being able to fit into any neat category. In the sense that I can learn from other people who are second generation, whether they are Jewish or not; and I find a whole range of literature about being secondgeneration Algerian in France very illuminating. So for me, it is a useful concept. I’d want to get more refined than that. But that’s in the nature of concepts. You start with the general and zoom in to the specific. Being second generation is top of the list, without question, and nothing else comes anything near. It’s not that I want to walk around saying that the Jewish strand of my identity is all that counts. That would be to deny all the different influences and distortions that I’ve tried to escape; I want to acknowledge everything that has been important. If I was explaining why I am as I am and why I give a priority to the things I do, there’s no question, that’s the first thing on the list. I can’t go back beyond puberty, but from around the age of thirteen or fourteen, I’m starting to develop some sort of ethical consciousness of my own and to define that in some kind of way separately from my parents and developing the sense of having some special responsibility to live well.

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I wonder how far the fact that so many of your father’s relatives disappeared had an effect on you? I think it did. I think that’s absolutely right. There’s no way I’d want to trivialize the experience and traumas and difficulty of one of my close friends. Her mother left Czechoslovakia when she was six, but she came with her parents, and later her grandparents came too. Now there were strands of her whole family that disappeared, but in some ways it’s quite different. Even with Hungary too; the Red Army were advancing at such a pace, that they stopped operations at Auschwitz in July 1944, and they stopped the deportations at that time, so they never deported systematically from Budapest after that. Everywhere outside Budapest, everybody Jewish got deported over three months. Because they weren’t shot in the forests or something like that where a few escaped, you got the wholesale obliteration. A few survived, like my father, who escaped, and they may have returned. In a few cases, some of the younger men had been drafted in the navy’s legion to do really dirty work for the Hungarian Army, in about 1940, where the death rate was incredible, but a certain proportion did survive, including one or two of my father’s distant relatives, who drifted back. I haven’t come across anywhere else where the decimation was so complete and utter. That’s part of what makes this so impossible. This black hole of Siklós. There aren’t even the little fragments left that you can claw your way up to . . . The one surviving strand, the aunt who had moved to Budapest, not the family home at all, who was from a different area, she had gone to Budapest to be the outlet for what the factory was producing. She lost both her husbands; allegedly the first to the Gestapo, the second in the Communist era. The two children were hidden during the war. One died of diabetes that she contracted during the war. The other son, in common with an awful lot of Jewish students at that time, was involved in the 1956 uprising, fled to Austria and emigrated to New York and didn’t dare to go back. Another story of Jewish survivors. I have this image of her, the one family member I have met. She is the most complete picture of destruction I’ve ever seen. I saw her couple of months before she died—a completely broken woman. Sitting there with a picture of her son in her hand. You could distract her a bit, like a child, to talk about things other than the awfulness of her life. She was the surviving member. It’s this complete disappearance. I suppose my incapacity to comprehend what it is to go through life in my father’s position. That’s not to make light of my experience. But when it is your family, I cannot get inside what that must have been like for my father. There’s some kind of black hole in me, trying to empathize with what that was

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about, and I couldn’t rescue my father from that. There was nothing I could do. I read a Hungarian book, wonderful book, by Magnasbom. Not Jewish, Protestant, about a woman who lived through the Nazi and Communist eras. And she is lost, lost, lost. And the book is about the impossibility of sharing that loss. She did not allow anybody to see that was totally wrecked. My grandmother . . . no, great-aunt, was completely different. She allowed people to see how wretched she was. She made no bones about being a broken person. She was not embarrassed. Most people can’t allow that level of trauma to be seen. She’s so traumatized by her loss, the one thing that counts for her in her life, even when she’s had a stroke in her eighties, is not to let anyone see how destroyed she is. The way that manifests itself is that she will not let anyone into her house. She has a whole lot of animals representing those she’s lost. She has photos everywhere. She can’t let anybody see. It’s perhaps my own inability to cope with this private side that is so painful. I wanted to be let in, but, of course, I couldn’t be. That’s my naivety that anybody could go there. You just said you had to fill the emotional needs of both your parents. Would you mind elaborating on that? Both my parents were extremely emotionally needy, arguably for different reasons; my father because of his vulnerability, because of his loss and being a refugee, wanting the world to be predictable and under his control. Also because of the huge problems there were in their marriage. It was very difficult for them to support each other. There was such tension between them, of a classic kind. It was very hard for them to talk to each other, leaving both of them with emotional needs. There was such a void in the way my father communicated with my mother. My mother’s constant anger. I can’t unthink the element of anger which was omnipresent and the need to let this out in some form. I have to let this out. Because I had identified with my father and his sense of vulnerability . . . I did see it as my responsibility to try to help them, to support them emotionally. Latterly, as an adult, I have my own responsibility, but as ever, these patterns are laid down at a time when one can’t really claim to be responsible for the choices one has made. After I left home at eighteen, they wanted me to come home frequently. Why? They said this explicitly: ‘We get on when you are around.’ This expectation that you will make it OK for us.

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You’ve talked about your mother. Could you develop on how you experienced her need for you? I suppose this is the result of my having been exposed to all kinds of strands of feminist theory. The environment in the ’70s and so forth. My mother, to my mind, was a textbook case of certain kinds of feminist theory. Apart from the abstraction of it, she was also suffering in that relationship. Controlled. Disempowered. Without the basic skills to move beyond that. Without being able to develop a separate space of her own. At the beginning of the interview, you presented your mother as playing an essentially conformist role. What you are now suggesting is that it’s more contradictory and conflictual. It is contradictory and conflictual. My mother would have done whatever was considered, given her own social background, socially normal, to be at your husband’s side, to be supportive, to sit watching the TV with him, watching the programmes he chose, hating them but thinking this is what one does but at the same time livid about it. Although I knew there was something completely wrong about all this. I suppose without the education, without the environment which could have helped to sort all that through or to give her the confidence to act on her own. She could not take that step, so she lived in a state of permanent anger, and growing up around that was awful, and it was another reason why I could only survive that environment, even from very little, by creating some kind of world that was mine. What they’ve expected from me has changed with the different phases of my life, as most parents would with any child. Doubtless, I could intellectualize it a bit, but it’s about being the black sheep of the family. Having had a university education, growing up in a different era, more analytical, more critical, more informed by psychological theory, family theory, my parents absolutely unable to use any of those tools to make sense of how they related and its effect on me. They can only categorize what I did in terms that were available to them. I don’t visit my mother all that often now, although she’s eighty-four and is in some ways quite frail, because I can’t cope with it because it evokes anger. Nevertheless, all kinds of aspects of their parenting were excellent. They gave themselves in all sorts of ways. They didn’t think it mattered that they themselves didn’t get on. It was an impossible environment for me to be around because it was so poisoned. So there’s the legacy of that, and I can’t get beyond the anger that involves. And there’s the sexism of it. My mother didn’t in any way kick against it. She didn’t try to oppose it. She’s quite happy to ask people to run around and rescue

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her in every conceivable situation now in the way that my father rescued her. The idea that I might not be happy to do this, not to relate to her as an adult, never occurred to her, so I’m now cast in the role of undutiful son. I’ve had some good phases with both of them, but they had a tendency to make judgements about what I did or didn’t do, which were extremely negative. This was just because they had no analytical ability to see they were so emotionally needy, and they were constantly making demands on me that were constantly unnegotiated. I’m not trying to suggest that the Holocaust is the only thing that defines me, but it clearly had an impact, but still in these kinds of very practical interpersonal ways, its legacy is still in some ways eating away at me in that very personal way. Next section submitted in writing after the interview for inclusion as a postscript. There was also, I think the factor that you articulated so well at a Second Generation Network meeting, that there was a delay in becoming stable enough, sorted out enough, to be ready for any mature kind of relationship. Life felt so burdened, I felt such a strong sense of responsibility and that my life wasn’t my own. A form of survivor guilt I already mentioned . . . left me with such a sense of duty to live for the social good and to justify every minute of my existence that I was very uncompromising in relationships and very moralistic (even self-righteous!). This led all too often to my withdrawing from them, unable to negotiate my way through various kinds of difference. It also made me feel that one of the worst things one could experience was to feel trapped in any kind of relationship. The withdrawal and fear of ‘entrapment’ was, I’m sure, one reason why I didn’t get into any very meaningful relationship until I was over thirty.

INTERVIEW WITH SARAH, JANUARY 2011

This interview took place in a hospice. Sarah was very ill, but she retained an awe-inspiring optimism and did not realize quite how ill she was, as can be observed from her testimony. Tragically and unexpectedly, Sarah died almost exactly a week after this interview took place. Thus, I was not able to return to her for clarification, further questions or for her to read through and comment on the transcript, though we had already arranged a return visit. Sarah was also, at points, in pain during the interview and was intermittently being given morphine—she called the nurses her ‘drug pedlars’. She consequently needed to end the interview earlier than I might otherwise have wished. Her speech had, at points, a disjointed quality. I have not attempted to artificially ‘put this right’. But I did decide not to include one small and impenetrable ‘paragraph’ and have moved one paragraph—which I signal. I also decided, given that Sarah was not around to make decisions, to use my discretion and delete some of her more barbed comments. I have left some of the names of people she referred to in full, not abbreviated. They are key to her family story, and I feel confidant she would have wanted the names included. After a break, Sarah wanted to go to the café, and she continued to talk to me there, though this was not recorded. But on occasions, I make reference to these unrecorded comments in the main text. Sarah was emphatic about how glad she was to talk to me. Bringing this interview acts as a memorial to a vivacious woman who hugged life hard until the end. Sarah saw herself as a socialist and emphasized that she did not consider herself to be Jewish. Her mother was Jewish, her paternal grandfather was Jewish. Both her parents originated from Berlin. Her father fled Berlin in 1933, primarily because he was a political activist, 203

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not because of his ‘Jewishness’. Sarah tended to focus on her father during the interview.

Sarah started to talk before I had asked her any questions. I’ve been looking since 1984 to talk to somebody like you about this. Then I read your book and thought, ‘This is amazing. I must talk to her.’ In my household, there were no silences. My father’s mother was a gentile, his father a Jew. The mother was working class. They had met through politics and married late. Both of them were in the Social Democratic Party, when Bismarck had banned it. They both renounced their religion in favour of politics. Their children, my father, were brought up as atheists. He [Sarah’s father] was born 1906 in Breslau, which is now Brookslav. By the time he was two, they had emigrated to Berlin. My father was only twenty-one when his father died, aged about sixty-five. My father was in the [German] Communist Party before things started getting difficult, though I don’t know what particular aspects he disliked. He talked very little about his time in CP because he became rather embarrassed for being in the CP. He had terrible political rows with my sister because they remained in the CP. My mother was a Jew. They renounced their religion in favour of politics. My father never saw himself as a Jew. My father was twenty-one when his father died and was still in Berlin. He was a journalist, though not a very good one. He left for Prague in his early thirties. They left not because they were Jewish, but because he was a left-wing activist. I’ve never been interested as to how he got out and exactly which year. He wasn’t Jewish, technically, so he had no problem getting out. It was after the Nazis came to power. I know some of his friends got arrested. [This next paragraph has been moved from towards the end of the interview.] [He] got out in 1933 because several of his friends were arrested. The Lowenheim brothers also got out. His [Sarah’s father’s] sisters stayed there. They were not connected to the CP. People chose Prague as a staging post for people deciding what to do, and he had a couple of contacts there. He rang one. She was to become my auntie. She was married to a Lowenheim. Known as one of the Marxist Adler girls. Two sisters. She provided him with accommodation, passes, Czech classes and what he needed.

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He was friends with Ruth Fischer. She used to come round to our house. They remained friends till she died. Fischer was the sister of Eisler [the German left-wing song writer within the agitprop movement of the late 1920s/early 1930s]. Krause did some amazing recordings of Eisler songs. Fischer went from being leader of the CP in Berlin to being put in prison by Stalin for being too radical for him. Then she went to America. She later shopped her two brothers to the House of Un-American activities. I knew Fischer—she used to come round to our house. She was not a nice person. Father and Ruth Fischer were both obsessed with ‘reds under the bed’ and veered more and more to the right. Fischer was totally convinced that there was a real danger the Communists would take over. Very much the whole debate about the Cold War. She published a magazine all about the threat of Communism to democracy blah de blah . . . Father was not a Communist for more than about two years. Not exactly sure which years. Then my father met Walter and Ernst Lowenheim, who had formed a group called Neue Beginnen. My cousin has stuff on Neue Beginnen. He gets attracted to Neue Beginnen. Neue Beginnen was a hotchpotch. Not all Jewish. Workers who had left school at fifteen to people with three degrees. Those friends remained friends for the rest of his life. So I met all of them when they came to England. I liked the Lowenheim brothers. Lowenheim changed his name to Lowe. I resent all this Holocaust stuff, and it pisses me off. That’s why I like the Imperial War Museum exhibition, because it mentions homos, gypsies and lefties. None of the others do. It took him an awfully long time to move right. My father joined the Labour Party here and was a sterling worker here for them. But he moved right. Jeffrey Stuart Smith, MP, solid English gentleman, and they used to have meetings together and so on. By the last year of life, very fat by then, and he [her father] couldn’t drive any more, rings me up to take him to the polling station. But I said, ‘If you think I am taking you to the polling station to vote for that bitch, you can think again.’ We had visitors every year from Germany and visited these people every year in Germany. They were part of my life. I have loads of photos of Dad’s friends. There’s a small archive [of her father’s papers] in Wiener library. Last paper was about my father’s parents’ politics; second document from 1955, more about politics. But he didn’t really document the important things. I think he was frightened. He refused to go to Czechoslovakia for twenty years because he was convinced the Communists would get him. So he didn’t put down anything interesting. Wrote a third document to my children to explain what his childhood was like. So the last document is really the first document.

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Father loved the Wiener library, but it went through a phase when it was losing things. His [her father’s] sisters survived; married Communists, survived . . . Both cousins stayed in Germany. Their children are German. My female cousin was in the CP. Not uncritical but always thought that change would come from within in a gentle sort of way, which it didn’t. But very intelligent. Taught economics for her academic career. I’m going to Berlin to pick up the other half of the archive in March. I didn’t know that existed, so that’s very interesting. My father has one surviving friend, much younger than him, eightyfive. MF in Berlin. Only speaks German. He’s there at the moment. He’s a wonderful bloke. He’s a socialist. There was a TV programme from about ten years ago. Babetta Gross and Margarette Bubber-Neumann were being interviewed. I never saw the TV programme about the two of them. Both old ladies by this time. Both extremely articulate and funny. Peter Gross, her son, is in Australia, but I’ve heard nothing from him, so I don’t know whether alive or not. My father never saw himself as Jewish. He would have said he was only interested in religion from a historical point of view. He just wasn’t interested in the Jewish thing. My mother’s family were wealthy, cultured Jews who didn’t practice. My mother was Jewish. Goes through female line in the scriptures, as you know. I don’t give a toss. Technically, my son is Jewish because I’m Jewish, and I’m Jewish because my mother was Jewish. She was not political. My mother was very naïve, very intelligent. She was born in 1907, and went to uni[versity]. Her sister was drop-dead gorgeous. My mum was sent to German uni in Prague because my grandfather loved her, but her father thought she was unmarriageable. At university, my mother started smoking, lost weight and had a string of lovers. She told me that. She couldn’t stop talking. My mother talked about her family all the time. I know about all my family people, though I’d never met these people. She didn’t like vulgar Golders Green Jews, full of bling, and had no culture. The English Jews did not welcome the Central European Jews, and the refugees looked down their noses at the English Jews. She wasn’t interested in the English Jewish community. She was horrified by crazy Jews in Stamford Hill. I wasn’t brought up in any way as being Jewish. But being born to refugees affected me quite badly. I spoke German before I spoke English. Ridiculous to speak to me in a language they couldn’t speak themselves. Mother was a primary school teacher. My mother’s father did not fight in the First World War because he was too old. He ran a textile business

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in Prague. Booming at the time. Chief engineer. He grew up in a little town near Prague. Privileged backgrounds. I did get embarrassed because my mother was old. She was thirtynine. They said things like, ‘Is that your granny picking you up from school?’ I was embarrassed. It was years ago, and I can’t remember what language she spoke when she picked me up. I love my mum, but it was embarrassing to have an older mum. I was badly bullied at primary school by a Jewish girl. In Crouch End. She got her fat minder to beat me up. About nine. Every German is a bad German. Once I got so upset at what was happening, my mother went to the head and sorted out what was happening. The girl had been told all Germans were bad. I was very shy and had a series of ear infections, so I couldn’t hear properly. And bilingual. So my start at school was not very auspicious. The girls at school had said, ‘Miss, you don’t speak English properly.’ Another said, ‘Miss, you are ugly.’ A lot of anti-Semitism at the time. People did not think of me as Jewish. It was the anti-German feeling that affected me. It was the anti-German feeling at the time. My name was J., but my father decided it was ridiculous to be a journalist in England with that name. He chose Mother’s maiden name because he was a great feminist. So he changed our name to H. At the flash of a pen. After that, there wasn’t a problem. You never fit in. I always felt like an outsider. I was born here, but I never feel English. I’m a rootless cosmopolitan. My son says, ‘You’re a European Bohemian, with your hippy friends.’ We spoke German at home. Pretty unusual. Most of my parents’ friends either had no children or children who were much older, at what would be considered the normal time. Had me so late—my mother had had three abortions before me, which she chose to tell me about, which I don’t think was a very good idea. Could have done without that. Because of the war and because of all the uncertainty. They didn’t intend to stay long. My mother wanted to go to France— she had lived in Paris as a student and spoke fluent French, but that wasn’t possible when the Nazis marched into France. My father wanted to go to the US, which my mother didn’t want to do, though I don’t know why. They arrived in ’38, so they could have got to the US. Mother was mentally ill. Got big restitution payment for her loss of health. She was manic depressive. In and out of hospital. My uncle, my sister’s husband, said, ‘If I think about it, E. [Sarah’s mother] was always very overanxious, and her mother was even worse.’ What happened to the rest of your family?

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My mother’s mother, my grandmother died in the Lodz ghetto. Mother had an older brother who foolishly stayed on, went to Therezin, Fritz Hellman, and said it would be all right, and his two small sons who ended up in gas ovens in Auschwitz. Mother had a bit of a traumatic time. Uncle did not die. He survived. There’s no family left. I’ve got these gorgeous photos of these kids [her cousins], and I had them up in the altar church for Memorial Day [Holocaust Day]. I don’t go to church, but the church needs to have something for Memorial Day. My mother adored those children, eight and ten, and her older brother, which was a difficulty . . . She adored me before I didn’t do well in the Eleven plus. She really wanted a son, to be honest. My father, the great feminist, was delighted to have a girl. I had a relatively happy childhood and felt secure. But my father had outbursts of rage over little things. Because my mother burnt the giblet soup, and he went into the kitchen and took the goose out of the oven and threw it. He was still ranting and raving over the giblet soup. My mother was not stable. She did hold down jobs. She had an English friend who was a headmistress, who suggested she did supply for small children. And she taught when it suited her. Father worked for a Swiss news agency, which was really poorly paid. My mother, alive for twenty years after I had my children, adored my children, particularly Boysy boy, whom she spoilt to death. M., my daughter, was Grandpa’s favourite. I. [Sarah’s son] went every Friday to my mother for special biscuits and Ribena . . . I was married to C.H. He had two kids as well. His kids came to stay twice a week. But there was a big age gap. How do you think being second generation affected you? Being second generation affected how I behaved. I was head of counselling for the students. Don’t like professional counsellors. It affected me because I didn’t realize my mother was mentally ill till I was about fifteen. I just thought she was annoying. Coupled with the bipolar, as they now call it. She made huge mountains out of molehills. My mother was affectionate to me. It got difficult around the Eleven plus because I did worse than my cousins. I was very frightened of the exam because she put so much emphasis on it. I didn’t get into the school she wanted me to get into. Complicated by the fact that cousin, drop-dead gorgeous, with a cleavage to die for. Mother was always going on: ‘Kathy is so wonderful. She

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writes such wonderful books.’ Kathy is very nice to me. Kenneth Tynan and people ogling down her cleavage. I didn’t feel responsible for my mother. My father lost patience and said, ‘Why do you think she went to hospital every two years?’ Went to H., where they did group therapy. When they closed that and we went to Friern, she never went to hospital again. I got fed up. She was the reasonable mother. Very affectionate, but everything I did after eleven was never good enough. Took no interest in what I studied, took even less interest in what job I had. My father had dropped out of uni, and he, on the other, was ever so proud that I got a degree, then I got an MA at Middlesex, really gone off the boil with J.Y. Then another MA in management and education about fifteen years later. I wanted to be a manager, but I didn’t have the experience. If I did x, my mother would say, ‘Why don’t you do y?’ If she gave me a bottle of whisky for my birthday, would spend the afternoon telling me how much it cost. I was very rebellious and very nasty to her in my teenage years. I carried it on. My illness. Carried it on. When I retired I had a nervous breakdown. I was in hospital for about a year. I. came to see me in the hospital and take me to the women’s pond. There were great gaps when I wouldn’t see her, but then I went to the swimming pool and there would be I. Her father, a horrible man, was much brighter than my father. Apart from plasmic cell leukaemia, which attacks the bone marrow, which I’ve got. I’m waiting for the results of two tests. Probably going to give me radiography. Nothing has worked so far. No cure for it. I’m so pleased to have read your book. Can I meet this woman, I thought? I went on this awful course at Birkbeck about the Holocaust. It was so boring; it wasn’t true. They didn’t talk about social policy or left-wing people. All they talked about was Jews. It was crap.

INTERVIEW WITH TANIA, FEBRUARY 2011

Tania’s parents had been members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and were political opponents of the Nazis and had no sort of Jewish background. Tania was born in the UK, but her parents went to West Germany after the war. Tania came back to Britain in her early twenties, when she joined the Communist Party (CP). She has lived in the UK for close to fifty years and was an active member of the Second Generation Network.

Could you start by telling me a little about your parents? My mother was born in January 1907 in Thuringia, the youngest of ten children. In 1916, the family moved to Leverkusen, seat of the chemical factory Bayer, where her father and brothers were active in the trade union movement and in left politics, and later in the Communist Party. In 1920, there was a strike at the Bayer works. Her father and four brothers were sacked as instigators and blacklisted. My mother was involved in a school strike against the teaching of religion in schools in the same year but caved in when her stepmother promised her a new dress if she agreed to be confirmed. She ‘let herself be bought off’ was how she put it. She left the church after she was confirmed. She moved to her sister in Ruhla, Thuringia, because she did not get on with her stepmother. She joined the Communist Youth Organization and married young. She had three children but remained active in the Communist Party. Her husband was arrested after the Reichstag fire on 28 February 1933. Police 211

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regularly held her for some days and interrogated her, so that in 1936, she followed her husband into exile to Czechoslovakia, where she stayed with her children until the Nazis invaded in the spring of 1939. Her marriage was dissolved in 1938; her husband and her son were able to escape to France, where they were sponsored by the Teachers’ Union. My sisters managed to get to Britain: the older one via Poland and the younger one on a Kindertransport from Prague. My mother was arrested in Mährisch Ostrau when she attempted to cross the border and was interrogated by the Gestapo. The family’s German citizenship had been revoked in 1938, and this, as well as my sisters’ successful escape to Britain, may have been a reason for my mother’s release from prison. My mother joined my sisters in Ayr in Scotland, but had to leave when Britain entered the war. She moved to London in 1940 and stayed there during the war. In March 1945, she married my father. My father was born in December 1901 in a little village in Upper Franconia. He was one of eight children; the family were smallholders. He also left school at fourteen and worked as a farmhand before he moved first to the Ruhr area, then to Düsseldorf, where he worked in a factory. He was active in the Communist Party, and, after the Nazis came to power, he had a leading role in the local Resistance movement. Due to their inexperience of conspiratorial or underground work, the group were arrested in June 1933. My father was tortured in the Gestapo cellar at the Düsseldorf police station; he bore the physical and psychological scars for the rest of his life. He spent time in prison in Düsseldorf and Wuppertal until he was transferred to the concentration camp in Esterwegen Börgermoor. He was one of the Peat Bog Soldiers. He was released in 1935, and, in order to avoid further arrest, he first fled to his little village and then to Czechoslovakia. My parents originally met there. In 1939, he managed to come to Britain. He was interned on the Isle of Man, then Canada. He came back in 1943. My parents stayed in London till July 1948 and then left for Düsseldorf, which was in the British Zone and where my father had lived. I was born in London. My father would have stayed here, but my mother wanted to go back; she missed the solidarity among the working class, but then realized solidarity had been closed down by the Nazis. You can’t go back to what has been. That’s what a lot of the Iranian and Iraqi refugees found when they went back. My mother wanted to go back to East Berlin, but they would have had to get permission from the Soviet military government, and that wasn’t forthcoming. So she was stuck in Düsseldorf for years and years. She

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didn’t feel at home there; didn’t like the dialect, which sounded quite harsh to her. The West German state machinery became riddled with Nazis after 1948. During the first three years there seems to have been a genuine desire to build a new Germany, but then the old Nazis came like rats out of the drainpipes. Adenauer, not a Nazi himself but not in the Resistance either, became the first chancellor, supported by the Americans and the British. His position was that as long as politicians and civil servants embraced the new democratic order, no questions would be asked, even of old Nazis. Even in departments that dealt with compensation issues, there were old Nazis. My father died in 1966 in Düsseldorf, and my mother in 1991 in Berlin. Did your parents tell you about their past? They both remained active, my mother in the Communist Party and my father in the Association of People Persecuted by the Nazi Regime. They talked constantly about exile, so I found out bits here and there and over time, though I didn’t and don’t know all the details. They censored what they said. When I heard or overheard anything, then I would ask questions, and they would answer appropriately. But they protected me. I only found out later that my mother had been in prison. I found papers from my mother recently—a paper she submitted when she moved to the German Democratic Republic in 1987. Some things I remember. But they didn’t ram it down my throat. We talked German at home. I was more of a liberal. I went to the theatre and was interested in all things cultural. Though at the age of nine I went to my first demonstration with a friend, against German rearmament; the slogan was ‘Wir brauchen keine Ami Waffen, wir wollen für den Frieden schaffen’ (We do not need Yankee arms, we want to work for peace). My parents always took me along to social events, antifascist events, May Day demonstrations, so I absorbed left-wing politics and met their comrades and other antifascists. I knew I wasn’t part of mainstream society. I was always an outsider there because my parents had been in the Resistance and they had been émigrés, and I had been born in London. Just before I went to live in West Berlin, I had become active politically in Düsseldorf in my own right, in the peace movement. This was in 1967, before things exploded in 1968. In West Berlin, I joined the Kampagne für Abrüstung, the equivalent of CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament], and went on an Easter march. There’s a photo of me carrying a banner. I moved to London in January 1968.

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My parents must have once been young people who enjoyed themselves. Their social life in Düsseldorf was with like-minded people, antifascists. My mother was always sad, and my father sighed. You absorb that. It was the repetition, the reinforcement. When I was a little girl and I would wake up to a new day and life was so exciting, then I would go to the kitchen, and my mother would be sitting there and greet me with ‘Today so-and-so would have been soand-so old.’ She was mourning for her brothers, one murdered by the Nazis, another executed in the Soviet Union, and her son, K. He had accompanied his father to France, then the Nazis occupied France, and they were sent back to Germany. His father to a hard labour penitentiary. K. was called up when he was eighteen and sent to Finland. He deserted to the Soviets but died of typhoid fever. My parents never lit candles or anything like that. Candles were seen as a religious thing, so they wouldn’t. What do you see as the effect of the past on your parents? They stuck to their views. They lost their sense of joy. There were ten thousand victims of the Cold War in West Germany, many imprisoned while the old Nazis flourished. A lot of people persecuted in a ‘democratic state’. What was the effect on you, to your sense of self? I knew I was an outsider. I knew I wasn’t like other kids. My best friend was U. Her father and my mother were in the same Communist Party branch, and that’s how we knew each other. I knew I wasn’t even like the other kids from Communist families who had stayed. And I wasn’t like the bourgeois kids. I adopted the outside thing quite early. I mix with people on the left; they listen but they don’t know what it means. My child’s father was quite aware at some level that he was a sort of outsider. He was the person I had the longest relationship with. He was a white South African. I don’t think it was an accident that I chose him. He was not from a persecuted group. He wasn’t part of the ruling class in South Africa. He was left wing. I don’t think any relationships I have had were with mainstream blokes. We in the Second Generation Network don’t talk about relationships. Settling down or not. A lot of us haven’t settled into stable relationships. I don’t think living in a stable relationship is as important as a lot of people seem to think. We don’t talk about it, though sometimes someone alludes to our status as single or childless. This applies to first generation too. Lots of survivors never got married.

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I didn’t want to settle down. I never got married. I was quite good at breaking off relationships. Perhaps it was about insecurity—perhaps not. There were social expectations. Perhaps the social expectations weren’t culturally strong enough. I had a fractured existence. When in Düsseldorf, just when my friends were settling down, I buggered off. I read de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and that made me think. My mother—was and wasn’t an independent woman. She never had a job—I think, just for a little while, when her first husband was imprisoned and she was destitute, she worked as an usherette in a cinema, but that was it. She wanted me to be financially independent in case something went wrong, in case things didn’t work out. The relationship with my child’s father lasted for thirteen years. A long time. I did other things, but that was always in the background. We bought the house together. My parents’ experience affected me—probably insecurity. I know nothing is forever—a second-generation thing. We don’t take things for granted. Where do you belong? That’s a question I don’t understand. I don’t think it’s important. I don’t understand nationalism. Doesn’t make sense to me. When people say England is the most beautiful country—have they never been anywhere else? There is beauty and ugliness in every country. I belong with people who want justice and who want change, but not on any particular patch. I wish I could cook like my mother. She was a good German cook. She cooked in the Kulturbund. I heard she cooked good meals there. I don’t try to imitate her because she was such a good cook. Even her mashed potatoes were delicious! What does being second generation mean to you? In my context it means that I’m German, but not that kind of German people think. Or is that a hope, perhaps. Being German is a bit of a problem. Being second generation from a political background, again, I am an outsider here. But it does mean a lot to me. Perhaps if the Communist Party hadn’t folded, I mightn’t have done anything about it, but then the Second Generation Network came to mean a lot to me, to my identity. What is my identity? I have a German accent; I’m a woman, a feminist. But somehow . . . the influence of my parents, their particular influence—both political and their lives—I do see myself as continuing in my parents’ footsteps. Validating. I always thought they were right, and the majority was wrong. The lack of recognition meant I wanted to acknowledge what they did. Validating them was part of who I became and

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probably was part of my political involvement, not only in relation to the Second Generation Network. But that was not all. Not only acknowledging what they did, but also acknowledging the effect on me. Becoming as involved as I was, articulating the second-generation aspect, I could influence the content of Second Generation Voices. Becoming active, that is also from my background. Other people are involved because of genealogy. It’s not a political thing. For me, my activity in the Second Generation Network and in Second Generation Voices was a form of political involvement. At the end of the interview, I asked Tania to talk more about her grandparents. She wrote me the following: I had no grandparents, but that’s nothing to do with fascism or the Holocaust. My mother was in exile [in the UK] when her father died. My father’s mother also died while he was in exile, his father had died when he was quite young . . . I don’t think my parents knew about these deaths until after the war.

INTERVIEW WITH TOM, MAY 2011

Tom’s mother and father both came from Vienna. They were both active on the left and also both Jewish. At the time of the interview, Tom’s mother is still alive. Tom sometimes paused, and this is shown by the use of ellipses.

Could you start by telling me your biographical details? I was born on the first of May ’39 in London. My father, Paul, was born in 1894 in Vienna, and my mother, Gertrude, now called Dada, née West, was born in 1915 in Lundenburg, now called Brezlav, and now in the Czech Republic. Did either of your parents talk to you about their pasts? Oh, yes . . . My father talked quite a lot about his life as a young man in pre–First World War Vienna, . . . about leading applause for the particular singer of his choice . . . a chef de claque I think he called it. His father died when he was about twelve. His parents had run an antique shop. He and his brother carried on in the same trade when they came to England. They left in ’38. Just after the Anschluss . . . They managed to get out. My father gave lectures on Marxism in some context in Vienna. I don’t know which. He knew he was on a list of minor trivial people to be got rid of or ‘concentration camped’ or whatever.

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My mother was a member of an illegal party in Austria at the time: the Young Socialists. Period of clerical fascism under Dolfuss, a weak Austrian version of the Nazis. She had been posting bills on telegraph posts and stuff. She was arrested and put in a prison. She said it was the best education she could have had. She met some amazing people there . . . I should really date that. Sometime between ’34 and the ’38 Anschluss. The Young Socialists were illegalized. They weren’t illegal before. I don’t know what they were attached to . . . I haven’t really talked with her [his mother] about that [what the Young Socialists’ politics were]. I think they were like the USPD [Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands] in Germany. On the margins, partly revolutionary, and at some level not . . . My father was an art dealer. He was not attached politically to anything. He left school at sixteen. He was an autodidact . . . he read an enormous amount. I don’t know how he became a Marxist. I suppose there was a left wave at the time. This is interesting. I don’t think he ever joined a party. Not a Marxist-Leninist. I think he saw himself as very close to Marx, as a Marxist . . . Your questions force me to think about things I don’t know. Why was he liable to be picked up? He wrote things and gave lectures on Marxism. Interesting. I don’t know. I’ll have to ask my mother. Not sure what exactly he had written. I’m not sure why he was picked up . . . I don’t know how he knew he would be picked up. There’s something funny about my father that my mother doesn’t know about. There’s some story that he had a minor Hapsburg royalty protector . . . Maybe through the art connection, that’s quite possible. My sister is convinced that there’s some connection there . . . My image of him, which could be quite wrong, is that a bit, like, after 1968, the free university of here and there, a sort of ‘volksuniversity’, some sort of people’s university, an alternative place. He was quite radical, but not an activist . . . Was he more scared because of his Judaism or his politics? I don’t know. I think it was more like ‘I’m in danger’, probably more the Jewishness. But I don’t know. My mother was Jewish too.

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How long was she in prison for? She was in prison for two months. It had a strong influence on her life. She’d just completed her thesis, but by the time she came out, she was not allowed to go to the university any more. That was because she was a Jew because the Jews weren’t allowed to sit at university any more. Don’t know the exact date. So your mother was more politically involved than your father? She was more active than my dad. She was probably at the beginning of her twenties, he the beginning of his forties, so I’m not surprised. She was a student at Vienna University studying geography; he was a forty-yearold co-owner running an antiques gallery. I’m not surprised there was a difference. Did she talk of her time in prison? Not very much. I didn’t know I was going to be interviewed on this subject, or I would have interviewed her first! She just said it was full of very brilliant people. The name she mentioned was another lover of hers at the time, or maybe a sequence, I have no idea, Paul Neurath, son of Otto Neurath, who was a very important mathematician, philosopher . . . Do you think her time in prison affected her? It affected her career. I don’t know about the emotional landscape. She’s only described the experience as being very exciting. Like doing three university degrees. A bit like all the people who were interned on the Isle of Man. You felt there were no secrets? I didn’t have a sense that there were things I couldn’t ask about, not in that sense. My father was in and out of psychoanalysis all his life. A bit of an A. S. Neil type, a friend of A. S. Neil. It was—one shouldn’t have secrets (at least children shouldn’t have them from their parents!). I didn’t experience it as a culture of secrets. There were things he didn’t say to me. I don’t remember my ever having a sense of my asking him something and him not telling me. I knew that they stayed in Denmark on their flight out . . . They took a train and had visas.

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They were able to get visas? You were able to get them up to a certain point, which included 1938. You could get a visa if you found a protector who would guarantee to support you in England and keep you off their [British] taxes for two years . . . The giving of the visa was made by a Nazified regime, after Hitler walked in. The general politics is, I don’t think there was any problem, the Jews were not kept in. They went away or evaporated and went to England; that was fine. They just didn’t want them at home. I don’t see any contradiction between being a Nazi regime and giving . . . the main problem was getting a sponsor. A friend of my mother’s . . . who was the daughter of quite a wealthy banker in Austria . . . who wanted to leave . . . the problems were he had to clear everything financially, sell the business at a ridiculous rate, clear all tax, sell the property. They weren’t trying to stop you leaving. They wanted to squeeze every penny out of you. Had your parents met by then? My mother said if it hadn’t been for the Anschluss, they probably wouldn’t have got married. It would have been an affair, a good affair. They married because she couldn’t get out. They couldn’t continue their relationship unless they were married. Since my father was definitely going to leave . . . Had they been able to travel without getting married, they might very well have done so. They had a good marriage in lots of respects . . . From my point of view, they worked very hard at creating a good, strong family. Did you feel there was something strange about your family situation? I knew they weren’t English . . . It’s quite interesting. I remember one particular incident. I was at a small, private prep school in South London in Putney. It had a playing field. Every year there was a sports day . . . I remember quite vividly to get from where the cars were to where the event was going on down the field, I remember being quite embarrassed by my father at having quite an expensive fur coat and speaking with a definite Austrian accent. That’s how I defined it. I remember feeling embarrassed by that. It’s quite interesting. I always thought my mother didn’t have a German accent, but my wife P. says she does. Much more an English accent than my father . . . My fights were all with my father. My mother is an even-tempered person . . . Unfazed by things. There was an emotional division of labour. He was wildly neurotic and every bit of distress showed, while she was

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the counterweight and had to remain calm and equable and the rest of it . . . One has to bear other things in mind. My father’s father died in a traffic accident when my father was twelve, just coming up to puberty. I think that was pretty heavy. He didn’t talk much about that, but the way he didn’t talk about it suggested it was a very awful thing. The other thing was that my father married three times. His first wife, a ‘susses madchen’, they had one daughter . . . a little younger than my mother . . . Then there was a second wife, who died in a car accident. My father was driving. My father’s mother, my grandmother, apparently was quite a vicious person. She was always playing the sons off against each other. There were a lot of particularities. Whereas my mother has fewer stories. The only story of difference was between my mother and her sister, is that my mother’s sister, who was older, had polio and had one leg longer than the other. She stayed at home with the grown-ups. My mother went out and did things in the outside world. Not a conflict. They just did different things. Did everybody survive? No. On my father’s side, his brother and his mother survived. On my mother’s side, her sister, Stella, survived, but my mother’s parents and great swathes of her family went to the gas chambers. Some went to Israel, which was then Palestine. I don’t have much to do with them except for David, who is my mother’s sister’s, Stella’s, son . . . My mother represents David’s mother. David’s lovely. I don’t go to Israel. We see a reasonable amount of him and his wife, Susie. But no, most people died. My mother told me this. Stella lived with us in South London. She came out at roughly the same time. Then, about 1949, Stella, who was a single parent with her son, David, went to the new state of Israel. I’m not quite sure when I became aware of the death of my grandparents and the rest. But I know, most of the time, I didn’t think of them. Maybe I should go back on the Jewish thing. I married for the first time when I was in my early forties. She is the mother of my children. We separated and divorced. It was all very painful. My mother and father were completely secularized. They didn’t think of themselves as . . . [Jewish]. I knew nothing of Jewish rituals. I was never circumcised, bar mitzvahed. They were and I am fully assimilated. But I went to see a rabbi . . . I was struggling with why it had all gone so wrong. He was running a group for Jewish Christian couples. My ex-wife was a sort of Catholic . . . also quite a hybrid person. Anyway, I remember going to these sessions . . . And, at one stage, somebody asked . . . ‘Who are you?’

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Not a question I’d consciously felt was problematic. And I said, ‘I suppose I am a sociologist.’ [Then they asked,] ‘Would you say you were a Jew?’ And I shrugged in Jewish fashion. ‘Can you say the words “We Jews”?’ I spent no less than ten awful minutes trying to say that, bursting into tears. And in the end, I managed to say the phrase . . . I was horrified. I could have said, ‘We Nazis’. It’s just a form of words. But saying ‘We Jews’ was obviously laden with stuff I’d never thought about, that I wasn’t aware of . . . I have things in common with people, sociologists, socialists, not ethnicity. Obviously there was something, whatever you call it, communitarian in me that made me have to try for ten minutes to be able to say these words, though in the end I did. I don’t know why I could not say them. Internalized anti-Semitism? My image of myself . . . I’m just a relic of the Austro-Hungarian empire. That’s what I felt I was. If somebody said, ‘Would you say you are English’, I’ve never thought of myself as English. In England, I say I’m a remainder of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Abroad, I’d say I’m pretty English. If somebody says, ‘Are you Jewish?’ I’d say, ‘I come from a Jewish family, etc.’ But to say ‘We Jews’, an assertion of solidarity and exclusion, I couldn’t do it . . . Do you feel you are carrying a burden? I’m not sure about not carrying a burden. There’s a novel. Might have been called The Black Prince by Iris Murdock. There’s a brother and sister who are Jewish. The sister strikes up a friendship with the hero. And she tells this story, I think it’s in Russia, that they had to escape because they were Jews. It was all very dangerous . . . Later, at some point, the hero talks to the brother and the brother says . . . ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but we’ve been very comfortably off. We’re a Jewish family; my father’s a furrier, living in Golders Green for a long time.’ By the end of the book, the girl is dead and the brother says, ‘What my sister told you was true. It was me who was lying.’ So the hero says, ‘Why did you tell me all that stuff?’ And he says, ‘I didn’t want to be a dark Jew, carrying all that stuff . . . I want to be a light Jew; I didn’t want to be somebody carrying the history and weight of persecution and so on.’ Have you carried that history? My relationship with my father was quite a painful one. We fought a lot about a lot of things. He wasn’t physically brutal at all. He was emotionally, basically without knowing it, very manipulative. He was a guilt tripper. ‘How can you do this to me?’ When you’re young, how do you know you’re right? A lot of aggro and a lot of pain and struggle involved

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in my relationship with my father. But there was not a lack of love . . . on either side. There was a lot of love. I’m thinking of a particular cycling trip when I went to Austria when I was about seventeen, in about 1956. I’d been to Austria with my family. This was my first trip to Austria without my family. My father was very worried, but he didn’t say I shouldn’t go. But he gave me a little green bag which I had to hang around my neck on my chest to contain my passport and travellers cheques, and I was on no account to take it off, except when I went into the water. And then I was to put it back afterwards straightaway. I was to ring him every week, let’s say on a Saturday. Phoning him at the time was hard. You had to book it a day before. You had to wait for nine different operators to all synchronize their watches. It took up a morning, and I didn’t want to spend that time to say, ‘Hullo, I’m fine. Goodbye.’ I remember thinking at the time, ‘This man is overprotective like crazy.’ In retrospect, I quite sympathize with him. Here is a boy, seventeen years old, who knows nothing about the world, who is travelling through Europe. You can run it anyway you like. But anyway, it’s not an English way of behaving. An English way would have been, ‘Go off. See you at the end of the summer.’ A very overprotective way would be ‘No, you can’t go’, or ‘Yes, you can go, but you have to ring me every evening.’ He was somewhat overprotective. On the other hand, his experiences of being alone in Germany and Austria . . . Jews who had escaped from Austria didn’t like the Germans very much. For him, I was going into enemy territory. My mother was much quieter about it. Maybe a division of labour. My father provided the drama and the anxiety. One of the things about my mother, though, it’s difficult to know. My mother was and is a very loving person and very good hearted and very intelligent, more in a university way than my father was, who had a different way of being educated. There is a sense—which I’m only starting to think about very hard about in the last ten years—in which she often doesn’t quite engage fully emotionally. She is warm, and she is very loving, and she is very concerned, and at some level . . . My mother will ask a question: ‘Tell me about what a holiday was like.’ And you’ll start to answer and start to give a feel about what it was like, and she’ll interrupt and say, ‘Did you meet anybody?’ And you start to tell her about that, and she’ll say, ‘How was the garden?’ To parody it, you could say she was quite positivistic. The important thing for her are the facts of what happened, not so much the feelings that you had about what happened. So somehow . . . it struck me as something true about her, which is she doesn’t particularly want to know the detail of the emotional nitty-gritty of things. While my father was the opposite; he wants to know about the pain and the anguish and

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the drives and the instincts and the hatred and whatever. My mother doesn’t want to know about all that. Do you think she was behind a ‘bell jar’? She was behind something. Not as strong as that . . . I didn’t really think about it before. Have I been behind bell jars as well? She was twentyfour; she had to leave her country very, very rapidly. She had to leave her parents behind. She lost her whole world and, as it turned out, most of her expected future career. She had no news during the war, no doubt suspected the worst. At some point she had no reason to think they hadn’t been killed in the gas chambers. As I discovered, they had. You found out? Yes. About ten years ago. You can look all this up on the web. Did you not find out before because you hadn’t wanted to find out? My mother had sort of assumed that that is what happened. She did not want to know more, and I didn’t want know more. I now know their last place was Lodz. Do I know much more? No, I don’t know much more. It makes it too graphic. Anyway, she came to England. She had a child. She didn’t know anybody who knew anything about children. She told this story, horrific really. My father went out, rushing around trying to survive economically. There was a bombing raid in the middle of the day, my father wasn’t there, and she went down into the shelter, and there were other people from the same building, and they talked to her. And she thought, ‘Oh, they know I exist.’ They’d never said a word to her. She’d been living in this building for about a year. Invisible woman. Then the raid was over, and they never talked to her again. She was reinvisiblized. She must have been very lonely, perhaps very largely preoccupied by the fate of her parents, which turned out to be more awful than she could know at the time. She’s handled this by taking the edge of emotions. In English it would be ‘Let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill.’ . . . It’s like having a local anaesthetic? A bit like that. Not a powerful one. You can feel the emotion through the anaesthetic. It’s very slightly dulled and dulling. I now think it had the effect on me deciding that I didn’t want to be like my father, who was run by his emotions, but to be like my mother,

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who, clearly, it appeared, wasn’t run by her emotions; they weren’t so strong, and they were better managed. Which parent was more like a mother? Both of them were mothers. My mother marvellously looked after us and the house. She didn’t work. At a much later stage, she worked a little, in my father’s gallery. She did do some work at the very beginning. At some Jewish immigrants’ organization, maybe it was Austrian, maybe for immigrants from an Austrian relief organization. She was trying to find jobs and places to stay for people like herself because she had some English. But not very much. She would be the person who rang up and try to find things. She never did find out about her parents? I don’t know about that. She never said to me she’d found out. I don’t want to be asking questions like that. But my brother or somebody about ten years ago said, ‘You know you can find out what happened to deportees.’ I found out. On the web. I can’t now remember where it . . . It took me ten minutes. As long as you have their names and birth dates and address, it isn’t difficult. The Germans were great bureaucrats. What did you feel? I felt like I’d cut myself. Somebody talked about mutilation. Much stronger than I wanted it to be. I didn’t want to know they went to XYZ concentration camp. Whose name I’ve carefully forgotten as soon as I found out about it. Too strong . . . I could understand exactly why my mother didn’t want to find out. It just makes it more real. Did your mother stay political? She joined the Labour Party; she joined and worked in CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament]; she was enthusiastic about the Great Cultural Revolution [in China]. It was a leftish home. Her comments in the home would have been left political. My father lost interest in that. He was from a sort of, in Austria, they had quite a big antique shop in, I think, quite a prosperous part of Vienna, so he was a sort of middle-class bourgeois art dealer.

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Have you been back? The place doesn’t exist anymore. That street has been knocked down. I went with my mother about seven years ago, quite recently, to where she was born and grew up in the Czech Republic. Lundenburg. A very little town based on periodic sugar beet production. Very nice town. Jewish school. We went there because she wanted to see that place again. She hadn’t seen it since 1924 when they moved to Vienna. We went to Vienna, and she showed me where Paul and she used to live. And she said Paul used to live on the second floor of this very tall house. We couldn’t get into the flat of this tall Viennese house . . . She said, ‘That cafe was there, but I never saw it. I couldn’t afford to go in there.’ I don’t think it was a Jewish quarter. Has Jewishness become more important to her? No, if anything it is has become less important. Not something she thinks about or raises. It’s more problematic for me. For her, she was born Jewish. I learnt recently that as a child she’d been to some Jewish festivals, which I was surprised by. When we went on this trip to visit this town, there was a Jewish synagogue, which is now the municipal pool or something like that. We went to see that. Very nice. There was Jewish school. No Jews left there at all. People know it was used like that before. We went to the Jewish cemetery, and we spent about half an hour looking for her grandparents’ gravestones. Her parents’ grave, by definition, wouldn’t be there. But half of the cemetery had been cleared of graves, and the other half hadn’t. We looked quite hard. Have you ever thought of ‘commemorating’ your grandparents? No. I don’t have that sense. I haven’t thought of it, is all I can say. How would one do it? Where? Here? Vienna? The concentration camp? Israel? What sort of ceremony: Jewish, agnostic, humanist? As a concept for a project, it falls apart. Maybe I’ll think about it tomorrow. I was very pleased to go to my mother’s birth town, especially with her. It was quite interesting going with her. As I said, we looked for the graves. And then she said, ‘I’m feeling tired, I’d like to sit here.’ That’s fine by me. She wanted to be by herself. So I wandered off and wandered back. She hadn’t really moved. She was remembering or whatever. And then she started to come out of it or whatever. I don’t know if this is true, and I said, ‘Do any particular thoughts occur to you?’ And she said, ‘No. Not really.’ And that can’t have been true. She must have had nothing but particular thoughts. That symbolizes

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that she doesn’t want to make a fuss about it. Not want to amplify it. That’s how my mother would handle that stuff. Obviously I didn’t believe. If she doesn’t want to talk about it. That’s right. My mother doesn’t go for those. My father wasn’t brought up to share household tasks. He couldn’t cook an egg . . . Nowadays one would say he was a very selfish man. He didn’t feel like that to me at the time. There is one story my mother told me, and I was very shocked by that. All her Austrian qualifications were rubbished when she came to the UK. They said start again with the Eleven plus. Start again. It’s a way of avoiding competition. She did a correspondence course, very boring and uninteresting. Something about being able to go part time to university. And my father said he didn’t mind as long as his dinner was always on the table at 7 p.m. Which meant she couldn’t. I didn’t know about this at the time. I feel very bad about that. There were two great issues that I know about. One was this: ‘I’m not going to put myself out for you to get a degree.’ So effectively vetoing a degree. He did work very hard. Part of the marital contract was that supper was on the table at seven in the evening. I can’t remember the other. I’ve forgotten. It was worse. Which seemed gratuitous. My mother had to be very strong. My father was, and my mother still is, strong personalities in completely different ways. That made them quite a winning team. My father would get hyper neurotic. My mother would say, ‘Things are not so bad. We aren’t dead yet. The money will last.’ . . . She was very realistic. She was very aware of his neuroticisms. She was perhaps dazzled by him at the beginning. Lecturing in Marxism. He was part of the Viennese bourgeoisie, with its lifestyle. My father loved art, typical Viennese, a high-culture man. When he came to England and had to earn a living, he worked very hard at that. What would your parents or you call yourselves? My mother would not call herself English . . . I’m mixed. Mixed between too many things to count. I wouldn’t know how to answer. What is interesting is that you don’t say you’re English. No, I don’t. I’d say I’m peculiar. I wouldn’t play with identity. I mistrust people who say, ‘Oh, I’m English or Austrian.’ It’s a distrust of claims for one-word self-identity. I can recognize that I am very English indeed. But that’s not my identity. That Englishness appears when I’m out of England. What appears in England is my un-Englishness. What appears is a Viennese psychoanalytical culture, a delight in psychological complex-

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ities; I’m very happy to give you my auto-psychoanalysis. An interest in other people’s in-depth psychology is not particularly English. Did that affect your first marriage? Yes, I think I did. My first wife did not see that as of particular value. She probably rather hated it. She did not feel comfortable with it. Do you think the glass [of the ‘bell jar’] is thinner for you than for your mother? Yes, I think that’s true. At one stage of my life, in any situation I had two reactions, my mother’s and my father’s reaction. I wouldn’t know what my own reaction was. I tend to oscillate. The glass is thinner now. I’m more in touch with the emotional life of myself and others than my mother is. But I don’t claim that as a credit. I’m living in a moderately prosperous part of the world in a relatively stable part of history. It’s lucky. I haven’t had to develop such furious defences against the present and the past. I’ve been a member of a relatively privileged class in a relatively privileged part of the world at a particular time. The welfare state plus the golden 1945 and all the rest of it. If I’d been subject to the same pressures, I might well have turned out to be more peculiar than they were. My reactions moderate each other more. Do you think your parents’ politics influenced you? Yes. They didn’t preach to me or things like that. Both of them read lots and lots of books. The family library was largely my father’s, but my mother also had and still has lots and lots of books in her room. That’s what I was trying to remember. The first most horrific point of contention. My father brought his mother, late ’38 when they came. She just couldn’t cope with it all, and she went senile and died within a couple of years. The shock was too much. And my mother wanted Paul to find a guarantor: Anglo-Irish nobility who had guaranteed Paul and Dada’s coming to the UK. My mother wanted him ask his patron to guarantee her parents as well. And my father said he couldn’t do it. He didn’t want to spoil his relationship with his patron asking him a second time and therefore putting in danger the family’s economic survival. It might have been someone called Lord Gort. He [Tom’s father] said he wouldn’t ask again. My mother was thrown back on her own resources. It related very much to my birth. She was pregnant. My mother went out to the country to find the last person who had said they might guarantee her parents, as maid servants or what-

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ever, but they refused. So then she went back home. She went into labour six weeks early, whether it’s the bumps of the bus on the way back to London or the shocks or whatever, and I was born. When she told me about this, after my father died, he died about 1980, she told me. She didn’t say, ‘I never forgave him’; she used something like the present tense: ‘I could/can never forgive him for that.’ I was very startled by her saying that. I think that may have contributed to the glass-jar thing. She had all sorts of love and respect for him. That was something she couldn’t forgive, perhaps either at the time or when she found out what had happened to them. In those days, six weeks premature, you’re pretty unlikely to live. The doctors told my father that he should prepare my mother for me dying because they didn’t expect me to live. So I was in an incubator for about six weeks. Then I went home. And then what I know is that very shortly my mother’s breasts became ulcerated, and then I went back to the hospital, to the incubator, and then her breasts healed, and I went back home. Anyway, they were both very determined I should live. I had no sense of not being highly valued . . . I was born in May ’39, and I think until the declaration of war there were still letters and phone calls. One could carry on communicating. Once war was declared, September 1939, then that was the end of communication. Full stop. How do you feel about that story? Everybody has its own mythology. It’s a source of resilience for me. One can survive. Even though I was six weeks premature and expected to die, I didn’t die. My parents were determined that I would live, perhaps I was too, and I did live. It’s a source of resilience . . . Even when I’ve had ‘suicidal thoughts’, I’ve thought of what my parents went through, and I say to myself, ‘Our family does not commit suicide.’ Things may be very bad, but my parents didn’t give up, and they came to England and they didn’t give up, and I haven’t given up. Do you have any objects from the people who died? She [Tom’s mother] kept a diary intermittently from quite young, certainly from the ’30s, maybe before then. She spent some time turning these totally incomprehensible notebooks into a fair copy in German in her handwriting. I can’t understand that either.

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How much did they speak to each other in German? There’s a disagreement about that between me and my mother. She is convinced they only spoke English to each other. I don’t resent it. I remember thinking what a clever wheeze. I suspect it gave us an incentive to learn German to understand what they said to each other. I understand Hausdeutsch, children’s German. I didn’t want to learn German awfully much. I now wish I had. I understand French. French was my A-level subject. I bought a house in France. My cultural heroes in the 1960s were French. Germans weren’t producing anything of any interest, well, if they did I didn’t know about it, well Habermas . . . In France, there was Sartre. If there’d been a Marx or a Reich or a Freud, but there wasn’t. They were hard at work forgetting there had ever been a Third Reich. Most were bourgeois, philistine; most of the interesting people had gone; what were left were the anti-Communists and those who supported and colluded with Hitler. Do you have anything that carries an emotional aura? There are a lot of family photographs, mostly my father’s, but not entirely. A large trunk of photographs. That’s an emotional time when I go and look for them. How often do you look at them? Once every twenty years. Why haven’t you looked at them more often? Too busy. [Said with humour] Do you find it too difficult? It isn’t too difficult. I don’t know most of these people. There’s a family album that my mother kept. Some of the photos have names, but I don’t know anything more about them. There is a resistance there somewhere. If I go into that, I will start to discover all the things I don’t know. Is there a way of discovering all that? If they were people I knew very well or had lots and lots of stories about so I felt I knew them or had met their children or something.

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And yet you find a resistance to looking at their photos. I don’t know if you know the work by Gabrielle Rosenthal . . . It’s called The Holocaust in Three Generations: Families of Victims and Perpetrators . . . She and coauthors are comparing the families of victims with collaborators. What’s very interesting in these family studies, what she says is that things get worse as you go down the line until the third generation. The first generation have a clear idea of what happened and who they are. The second generation know things aren’t good, but they don’t have a clear idea of anything very much. If they were the victims, they try to spare the children. If they were collaborators, they sure as hell don’t want their children to find out. They tell their children ‘I had nothing to do with the war’ or ‘I never killed anybody’ or whatever, but the children don’t quite believe it, but they don’t dare not to believe it. Therefore, they are oppressed by strange fantasies for which they have no evidence and are vague and which can’t be proved or disproved. So the effect of the Holocaust gets worse over the generations . . . If the parents lied, they knew what the truth was, and they knew they were lying, but the children who were lied to, they don’t know what is true. What does being second generation mean to you, and do you think it’s a useful concept? I have rather a horror of tags, including the tag ‘second generation’, unless a technical description. If I’m asked if I’m Jewish, I’d answer I’m technically Jewish (bloodline through the mother), but I don’t know a single Jewish ritual. I did join a group meeting in Belsize Park of secondgeneration Jews, and I don’t think I stayed there very long. I don’t remember virtually anything about it. I think I felt a slight distaste. I think there probably is something I haven’t put together before. Something about not wanting to say ‘We Jews’. I don’t feel any sense of solidarity with being Jewish or second generation . . . What does the term mean to me? I don’t like identity terms. Give me a list of as many identity items as, say, twenty, and I would not think of myself as a second-generation Jew or anything would not occur to me as a description even if I had a forty-item list. I have a revulsion against ‘identity politics’, monomaniac tribalism. Amin Maalouf has written well on this. I can give some meaning, very contradictory, meaning to me. What does ‘being Jewish’ mean to me? Deeply hostile as well. I’m struck by not being able to say ‘We Jews’. It’s not a neutral term for me. Neither is it full of positivity or negativity. I’m not sure what my relationship is to it . . . But it’s real. Second generation, Holocaust, survivor or something, I’d have no difficulty saying it. I could say I am because my mother’s

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parents died in the Holocaust, we just escaped, and I was born in England. I could do a history that related to that. It’s hostility to the concept because of its political use. You started off the interview differently? It dates from my school days. This image of my father in his fur coat and the foreign accent, what I thought at the time as being a Viennese accent. I didn’t think of it as Jewish at the time. There is something about being the same as everybody. I wanted to conform, between five and fifteen. I don’t want to be special or marked in any way that I haven’t myself chosen. If I’d had a pronounced Spanish accent, or my father had had, I wouldn’t have liked that either. It’s something to do with being foreign in xenophobic England, 1945 to ’55, where the exotic is not welcome. Between five and fifteen, primary and early secondary, up to O level, how I would have thought at the time. I think it would be a difference that justifies persecution . . . I was more conscious of the dangers of persecution because I wore glasses, so I could not do contact sports. And also I was relatively small. The last thing I needed was another attribute that called for persecution. Being Jewish in Israel, as an example, does not invite persecution, not from other Jews in Israel. The school playground is a scary place, and you know the wash of people picking on people, just wandering around. I was quite vulnerable to anybody knocking off my spectacles, without which I was pretty blind. I wanted to be not noticed, not because I was a Jew, just because I didn’t want to be picked on . . . My secondary school was a grammar school in Clapham Junction. Another perfectly decent school. The playground is a dangerous place. People can be picked on for any reason. People amuse themselves by picking on others. So in that sense, being Jewish was not a power resource, if anything, it was a ‘not one of us’. Being Spanish would have been similar. Or being Austrian? That never seemed to come up. One teacher in my school called me Vindebona, a Latin name, I think, for Vienna. I didn’t like that. Probably that’s why he said it. Drawing attention to my Austrian origins. People didn’t think I was German. I’m a bit surprised people in England knew the difference. The general thing was about being a foreigner or being foreign or being weird or something like that. The notion of Jewishness or Austrian or Spanish, I don’t really know; I think it’s about difference, what particular difference it is. I think if I’d said I was American that

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would have been a source of power. Whatever being Jewish was, it wasn’t a power resource.

III

Reflections on the Voices of the British Second Generation

4 REFLECTIONS ON THE VOICES OF THE BRITISH SECOND GENERATION

GRANDPARENTS, PARENTS AND US

In part 3, I reflect upon how the testimonies reveal the long-term personal repercussions of one of the major political catastrophes of the twentieth century, Nazism, on the quality of the lives of the British second generation. Unlike part 1, I write this section using ‘I’ as a member of the British second generation and also generally refer to ‘we’, not ‘they’, when talking of this group. The issues highlighted in part 3 are largely a result of the topics that the participants emphasized, though these were not always the ones I had predicted. Nevertheless, I have drawn on the mosaic of issues detailed in part 1, I have formulated the initial questions and then I have chosen which bits of the transcript to make use of, so part 3 does to some degree reveal what is of particular interest to me. Just as a reminder: all the participants, except one, had parents who had escaped the threat of Nazism and had successfully reached Britain before the outbreak of the war. I was not looking at the children of people who had themselves survived the systematized mass murder of the Holocaust. But what the exiles in Britain had faced was the murder of their families as well as their own dislocation. The possible exceptions were people whose parents had fled but were not Jewish, and so therefore their parents, the second generation’s grandparents, could have survived. This was also not a study that focused on the British second generation’s understanding of their parents; rather, my concern was how the participants saw their parents’ behaviour and feelings as having affected them. This subtle distinction—between the British second generation 237

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talking about their parents’ impact on them and talking about their parents—became clearer and more significant as I observed how keen many people were to talk about their parents rather than to talk about themselves. I wanted the participants to put themselves centre stage. I have ordered the topics in a rough chronological order, not in terms of the order of the original questions or the importance that the participants placed on these topics. Throughout ‘Reflections’, I try to pose the issues in terms of a question and a spectrum of often incompatible responses. Thus the questions and organization of the responses invite the reader to reflexively theorize about what the significant patterns are. I am neither attempting to draw out definitive causes nor to explain, but I am looking for and considering links and significant patterns.

GRANDPARENTS AND US: THE MEANING OF THE HOLOCAUST FOR THE BRITISH SECOND GENERATION Everybody interviewed had lost grandparents and other family to the Nazis, either for being Jewish or as political opponents to the Nazis or both. In every case, the interviewees had not known their country-oforigin grandparents, had often been born after their grandparents’ deaths and generally knew very little about them. Was it the case, therefore, that the grandparents would mean very little to the grandchildren, and, if there was meaning, what form would it take? Most of the participants initially said something to the effect of ‘I don’t know about all my grandparents.’ But what became increasingly clear as the interviews progressed, and this was not something I had anticipated, perhaps because I found it too painful, was how significant the absence of grandparents was. This is something, I suspect, that those who had grandparents often find difficult to understand. This absence often lies at the very heart of the experience of exile and the Holocaust for many of the British second generation. The distinction in experiences of loss between those in the second generation with surviving grandparents and those without was illustrated by Peter. He contrasted the experiences of a friend with that of his greataunt: ‘Her [his friend’s] mother left Czechoslovakia when she was six, but she came with her parents, and later her grandparents came too. . . . It’s quite different.’ Then Peter talked about the decimation in his father’s family: The one surviving strand, the aunt who had moved to Budapest . . . She lost both her husbands; allegedly the first to the Gestapo, the second in the Communist era. The two children were hidden during the war. One

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died of diabetes that she contracted during the war. The other son . . . emigrated to New York and didn’t dare to go back [after participating in the 1956 uprising]. I have this image of her, the one family member I have met [and the only family survivor]. She is the most complete picture of destruction. . . . A completely broken woman. Sitting there with a picture of her son in her hand. . . . It’s this complete disappearance.

Peter expanded on the sense and effects of this loss: I suppose the Holocaust was something in which six million people died, but in which there was hardly any concept of my own grandparents there. My father had had pictures of both of his parents by his bedside. It was a strand of the confusion. We were told nothing about them. . . . All trips [when Peter was already in his forties] back to Hungary have been about putting a person’s face on all of this. It’s desperately painful. . . . For all the time I’ve spent thinking, emoting, talking about the [British] second generation, reading about it, painful as it is in the abstract, when it gets to actually thinking of my grandparents, it gets to be heartbreaking.

When one’s grandparents have been murdered, their absence can become overwhelming. Peter said, ‘I couldn’t say why was my strength of identification with that fact, that my grandparents being murdered was so strong, but it was.’ Towards the end of the interview, asked whether, after all his research, he felt he’d got to know his grandparents, he replied: It’s very interesting. Not really. They don’t feel impersonal, and they don’t feel that distant. But the amount I actually know about their personality is just tiny, I think even more about my grandmother than my grandfather. At least I know what he did. . . . I don’t know how far that [knowing about them] can go. Not just because sources of information would be very hard—my father is dead. Because there is a level of vulnerability on my part that I don’t know if I can get beyond.

Peter said, ‘I’m not trying to suggest that the Holocaust is the only thing that defines me, but . . . its legacy is still in some ways eating away at me in that very personal way.’ Then Peter said that he thought frequently of his grandparents and their deaths in the gas chambers. He said: I think that thought tortured my father, though I can’t remember him saying it. He could not get his head around what had happened to his parents. . . . If you look at what do I know of my grandparents? The fact that they died in their forties looms as the one large fact about

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their lives. Everything else I know is only tiny, is utterly shadowed by that. . . . I don’t think I could tell you one story about either of them.

Mike, whose English maternal grandparents he knew but felt little affinity with, said that he had dedicated much of his adult life to commemorating his Czech father’s parents and sister, all of whom had been murdered in Auschwitz. His father had never talked about the past, and, until shortly before his death, had given Mike and his siblings very little information. Mike said that he knew something frightful had happened ‘by osmosis’. Later Mike said: ‘I have been trying to find out when they went to Terezin and when they left. I spent years trying to find out. . . . It’s [the Holocaust] coloured my whole life and reading.’ Elaborating on the effect on the deaths of his family on him, Mike said: In my writings I am commemorating them all the time. Even though I don’t know the exact details, apart from knowing exactly when they died. Their postcard was sent. . . . Every year, when I get a new diary, I put in March 7, when they died [that day], although the last card was dated the twenty-first. It’s very poignant to me, very important that I record that for my family history and posterity. Some things are very deep, deep in one’s soul. The monumental fact is they died without ceremony, without knowing that they were going to face. It’s supremely shocking. What I’m doing is commemorating them, the memory of them each year. What all my reading is about is trying to keep it in the memory. Once you lose that, we lose everything. . . . I have always felt I had a mission to explain, to make sense of the family catastrophe. It gives one’s life coherence. And because my dad couldn’t, was mostly silent, I’ve got to speak out.

Towards the end of the interview, Mike said: Whenever people talk of uncles, aunts, grandparents, nieces and nephews on my father’s side, I can’t help thinking, ‘What does that mean to me?’ I remain enraged about it. . . . It’s inside my head all the time. . . . But I can’t talk about it, not with the majority of people anyway.

When I was not recording him, Mike explained that his father had ‘called his own daughter [Mike’s sister] when she was born by the same name, the middle name [as his father’s murdered sister]. And that says something.’ Mike’s father had never known the details of what had happened to his family. It was his Czech father-in-law, not his father, with whom Mike went to Czechoslovakia and discovered something of his murdered family. Mike, as well as his father, was haunted, as much by the unknown as the known.

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Henry said that what he felt most about the Holocaust was fear. I think what really was transmitted through the Holocaust experience was not death itself but the fears that went with it. I couldn’t speak to either of my parents about it because it only occurred to me much later. I feel the anxieties are so deep ground, it’s almost as if it was inherited.

For many, though certainly not all the British second generation, the absence and loss of grandparents—and often of an extended family—is often so painful that it becomes the Cerberus to halt both our parents and our own ability to enter into the tunnel to the past. The one exception was Tania, whose family fled for entirely Political reasons. Tania’s parents were active anti-Nazis and not Jewish. Her four German grandparents all died early from a mixture of natural causes, two while their children were out of reach in the UK and before Tania had a chance to know them. Hers was the one interview where the issue of grandparents did not push itself to the fore of the interview. She did tell me that her parents were left not knowing what had happened to her grandparents till the war’s end and then having to cope with the idea they had deserted them. But whatever the reasons, Tania talked less than anybody else about her feelings about her grandparents and parents. Here the lament was for loss of family as well as being in exile. Tania said: When I was a little girl and I would wake up to a new day and life was so exciting, then I would go to the kitchen, and my mother would be sitting there and greet me with ‘Today so-and-so would have been soand-so old.’ She was mourning for her brothers, one murdered by the Nazis, another executed in the Soviet Union, and her son, K. . . . They [Tania’s parents] lost their sense of joy.

Having no link to grandparents led to some participants trying to find a link through possessions, such as through old letters and other mementos, which for some had come to assume a profound significance. It was noticeable how many of our parents had either destroyed or not preserved such letters. In almost every interview, the person showed deep emotion when referring to the few objects that were in their possession from their grandparents and from the youth of their parents. In an interview that was not used, the interviewee started to cry almost uncontrollably when talking of the one letter she had from her grandmother. John was demonstrably touched by having a few of his grandparents’ letters, after his father had got rid of almost all other correspondence. Robert’s father had also destroyed many letters, and he also lamented the disappearance of the book written by his uncle. Tania was concerned to find past letters

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and documents that could cast light on her parents. This yearning for ‘significant objects’ has led many of us, often late in our lives, to start ferreting out information about our grandparents and other family members. Tom spoke about the unbearable pain that can be attached to such objects and the contradictions involved. Talking of looking at the family photos, which were in a trunk in his mother’s home, he stated: That’s an emotional time when I go and look for them. How often do you look at them? Once every twenty years. Why haven’t you looked at them more often? Too busy. [Said with humour] Do you find it too difficult? It isn’t too difficult. I don’t know most of these people. There’s a family album that my mother kept. Some of the photos have names, but I don’t know anything more about them. There is a resistance there somewhere. If I go into that, I will start to discover all the things I don’t know. Is there a way of discovering all that? If they were people I knew very well or had lots and lots of stories about so I felt I knew them or had met their children or something.

But Peter’s reaction was very different: ‘I don’t really care. I’ve got a couple of little bits of porcelain that were my grandmother’s. I was going to say, of course I keep them, but it just doesn’t mean anything.’ One of the women respondents similarly dismissed the importance of artefacts, stating, ‘Memory is in here’, pointing to her head. Because of the regularity with which the issue of commemoration came up at second-generation meetings and in public lectures, I had expected this issue to appear more than it did. In fact, of all the people I interviewed, none had seen cause to commit themselves to specific forms of commemoration for their dead. Instead, Mike saw his life’s work of reading, researching and writing about the Holocaust and his family as a form of commemoration. For Peter, just finding out about the past and those who died was difficult in itself. Tania saw her political work as representing a commitment to preventing anything like Nazism from ever happening again. It was Tom who, when I asked him whether he had ever thought of commemorating his murdered grandparents, gave expression

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to some of the problems surrounding commemoration. He said: ‘No. I don’t have that sense. I haven’t thought of it, is all I can say. How would one do it? Where? Here? Vienna? The concentration camp? Israel? What sort of ceremony: Jewish, agnostic, humanist? As a concept for a project, it falls apart.’ I want to end this section by referring again to Robert’s interview. Robert, whose grandparents had been murdered, talked about how on a visit to Germany, he was rushed to hospital, having almost died. When I came out of IT [intensive care] after my heart attack, they put me in this room, a wonderful room with a big glass window . . . It’s snowing. It’s Berlin. It’s Christmas. I then start to look out of the window. I say [to S.], ‘Don’t say anything, but just look out of the window.’ Out of the window is this building, in the snow, with a big chimney, smoking. And it’s the laundry. And she says, ‘What?’ And I say, ‘Arbeit macht Frei.’

OUR PARENTS AND US: THE SILENCE OF THE PAST Any reader of literature about the refugees, our parents, will recognize that this is a group who often find it difficult to retrieve information about the past in a systematic and ordered fashion. While Rosenthal’s study is of people who had directly suffered from the Holocaust, nevertheless, her analysis contains useful pointers. She highlights how difficult the first generation often found it to put together a coherent narrative, sometimes even about their own experiences pre-Nazism, and how disjointed and fragmented many stories about their pasts were (Rosenthal 1998c, passim). Whether the splintering of memory is associated with trauma is open to question. Rosenthal et al. (1998, 41, 116–18) discuss the impact on the second generation, including how the parents’ blocking out of the past and the ‘blocked question’ of the child by the parent, which the child will then itself perpetuate, amplifies the child’s sense of loneliness and unwillingness to enquire further. Thus blocks are created between parent and child. Yet it is parents who provided the only—clogged—channel of knowing between grandparents and their second-generation grandchildren. Lasker-Wallfisch also highlights how crucial the role of the parent is in answering their children’s questions about grandparents. How can there be normality, she asks, when the parent hesitates to answer for fear of traumatizing their children because the answer is that the grandparents are lying in a mass grave somewhere (Lasker-Wallfisch 1996, 13). Who a person feels they are is usually composed of a social fabric made up of mini snapshots: of a grandmother’s hair, the smell of an

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uncle’s house, the pet dog of a neighbour, the hidden meaning in the way words sound, how the trees sway when the wind is blowing. But these cultural associations could no longer be accessed by our parents and certainly not by us. This depleted our parents’ confidence about who they were and their ability to talk to their children about their past. It separated out our parents from us. There was no easy communication of the ‘Remember Granny’s cakes?’ variety. What made communication harder still was the shock of discovery. Because piles of dead bodies have become an everyday image associated with the Holocaust, it is easy to forget that our parents may have feared but did not know what had happened to their parents. Nobody imagined the unimaginable. Our parents had not expected when they fled their countries that they would never see their parents again. Even once the Nazi state started on its policy of extermination, it had made a good job of keeping their extermination of millions a secret. It was only as the extent of the mass murders emerged, as news of what the Allies had found in the death camps filtered out, that our parents would have stopped hoping that they would soon be reunited with their parents. In a heartbreaking letter she wrote to her father at the end of the war, of which I have a copy, my mother wrote that the first word she would teach me, his baby granddaughter, was grandpapa. Even though our parents, whether Jewish and/or political, could not have imagined the extremes to which the Nazis’ barbarism would go, I suspect many accused themselves of selfishness and/or felt shame or guilt for having saved themselves and left their parents to die. When my mother told me she wished she too had died, I imagine that she felt she had betrayed her family and/or felt a sense of shame that she had deserted them, which at points made her life close to unbearable. Politicals too lost comrades—my father, or so my mother told me, felt that to flee Germany represented betrayal. ‘The working class has nowhere to hide’, he was reported to have said. Indeed, in the copies of a letter of his that I now possess from straight after the end of war, is a litany of past comrades who had been murdered. Our parents could not speak easily of those they felt they had abandoned. For some, their sense of having betrayed their parents closed down the possibility of speech. But if the parent could not speak to the child of what had befallen their grandparents, could not speak of their own culpability, then their ability to talk to the child about most matters became strangled. As so many of the testimonies suggest, parents frequently had difficulty themselves in coming to terms with the past, even as fragments of memory pierced their consciousness. Parents, uprooted, persecuted for who they were, far from loved ones whose fates could not be compre-

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hended, using a new language that did not allow them to say quite what they meant, in a cultural environment in which they no longer understood the syntax of meaning, could not find the words to tell the truth of what had occurred. And what was the truth anyway? Maybe some of our parents could not bear to remember and tried to keep closed the door to the past. Or maybe they considered it more appropriate not to speak of such appalling events to their children, the next generation, to leave them with hope about a new future. Maybe for some, their silence was also a feature of mourning. 1 Or was it evidence that they were traumatized? An alternative approach is that the silence was how our parents expressed their losses, an assertion that words cannot bring back the dead. Maybe it even felt like a further desecration to speak of their murdered love ones. But the focus here is on the effect on the second generation of their parent’s shutting the verbal door to the past. So, whatever the reasons, as the interviews reveal, almost all the participants felt their parent(s)’s silence and evasions warned them off from asking questions and prohibited their access to their own past. Thus, silence became the norm. The child grew up dispossessed from their past. Moreover, children can feel betrayal and resentment at their parents’ silence and evasions. As Rosenthal (Rosenthal 1998b, 17) posits, the more guarded the family dialogue, the more the parents keep secrets about the family past, the more sustained the impact of that past on the second generation. ‘An aura of secrecy and shame’ affected the second generation when parents did not tell what had happened (Rosenthal 1998b, 17). While the refugee parent knew at some level what had happened to their families, the second generation did not even know what there was to know. Moreover, as the testimonials confirm, the child did not need the parent to verbalize that they were troubled. Another form of discourse developed among the silences. The child often ‘knew’ within themselves what they had never been told. The child came to know the ‘unknowable’. 2 I was never told about what had happened to my parents’ families. Yet since childhood, death has been my lifelong companion. I knew there were no ghosts in my home, yet I also knew them to be there. Without my parents saying one word, and without my knowing that anybody from our family had died in the Holocaust, I had become the repository of their losses and fears. My—and so many others’—experiences edge into the territory of what is described as being haunted, discussed earlier. Some of the participants, for example, Robert and Tania, learnt to become keen observers of their parents, and even if they did not fully understand what they observed, were painfully aware that their parents were in some fashion in a state of grief or loss. As Peter, among others, suggested, the unspoken message from his father was ‘Don’t ask’. Ques-

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tions would never be answered except by silence—a vocabulary in its own right. Without wanting to enter the field of psychoanalysis and the unconscious, I would suggest that the silence of the parents was actually the medium through which at least some of the participants painfully learnt to understand their parents’ suffering. It is not just the psychology of remembrance that concerns me, but also Nazism’s fracturing of the common-sense assumptions that pressed down on our parents’ ability to talk. Our parents’ cultural and political language had been destroyed. The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the creation of distinct states and the earlier consolidation of a united Germany had encouraged a level of national identification across Central Europe, which most of our parents, whether Jewish or not, associated with to some degree. Moreover, Germany and German cultural influence was often seen as progressive—in the arts, drama, music, literature, philosophy and in technical development. Even Zionism was at points associated with progressivism. The exiles, political and nonpolitical, had grown up at a time when modernist concepts—certainly for many urban dwellers and professionals—provided a worldview of progress and of dwindling persecution on the basis of ethnicities. All such beliefs were challenged. The exiles would have had difficulty in rationally understanding or explaining the camps and the annihilation. Our parents could comprehend the occasional pogrom but had no language for mass extermination. The scale of the Holocaust could not be adequately understood simply as another outbreak of anti-Semitism. The exiles whose families were murdered as Jews had to come to terms with an extreme form of displacement: the perpetrators’ intent to kill their family and all others they defined as Jews and to prevent forever the possibility of newborns. The Nazi state had defined them as subhuman and wished their annihilation, something they would, or so the testimonials suggest, wish to protect their British second-generation children from, at whatever cost. Our parents’ reaction based on the testimonials appears to be to separate themselves from overt displays of Jewishness; thus, almost none of the baby boys were circumcised. A few of the parents had not told their children that they were Jewish or wished this to be kept hidden. Peter’s father ‘had tried to keep silent the fact of [Peter’s] suppressed Jewishness and the trauma he had experienced, and how that had affected [Peter’s] brother and [Peter].’ Robert knew he was Jewish from an early age, but with the birth of his two younger brothers, his parents forbade him from mentioning the issue of Jewishness; he became ‘a hidden Jew’. One of the women I talked to had been sent both to church and to a Jewish ‘Sunday school’ as a child.

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The pain of remembering became entwined with the absence of a conceptual language to explain the catastrophe. Insofar as parents’ deepdown fear was that Nazism was all to do with exterminating the Jews, this appears to have encouraged a silence about Jewishness that led many of their children, the participants, to try to find out what Jewishness meant to them late in their lives. Moreover, I suspect that being political generally did not help. Unless a crudely economistic interpretation of Marxism was supported that held that Nazism was all the fault of the German ruling class, there was no explanation for the largest genocide in history occurring in the most developed country in Europe. I now think that my politically astute parents tried and failed to understand what had happened. Generally, our parents did not have access to an adequate private—or public—discourse, as developed on in part 1, to explain to themselves why they had ended up as exiles, and why their parents were murdered, which augmented their inability to find the words to tell us, their children, what had happened. Moreover, in line with Gradvohl’s (2013a, n.p.) argument, the need for secrecy in the anti-Nazi organizations of the 1930s encouraged a culture of silence that stretched well beyond the defeat of Nazism. My parents’ inability to free themselves from the their fears of both the longarm of Nazism and Stalinism was brought into painful focus when they accused my boyfriend, in the mid-1960s, of only going out with me so that he could spy on them. So it is not a surprise that one key issue for the participants was their parents’ silence, though silence came in different forms and had different effects on their children. The degree of ignorance of some of the participants about the causes and details of their parents’ exile was marked. This absence of knowledge, this lack of a hinterland of stories that place us in a family narrative has profoundly affected us. Mike always knew that his father’s parents and sister had been murdered, but little else. His father had even written a supposedly autobiographical book for the British Museum’s collection on émigrés, but significantly, it started with the father saying goodbye to his family at Prague station and ignored all else. Mike said that his father didn’t talk about the past in his book. The annihilation of his father’s entire large family had sealed Mike’s father’s lips. Referring to other children’s chatter at his British school, Mike said: Children chatted about their grandparents. . . . ‘Where’s Granny? Where are my relations?’ I didn’t ask. Why didn’t I inquire? I probably had said when I was four, ‘I’ve got friends at school, and they have

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grandparents.’ I probably got the message from Dad’s eyes not to go there.

This acute awareness of subtle bodily clues also appeared in other interviews, including with one of the women whose transcript is not included, who talked of smelling her mother’s fear. Mike described when his father first told him anything: The real revelation was when he summoned his three children for a meeting a few years before he died. . . . He sat us down, and he showed us family postcards from Auschwitz-Birkenau, from the two Es (my granddad had already died), writing in camouflaged language that the time was up. That they were going to die. . . . They were shakily scribbled in pencil and ended ‘Love from the 2Es’. . . . I’d never seen them before. . . . It was revelatory but very painful. . . . They had been in Terezin maybe two years. These cards cemented something for me. It made things more real and true. Instead of rumour and supposition and ‘was Dad telling the truth?’

In his late teens, Mike became engrossed with reading about the Holocaust and literature that derived from the Holocaust as a route to discovery and has become dedicated to making memoirs for the future. But the silencing of language does not just affect the first generation. Mike said of the destruction of his family, ‘But I can’t talk about it, not with the majority of people anyway.’ At another point in the interview, he said that this was the first time he had spoken on these themes in such detail. Robert’s interview also illustrated the power of our parents’ silences. I asked him whether he knew what had happened to his grandparents. He answered: My mother’s parents were murdered. I found out when I and my friend S., who now lives in Berlin, and I went to Austria for the first time about two years ago. We went to the Jewish Museum, and S. helped me get the information about Leah.

To highlight the point, Robert, when he was already in his sixties, found out about his grandmother by checking the records in a museum in Vienna. He was not the only one to find out the fate of grandparents from museum records. In his late fifties, Isaac (see page 85), searching for his mother’s family, of whom his loquacious mother did not speak, went to the Berlin Holocaust Museum. There, alone at a table among the exhibits and the visitors, he was presented with a book in which he discovered that

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every member of his mother’s family had been murdered. Isaac wept. There was nobody with him, and none of the staff offered solace. He never told his mother—in a poignant role reversal—that her hopes that somewhere somebody might have survived were make-believe. Tom’s case is illustrative of the ‘syntax’ of silence. At the beginning of the interview, Tom insisted that his parents did not keep secrets, except the ones parents always keep. Indeed, he knew about his mothers’ parents’ and other kin’s death from an early age. His mother, moreover, was generally communicative. Yet as the interview developed, Tom made clear that he knew little about his maternal grandparents, particularly their dreadful deaths. It can well be understood why Tom’s parents did not tell their child this. Only ten years earlier, Tom had found out more details about his maternal grandparents’ deaths from the Internet. He said: I felt like I’d cut myself. Somebody talked about mutilation. Much stronger than I wanted it to be. I didn’t want to know they went to XYZ concentration camp. Whose name I’ve carefully forgotten as soon as I found out about it. Too strong . . . I could understand exactly why my mother didn’t want to find out. It just makes it more real.

I have looked up relatives in libraries. Here there is no delight of discovery at a name on the list of those eliminated at Auschwitz. Knowledge is not sweet. I remember when I first saw the name of my grandfather in print. It made him and his death real. The issue of accessing records reappeared frequently. One reason for not knowing is that our parents destroyed records. Robert’s mother was not able to cope with knowing and did not want any talking about the past, to the point of destroying her husband’s old letters. John’s father similarly had destroyed many old letters and documents, which John saw as an aspect of paranoia, though the father had kept his own father’s letters, which John was pleased about. Peter expressed shock at the absence of letters, which he knew his father had received from Peter’s grandparents during the war, suspecting his father of destroying them. The fragmentary character of what we do know is also illustrated by Robert. Robert talked about how he found out about his paternal grandfather: ‘My father’s family comes from Galicia. I only know that from some photos I found after his death. A postcard his father sent to a girlfriend who then became his wife. It’s in the Polish surname.’ He continued: My father’s parents escaped to Italy, though I don’t know how that happened. . . . My father, I’ve heard this twice in slightly different

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ways, not different versions but different angles, my father, no my father’s father, Opa, went with the partisans into the mountains. I don’t know where. My mother, no his mother, went into a convent, but the Germans took her from there . . . And she went to a number of camps which I can’t remember. That’s what it said in the museum [in Berlin], but I didn’t know any of the details till then. I didn’t know any of the details; I don’t want to think about Lodz. [Weeps]

Again and again, the participants found it difficult to remember the little details about the past their parents had told them. It is as if this knowledge became forbidden fruit. Tom was one among others to comment that he could never remember the names of his dead relatives. As Robert said: I have a really bad memory for these things which I think is very suspect. . . . I pursue this [information about his family] with great reluctance and difficulty, partly because of technical difficulties [Robert did not know or want to know German], partly I’ve always found something else [to do]. Although in some sense it [finding out about his family’s past] appears not to be painful to me, but I know it’s extraordinarily painful.

For some of us, silence can sometimes appear preferable to knowing. The ability of the second generation to ‘own’ that past is often exceedingly fragile. Peter’s testimony also exemplified the silence of some of our parents and the effect this can have on the ‘children’. Peter’s father never talked of his dead family; like so many of the other people being interviewed, Peter knew almost nothing of his paternal grandparents, who had been murdered in Hungary. ‘I still don’t think the sentences on that subject he [Peter’s father] used [about his parents] in the first thirty years of my life amounted to more than five minutes.’ When I asked explicitly whether his father had talked about the people who had been killed in Hungary, Peter replied: No. Not at all. Even in the period when that had started to ease because of the fall of the wall, because he had started to go back, because I was more insistent about the need to talk about it, even then he would talk very, very little about the individual people who had died, including his parents. He would say very, very little about them.

Before his father died, at Peter’s suggestion, Peter and his father went on a trip to Hungary together. Peter hoped, in the phrase his father had used,

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that this would be ‘like opening a book’. Though the trip was invaluable, and his father’s silence was never as complete, Peter was shocked when his father then stated that the book was now closed. One man I talked to at length at a conference who was in his early seventies, was only starting to piece together his father’s past, largely from the papers his father had left. He told me that at his father’s humanist funeral, nobody spoke. He explained this by suggesting nobody felt sure enough that they knew who his father was. Henry’s parents too did not talk to their son. ‘I didn’t know about the murders and the deaths till I was about ten. Getting to know the details was much later, both in general terms and in terms of my own family, and I never really got to know the details of my own family. Not really. Just the general outline.’ His father, when ‘captured’, was used by the Nazis as a translator. Henry’s father mentioned it to Henry once and told him: ‘“Please don’t tell anybody this”. He [Henry’s father] lived with that.’ Collusion too, even if unwilling, leaves a trail of misery, but this was clearly not an issue for the vast majority of refugees in Britain. Then Henry drew attention to one of the fundamental problems some of us have faced in finding out: ‘I didn’t know there was anything to ask until a certain point.’ One of the ironies in Henry’s case is that, although his father had failed to speak to him of the past, ‘later, towards the last years of [his] father’s life, [his father] got angry with [him] for not asking. That’s the paradox.’ Tom’s comments illuminate that one of our parents’ ‘coping’ strategies was that they became emotionally remote, stymieing communication even when their children were grown up. Tom’s mother was loving and very good hearted. But, said Tom, if she asked you a question, maybe about a holiday, and you’ll start to answer and start to give a feel about what it was like, and she’ll interrupt and say, ‘Did you meet anybody?’ And you start to tell her about that, and she’ll say, ‘How was the garden?’ To parody it, you could say she was quite positivistic. The important thing for her are the facts of what happened, not so much the feelings that you had about what happened. So somehow . . . it struck me as something true about her, which is she doesn’t particularly want to know the detail of the emotional nitty-gritty of things.

Asked whether it was as if she was behind a bell jar, he said: She was behind something. Not as strong as that . . . I didn’t really think about it before. Have I been behind bell jars as well? She was twenty-four; she had to leave her country very, very rapidly. She had to leave her parents behind. . . . She had no news during the war, no

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doubt suspected the worst. At some point she had no reason to think they hadn’t been killed in the gas chambers. . . . She did not want to know more, and I didn’t want to know more. I now know their last place was Lodz. Do I know much more? No, I don’t know much more. It makes it too graphic.

Tom gave the example of when, already into his sixties, he and his mother visited the graveyard in Austria where his grandparents had been buried, but they could not find their graves. There were, of course, no graves for her parents. ‘Do any particular thoughts occur to you?’ he asked his mother, who was sitting on a bench. And she said, ‘No. Not really.’ And Tom told me that he was incredulous and thought to himself, ‘That can’t be true.’ It is impossible to establish his mother’s muted reactions as a response to and consequence of her family’s destruction, but it seems likely. Tom saw it as his good fortune that his father’s emotionalism acted as a counterweight and that he, therefore, was able to become more open to others and their emotions. Silence can take many guises. Tania’s Communist Party parents talked to her more than many of the participants’ parents. Yet, already in her sixties, Tania started to appreciate that, though she knew her father had been imprisoned and tortured, she knew very little detail about her mother’s similar experiences. She came to realize that although her parents had been in the underground in Germany, she knew remarkably few details of what they had been doing, what had happened to precipitate their flight or what had happened next. She is only now, after both her parents have died, slowly putting together the fragments of knowledge she has about what happened to her parents. What all the political parents, of whatever affiliation, had to face after the war was that their political beliefs based on rationality and progress had been defeated, and instead there had arisen an insane system that had murdered millions because of being ‘Untermenschen’, the abject failure of the Communist movement to prevent this and the Stalinization of the USSR. Thus the silence of these parents towards their children can be understood in part because at one level the parents no longer possessed a coherent political analysis of what had occurred or why.

That participants, in some ways like their parents, did not want to know too much and had difficulty asking questions was unexpected. Even retaining the little information they gleaned or constructing any narrative about their families was problematic.

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Hass (1995, 27, 58) wrote of the scent of fear in the exile family and emphasized the difficulty the second generation have in breaking open the parents’ silence. The child did not want to increase the parents’ agony and did not ask (Hass 1995, 139). Many of the participants talked about understanding the often-unspoken cues from parents and knowing where not to tread. Hass found that the second generation themselves were in a state of denial, many not wanting to talk about the Holocaust (140–43). Rosenthal et al. (1998, 87–89) too address how the second generation keep silent, talking of how the second generation may cling to the families’ constructed myths and avoid specific questions. Listening may just be too painful. It is not coincidence that the participants were all middle-aged or older, and our parents were either dead or very old, and that we were only able to find out about our grandparents in our forties and fifties, and for Tom and Robert and me, in our sixties. It had taken most of the participants most of their lives to push open a window onto their pasts, and, as Hass (1995, 137, 142) confirms, it is at moments of emotional crisis that children and parents are more likely to speak. Our role in and responsibility for our parents’ silence was an area of dispute. At least some interviewed felt they should have tried harder to get the answers to their questions and not be put off by their parents’ silences and sighs, a position of ‘collusion’ and responsibility that other participants rejected, refusing to take on this particular guilt. Peter was one of several participants who gave voice to why we did not raise questions. Peter emphasized that finding out the details of his paternal grandparents’ deaths would be hard and not bring them any closer to him and that he feared the pain it could cause him. I don’t know how far that [finding out about his grandparents] can go. Not just because sources of information would be very hard—my father is dead. Because there is a level of vulnerability on my part that I don’t know if I can get beyond. . . . I guess we all have our thresholds, what we can cope with about the Holocaust.

Nevertheless, Peter added: ‘My brother has asked me whether I want to find out [exactly when and how his grandparents died]. But I don’t feel the need. All the pain connected with the Holocaust . . . I’m not just going to beat myself up. I need to see it’s something useful to do.’ Peter did not see his not searching for his grandparents as a reason for guilt. Knowing the minutiae of their deaths would not increase his understanding of them. ‘What do I know of my grandparents? The fact that they died in their forties looms as the one large fact about their lives. Everything else I

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know is only tiny, utterly shadowed by that. They are not positive qualities about them.’ He explained the texture of his father’s silence in a way that will be familiar to many of us who learned quickly, without ever being told, not to ask. Whatever sentences he [his father] uttered about the past, he said in a way which made you feel he did not want to continue. That really, really discouraged you, however much you have wanted to try to take him to those zones, if you are met with such a curt answer, if you look at the body language of somebody who really seems to be is saying to you, ‘I don’t want to go there’, given the power relationship between parent and child, it is very, very hard to go there.

Peter subsequently elaborated on the impossibility of gaining access to his father’s secrets. As he explained: ‘It’s perhaps my own inability to cope with this private side [of my father] that is so painful. I wanted to be let in, but, of course, I couldn’t be. That’s my naivety that anybody could go there.’ Later on in the interview, it became clear how closely Peter identified with his father’s responses. I wonder if at some level I’ve just always been horrified at what it must have been like to learn what my father learnt in 1945. . . . I don’t know whether that isn’t worse than what my grandparents experienced in the gas chamber. I can’t get my head round what it was like to discover that about your parents, and all the rest of your family had disappeared in that way.

Similarly, when I asked one of the women whose transcripts are not included whether she wanted to know more about what had happened to her grandparents, about whom she appeared to know particularly little, she said, ‘A concentration camp is a concentration camp.’ This form of distancing may be a form of self-protection. Part of us, I propose, did not want to know. We too were afraid of the pain, the pain it would cause our parents and ourselves and afraid that hand-in-hand with knowledge would walk guilt: that the dead would demand of us that we remember them, that we rescue them. At the same time, Peter, among others, said the absence of memories and of stories left him without a past. One interpretation of the silence of our parents was that it was a way of protecting themselves; whether this was healthy or not, it is not for us to condemn them for that, while recognizing how hard their silence has also been on us. I find it hard to write that. I know too much about growing up in ‘silence’, and, if push came to shove, being told lies. My parents, I am sure, felt they were

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protecting me, but in practice, it felt as if I never knew what was real, as if there were ghosts dancing on the head of every pin. There was disparity over the issue of the participants’ responsibility for not upsetting their parents. Asked whether he felt in some way responsible for protecting his father, Mike replied: ‘Protecting him from the pain of reliving his past or his losses? Absolutely.’ Mike poignantly described the difficulty of asking his father questions and also highlighted how precarious is the line we second-generation children tread: I have been trying to find out when they [his father’s family] went to Terezin and when they left [to Auschwitz]. I spent years trying to find out. I wasn’t going to get that detail from Dad. I felt that he was too vulnerable to ‘open up’ in that area. If he wasn’t going to volunteer to open up, I wasn’t going to go there. . . .

Mike said he wanted to protect his father from the pain of going over his past. Indeed, there is some very limited psychological literature about ‘parentification’, when the child/adolescent becomes the parent to their parents among immigrant families (Titzmann 2012, n.p.). 3 Robert insisted on his own culpability for his parents’ silence and ended up feeling that he was protecting his parents. What Robert was acutely aware of was that he had stopped asking questions, to the point he felt that his parents—erroneously—thought he was not interested in what had happened to them. So he felt himself to be somehow culpable for his parents’ failure to tell him about the past. He returned to this repeatedly in the interview. My mother destroyed everything soon before she died. I suspect ‘because Bobby didn’t make enquires. Bobby wasn’t interested.’ . . . She must have destroyed things shortly before she died. My father had a number of things. I have nothing. . . . ‘Bobby isn’t interested. Our younger children are not interested.’

Towards the end, Robert linked his parents’ silence to his own state of being. Here, he is imagining what his parents would have said: They would say, ‘You never asked.’ I know that’s what they would have said. . . . And that’s right. That’s the nature of it. Adults have more responsibility than children. But adults are damaged. How damaged they were. . . . They probably thought because I was not showing anything, that I was OK. . . . I never asked her anything. I fought my mother to the bitter end.

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The most significant ‘point of contact’ he seems to have had with his mother as a child/young person were their ferocious rows over Israel. Robert was the most explicit about finding his mother, as a child, almost unbearably overprotective. But the older Robert felt he had misunderstood his mother, perceiving her as she would have been if so much tragedy had not befallen her. He appeared to deeply regret the limited relationship he had had with her. Peter took the contrary position to Robert on the issue of complicity: The concept of complicity and silence—it does make me quite angry. Because there is such a power relationship involved between parents and children. There are such established patterns. If some sort of authority figure gives out the message that they do not want to go into that space, that they feel desperately vulnerable, then I think that in the moral sense you are not in the sphere of complicity. Maybe later in adulthood the moral balance changes. Certainly, though I would have wanted to know far more about my father’s past, certainly from the time of adolescence, it felt impossible to ask.

Mike was the only person who talked about the loss of his name, although this is an issue that regularly crops up in second-generation circles. I will let him speak for himself: In my family, the first secret kept from me was my name. When my mum died, when I was eighteen, I found my birth certificate in my mother’s cabinet. And I thought, ‘Who is this bloke?’ It said ‘Michael Buchbinder’. And my stepfather admitted it was my father’s surname. And he changed it when I was three [to Bor]. It ‘sounded too German’, I was informed. British people, being a bit insular, didn’t like Germanic-sounding names. That shattered me. Why haven’t I been told? Nobody talked about these things. My mother was ashamed of her mental illness; she was ashamed about her past. . . I once said to my father, ‘I feel like honouring my name’, and he said, ‘Bor is your family name.’ He was pretty hurt by that. I was stabbing him. Anyway, I’m glad I found out my real family name [Buchbinder], otherwise I wouldn’t have known, when looking up at that commemorative wall in the Jewish cemetery in Prague, that ‘That’s my family there. Those are my relatives.’ Who would have told me? I think that’s the trouble, trying to work out why don’t people tell me the truth. And you know they are bloody lying. It’s almost so ingrained, I don’t believe a thing.

I am going to end this section with reference to a particular mode of early primary socialization, fashionable in the late 1940s and 1950s: the

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child-rearing practice referred to as the Truby King method of feeding. The baby was only to be picked up at set intervals, whether or not the baby cried. This would teach the child who was master and had the added advantage of teaching deferred gratification. I suggest that the Truby King method will have complimented the young second-generation child’s sense of not being looked after; it would have had a deeper effect than when practiced on many other babies. In my case, my mother told me, the intervals were of four hours. To quote from my interview: My father was apparently very Victorian from the very beginning. Amazingly, my mother has actually told me this. . . . The Truby King . . . four-hour thing—apparently my father was absolutely adamant about it. My mother told me this. In the years before she died. She actually said to me how sorry she was that when I cried, she didn’t pick me up. So when I cried, I was left to cry. Put outside. They had use of a garden. So I was put outside and left to scream. Though I imagine I would have learnt quickly, so I stopped screaming when I realized it had no effect. And one wonders how far that failure to receive comfort, reassurance, didn’t help.

Tom said to me outside of the interview, in relation to Truby King’s prohibition on picking up the child between four-hour feeds, ‘I felt as if I was left at the bottom of the garden and could cry for hours and nobody would come. I learnt quickly the futility of crying.’ The baby learnt that its needs would not be met, its anger not responded to. The dead pass through locked psychological doors to hammer on the consciousness of the living. The murder of my mother’s sister and father haunted me as my mother lay dying. As I said in my interview: ‘[I felt] I had to be there for her [when my mother was dying]—which I wasn’t— because nobody had been there for anybody else [in Nazi Germany].’ I had to show my mother that she was not alone, that the Nazis had not won. But my mother died the only time I could not be reached. Isaac, finding the records of where different members of his murdered family had lived in Berlin, began a pilgrimage to visit all their homes. Walking down Gervinerstrasse, where his aunt had lived, Isaac said her two children, Gert and Fred—twelve and nine at the time of their deaths—came running excitedly towards him from their house at No. 24 to greet their unknown cousin. They were alive, Isaac told me, as any child, and he wept. For the second generation, ‘not knowing’ is not a matter of turning one’s head from what was once known, but of discovering what was never known. It takes a long time before we, the British second generation, feel able to understand what we want to know and to realize we have a right to such knowledge and hunt for the seeds of knowing. I suspect

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that any of the participants, if asked why they had not tried harder to find out more, would have spoken of the pain, even agony, endured in finding their dead.

PARENT AND POSTSCRIPT I had not anticipated to what degree the participants would find it difficult to talk about how they saw their parents as having influenced them. When my mother, in a demeaning tone, said to me, ‘We are history, you are the postscript’, I burnt with inchoate rage. She had welded truth to put-down. Nazism consumed Europe, killed our grandparents and made exiles of our parents. This was the history that turned us into ‘postscripts’. We were displaced before we were born. History pursues us even as we grow old. The participants did not generally present themselves as having been brought up in a stable, caring family, though some took care to also be positive about their parents. Indeed, what stands out from this section is how melancholy many of us seemed to be as children and adolescents and how uneasy many—though not all—of us continued to feel, even once grown up, and in particular about our mothers. Much has been written, detailed in part 1, on the tendency to both overprotection and aloofness of camp survivor parents towards their children and how the child’s response varied from anger to withdrawal. Despite the specificity of the British second generation, many of the testimonials here suggest overlapping reactions: a profound concern for haunted or troubled parents alongside a resistance to parents’ desperate overprotectiveness. But other major themes also occur in the testimonies: the frequency with which parents’ damaged relationships impacted the participants; the emotional isolation of the ‘children’, both within the family but also outside it; the impact of our parents’ emotional anxiety and the all-too-frequent depression of our mothers, of whom we frequently expressed a dislike. What unexpectedly emerged was how affected the second-generation participants were by their parents’ relationships. There appeared to be a more frequent incidence of disharmony between the participants’ parents than one would normally expect, although, except for Mike’s parents, they stayed together until death. Indeed, some of the literature on the first-generation exiles suggests a relative frequency of unhappy marriages. One suggestion that came up a few times in the interviews was that marriages between our parents took place because of the need to flee and that these relationships would not have lasted had it not been for Nazism and the war.

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Another possibility is that the nature of exile, of having to start all over again, became an additional factor in creating tension between the parents in some of the participants’ families. As many old films expose, men who came back from the war were not always the easiest to live with; no more, one can guess, would be some of these haunted refugees. My father wrote a letter to the Home Office defending my mother’s adultery; he said that his experiences of fleeing for his life had left him unable to be lived with. Moreover, some of the respondents’ fathers had married British women, which created a possible unevenness of experience. Such tensions may be a feature of many exiled families. Tom’s mother had been an active socialist in Austria but settled here to a traditional domesticity, which made her angry and resentful. Tom stated: My mother said if it hadn’t been for the Anschluss, they probably wouldn’t have got married. They would have had an affair, a good affair. They married because she couldn’t get out. . . . Since my father was definitely going to leave . . . Had they been able to travel without getting married, they might very well have done so.

He added, ‘They had a good marriage in lots of respects . . . From my point of view, they worked very hard at creating a good, strong family.’ Robert was explicit: ‘These refugees got together and married people they wouldn’t normally have associated with.’ I don’t think my father and mother would, under most circumstances, would have got together. My mother would have wanted some fun-loving man. Sure, my father was very good looking. So was my mother. . . My mother and father had a very difficult relationship. They fought all the time. My bedroom was above the kitchen. I don’t know why they fought.

One point of tension, however, was that Robert’s father did not want his wife going out to work. Henry, whose parents had married in Hungary, where there appear to have been problems from the start, was also keenly aware of how bad the relationship between his parents was and described some of its effects on him: I suspect they got married when I was on the way already. It was very tight. . . . No, I never asked. It would have been a good question, except that they didn’t get on. They quarrelled ferociously throughout. My father

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left my mother and took me with him when I was about three or four. They came back together. I’m sure they weren’t going to get married but for the war. I’ve always thought. They’d separated before the war. Then they came together in that emotional situation. But they knew they weren’t suitable for each other. . . . But they never split up. . . . They reconciled, as it were, and stayed together in an unhappy way. . . . When I was three or four, my father and mother quarrelled all the time. My father was quiet, didn’t shout; my mother was very hot tempered. My mother shouted at me a lot and hit me a lot. My father thought I was being mistreated. . . . So he took me away. We went to live with the [father’s] younger brother, who by this time was very rich. And we lived in his house in luxury for six months. And I asked [about his mother] and was told she’d gone back to Hungary to see her family and would be back in ninety-nine days.

Sarah described a scene that she presented as fairly typical: ‘My mother burnt the giblet soup, and he [her father] went into the kitchen and took the goose out of the oven and threw it.’ Tom, who thinks his mother would have become an academic if she had not had to flee, described his father’s attitude to his mother resuming her studies in the UK: ‘“I’m not going to put myself out for you to get a degree.” So effectively vetoing a degree. He did work very hard. Part of the marital contract was that supper was on the table at seven in the evening.’ Peter articulated the complex interplay between the parents’ relationship and his own feelings. Peter saw himself as needing to protect his parents, partly because of their fractious relationship. Both my parents were extremely emotionally needy, arguably for different reasons; my father because of his vulnerability, because of his loss and being a refugee, wanting the world to be predictable and under his control. Also because of the huge problems there were in their marriage. It was very difficult for them to support each other. There was such tension between them, of a classic kind. It was very hard for them to talk to each other, leaving both of them with emotional needs. There was such a void in the way my father communicated with my mother. . . . All kinds of aspects of their parenting were excellent. They gave themselves in all sorts of ways. They didn’t think it mattered that they themselves didn’t get on. It was an impossible environment for me to be around because it was so poisoned. So there’s the legacy of that, and I can’t get beyond the anger that involves.

Peter highlighted the link between exile and his father’s behaviour.

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My father’s own need to feel he had some control over his life, some security, exacerbated the sexism of my parents’ marriage. This generated huge tension and what seemed like a quasi-permanent mood of brooding anger on my mother’s part. This I found awful to be around and led to my withdrawing, in some ways, into myself.

This need by the man/father to exert an authority within the private domain of the family which had been damaged or lost in the outside world will reappear in the next section on ‘Us’. The tensions between parents are likely to have exacerbated the child’s sense of insecurity and the desire to put things right. Mike’s parents had divorced when he was very little. What was noticeable was that, although he had essentially been brought up by his mother, he appeared more attached to his father. He had felt a deep—and, for a child—inappropriate—responsibility for his mentally ill mother, who committed suicide when he was eighteen. Though he had seen little of his father until he went to university, Mike saw him as a man with many positive qualities. Mike made no explicit connection between his parents’ experiences and his own. Henry said: ‘I do remember asking my father how he had emotionally survived given the knowledge that his family had died, and he said I’d been born very soon after and it was only because I was there that he wanted to survive.’ I asked him whether he ever felt he shouldn’t have been born? He answered: It is true. I later began to think, for all the fact that they [his parents] said I was the only reason for them to stay alive, that they wished I hadn’t been born. I had a daymare rather than nightmare. I used to imagine that I’d come home from school. And a stranger would come to the door and say, ‘Yes. What do you want?’ And I’d say, ‘This is where I live.’ And he’d say, ‘I don’t know you.’ My parents had gone away. They hadn’t really wanted me. I was a burden in the end. Maybe a burden because I made them live.

In some cases, the child felt the parent was being overprotective, though the effect on the child could arguably be similar to the parent themselves requiring protection. Our parents’ experiences left many of us with a level of anxiety that our parents would not have faced from their own parents and also distinguished us from how our peers were brought up. Like so many interviewed, Tom found his parents, but especially his father, overprotective. Tom connected this to the issue of Englishness, or rather its absence. Before Tom, aged about seventeen, could go on a cycling trip abroad, his father had laid down a series of rules.

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My father was very worried, but he didn’t say I shouldn’t go. But he gave me a little green bag which I had to hang around my neck on my chest to contain my passport and travellers cheques, and I was on no account to take it off, except when I went into the water. And then I was to put it back afterwards straightaway. I was to ring him every week, let’s say on a Saturday. Phoning him at the time was hard. You had to book it a day before. You had to wait for nine different operators to all synchronize their watches. It took up a morning, and I didn’t want to spend that time to say, ‘Hullo, I’m fine. Goodbye.’ I remember thinking at that time, ‘This man is overprotective like crazy.’ In retrospect, I quite sympathize with him. Here is a boy, seventeen years old, who knows nothing about the world, who is travelling through Europe. You can run it anyway you like. But anyway, it’s not an English way of behaving. An English way would have been, ‘Go off. See you at the end of the summer.’

Robert too, when a child, had felt his mother to be overprotective. His comments also suggest a less-than-equal relationship, lacking harmony, between his parents. She was a very affectionate woman. Overly affectionate. I found it suffocating, but when I now I think about it, I think she was just a normal woman, perhaps a little bit more protective because of her experiences. It would irritate me when she said, ‘Your hair is out of order’, and she would lick her hanky and wipe my face, and I’d think, ‘Aaa’. That’s the sort of thing that is always happening to children. But I’d interpret it in a different context and magnify it out of proportion.

Later in the interview, he developed on this: ‘My mother always wanted me to do things I didn’t want to. She was a very intrusive woman.’ Robert said: ‘My mother wanted me to do things her way. Wanted me to be respectable. “When are you going to become a professor? Why are you a socialist? You spit on your uncle’s grave by criticizing the state of Israel. You join CND. You marry.”’ In my parents’ case, a particularly acute level of paranoia and overprotectiveness had fused. To quote from my interview: In terms of my parents’ paranoia, and you know, they really had a double dose of paranoia. . . . I wasn’t allowed to have friends . . . I wasn’t allowed to have girlfriends; I wasn’t allowed to have boyfriends. That world, that little cut-off world, absolutely edged with paranoia, obviously affected me, and, you know, did not increase my sense of self-worth’. Such was their level of anxiety that when I was sixteen they both blocked my exit through the front door so I could not go out to meet friends one Saturday evening.

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Later on, I tried to introduce my boyfriend, R., to them. The following is from my interview: He [R.] met my parents, and they were just terrible to him. Terrible to him. They threw him out of the house, apart from anything else. They wouldn’t let me have anything to do with him. . . . Then they had to meet R. again. They thought he was a spy. [My mother said,] ‘Why would he go out with you? The only reason he would go out with you is to spy on us’. . . . This is after we had been going out for about three years. [I said,] ‘That’s so stupid’. She was absolutely insistent. I remember thinking she’s off her head. Umm. ‘Who’s he spying for?’ [I asked]. She said it made no difference who he was spying for.

This level of protective intervention and paranoia affected me deeply. As I said in the interview: ‘I was influenced by that. I let that get to me. . . . There was always this voice in my head which said, “You shouldn’t be going out with him. You shouldn’t be going out with him.”’ Isaac linked his mother’s overprotectiveness to his homosexuality and asserted that there was a higher level of homosexuality [Isaac’s word] among the male children of German Jewish refugees than the norm because of the boy-child’s need to be ‘there’ for their loving but needy mother. This is how he felt, something, he said, researchers had not yet examined. As far as I know, Isaac was the only gay or bisexual person I interviewed, and further exploration of how often ‘nonstraight’ sexuality is expressed among the second generation would be interesting. Isaac said that he had had heterosexual feelings towards girls until he was ten or eleven. His mother was still cuddling him regularly on her lap at that age, and he was aware she wanted to go on doing so. Her behaviour had an overriding impact on his perception of himself; he was kept infantilized and developed a fetish about wearing short trousers. Isaac mused on whether he otherwise would have been homosexual. He said that at the time he had not understood that his mother’s extreme behaviour was a response to the murder of her entire family—she was the only person who had got out, and Isaac was her only child. Like others among us, he was also not allowed friends; in addition, he was torn between his secular state schools, which he identified with, and the Jewish ‘Sunday schools’ his nonreligious parents insisted he attend and which he hated. He was he said a lonely child, which he linked directly to his parents’, but particularly his mother’s, overprotectiveness. One response to both parents’ neediness and attempts to control was anger. Anger, as in Peter’s case, acted as a block between child and parent. Peter said:

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She’s [his mother] quite happy to ask people to run around and rescue her in every conceivable situation now in the way that my father rescued her. The idea that I might not be happy to do this, not to relate to her as an adult, never occurred to her, so I’m now cast in the role of undutiful son. I’ve had some good phases with both of them, but they had a tendency to make judgements about what I did or didn’t do, which were extremely negative. This was just because they had no analytical ability to see they were so emotionally needy, and they were constantly making demands on me that were constantly unnegotiated. . . . My mother’s constant anger. I can’t unthink the element of anger which was omnipresent and the need [for me] to let this out in some form. . . . Because I had identified with my father and his sense of vulnerability. . . . I don’t visit my mother all that often now, although she’s eightyfour and is in some ways quite frail, because I can’t cope with it because it evokes anger.

Yet Peter’s testimony was unusual in talking about his mother’s—and his own—anger. Many children find it difficult to be angry with their parents, but in our case, showing our parents anger was more dangerous. Our families were already, in general, isolated, us children lonely. To take on our emotionally unresponsive parents was to fear that you would destroy the only people you cared about and who cared about you. There was, moreover, a functional futility to expressing anger because the cause of the anger was unlikely to be discussed or resolved. Though again extreme, my parents would walk out if I expressed annoyance or, in a couple of cases, reply by letter. The refugees’ place in 1940s and 1950s British society encouraged our parents to become invisible; they wanted to be tolerated. Anger is explosive; it draws attention to itself and to you. The expression of anger, it was perceived, could lead to the parent or child becoming the object of manifested, rather than latent, contempt, which the refugee parent in Britain so feared. Remember that advice not to talk in German in public, or if essential, to do so quietly. That is what we second-generation children absorbed. Thus our difficulties in expressing anger, though this was not a feature common to all of the recipients, may also be a way of protecting ourselves against further opprobrium. I am going to draw on my own interview. I was talking about the first time I confronted my mother regarding her habit of showing her disapproval of me by refusing to talk to me for hours or days on end:

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It had taken me a very long time to pluck up the courage. Anger wasn’t allowed in our house. There was never any expression of anger. In fact, emotion wasn’t allowed in our house. . . . I don’t know if it was after that [the first time I shouted at my mother] that my father said to me, ‘You must never talk to your mother like that again.’ . . . [I argued back] And then he wrote me a letter. Wrote a letter! . . . And he said in his letter, ‘If you ever talk to me like that again, you will kill me.’

It took me a long time before I realized how few of the participants had expressed anger—either at the Nazis for killing their families or at our parents for saving their own lives and leaving their parents to die. Nor, generally, had they described their parents as angry. But before dismissing or pathologizing our parents’ shutting down anger, consider this response as a coping mechanism by parents who had to learn to cope with unimaginable levels of uncertainty and to keep everything together when all else had fallen apart. But it did leave us, the British second generation, or a significant slice of it, frightened of anger. We never learnt that on the other side of anger is resolution. We never developed an easy ability to stand up for ourselves if we feared that we could get angry or that another would get angry with us. Anger was not an expected or accepted emotion. Instead, the dominant discourse in the testimonials is of loss that can never be healed, of grief that can never be stilled. To break down the official quiescence about Nazism’s crimes with which we all grew up, to prize open the paradigm that we should forget, maybe a touch of collective anger would have been useful. An alternative response to the anger of a parent was articulated by a second-generation friend: withdrawal. His mother, who had lost almost everybody, was unpredictably either depressed or angry. He developed a world of which his parents had no part: an interest in birds that took him into an outside world where he made friends and met his friends’ parents, who provided him with a domain beyond his family. Withdrawal was also referred to by Peter, who withdrew into his bedroom and himself rather than into outside activities. Another word that hardly anybody used was death. Robert, with the many tragedies in his family’s past, made a link between the past and his ever-present sense of death. He talked extensively about his overwhelming awareness of death and about those whom he had known who had already died and his fear that people he knew would die. He talked of his own death with a deceptive lightness. ‘I’ve sort of always lived with death’, he said. The loss in his past suggested the loss of a sense of a future.

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One pattern that I had not predicted was that I learnt more about the fathers than the mothers; I learnt to become increasingly insistent in asking about the mothers. This paternal focus varied from Sarah at the one extreme to Tania at the other. Tania was one of the two people who had a mother who had been politically active, indeed as active as her father, and whose mother, therefore, had held a ‘public’ role, which Tania talked about. Tom also talked as much about his mother, and, in his case too, his mother had been political in Austria, more so than his father. Sarah’s concern, on the other hand, was largely with her father. It can only be conjecture, but maybe women who were active socialists were then more likely to retain an authority in the home, even if, as was the case for Tom, a traditional role division between the mother and the father developed in Britain. Moreover, the participants felt differently about their mothers and fathers. Henry, who saw his parents’ marriage as an unhappy one, was clear that there was an ‘asymmetrical’ relationship between him and his parents where he identified strongly with his father, a position his mother encouraged, although, Henry said, his father had removed him from his mother because she beat him. Robert, whose parents also did not get on, when young had disliked his mother and had fought her ‘to the bitter end’; he also felt her to be so overprotective that all he wanted was to escape her grasp. Slowly he had realized how damaged she was. One of the women interviewed said she adored her father, though found the need to clarify that by adding that she didn’t mean sexually. She said that she felt she had to stay alive and well because her father could not survive if she died or if anything serious happened to her. ‘That would kill him’, she said. The emotional impact of his father’s suffering affected Peter deeply. Peter said he had very strongly identified with his father and wanted to protect him, although his father also hit him. ‘But when it is your family [that have all perished], I cannot get inside what that must have been like for my father. There’s some kind of black hole in me, trying to empathize with what that was about, and I couldn’t rescue my father from that. There was nothing I could do.’ Peter said: I felt I had to rescue my father at an emotional level. I think I felt I didn’t have permission just to think about myself, my own needs, my own psychological difficulties. Keeping him afloat felt a duty. I suppose that I internalized some of his need to be protected and my not having a right that the level of emotional difficulty could never be comparable to that his or his parents had experienced.

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Peter recognized his relationship was not as good with his mother: ‘Perhaps because the day-to-day conflicts were with my mother as she was basically bringing us up.’ He said of his mother: ‘My mother didn’t in any way kick against it [his father’s bullying of him]. She didn’t try to oppose it.’ Judith (see page 85), who had not had an easy relationship with her mother, felt her mother had expected her to always make everything all right for her. She said her task from when she was really young was to compensate her mother for all the trauma and loss she had been through. She found her mother’s demands unreasonable from a young age. She said, ‘I’m sorry to say that I felt relief when she died.’ The participants’ tone about their mothers was regularly disparaging: overpossessive (Robert); always critical (Sarah); self-obsessed (Judith); volatile and shouted, hit, screamed (Henry). Similar words and emotions were not attached to the fathers. The general preference for fathers among the participants could also have been a product of the time, but I suspect that what is also spilling out within the ideological context of that period is that the children saw their mothers more as the ones who were unable to maintain the emotional balance within the family and blamed them for it. Certainly Glassman (2013, 225) argues there is a more intense attachment by the daughter to the mother. Tom, on the other hand, described both his parents as being mothers, and, unusually, fought with his father and not with his mother. Maybe the distress and disturbance of exile and the death of close relatives had a more obvious effect on the mother’s relationship with the child because it was the mother who was the main provider of emotional sustenance to the child, and this ability becomes more damaged by ‘trauma’ than the man’s ability to play the traditional father role. While I was doing these interviews, I happened to have a conversation with a woman whose parents had fled the Nazis and who had ended up being fostered in the UK; much of the rest of her family—her siblings, aunts and uncles— were all murdered. When I asked how it had affected her, her reply was instructive. She said that nothing ever seemed real, that she had been cut off, even from her own children. Certainly, many of the mothers come across as depressed and/or unusually anxious. Mike’s mother committed suicide. Sarah’s mother was in and out of mental hospitals. None of this is surprising. Tom’s mother, and indeed my mother, had been going to become academics. Instead they ended up responsible for ‘Kinder und Kuche’. Almost none of these mothers had any kind of family network or even friends to help or advise them with the newborn child. Many of the mothers, such as Tom’s, appear to have been extremely lonely. English-born wives had to cope with troubled husbands who had fled for their lives, or worse. Isaac told me

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that his German-born mother was so anxious and depressed that she believed that her husband, Isaac’s father, was always having affairs and repeatedly and heatedly accused the father of this in front of their son. Isaac felt sympathy for his father, who could never persuade his wife of his fidelity. Robert’s and Tania’s mothers were both seen by their children lamenting their dead. Many relationships were not harmonious, and it was generally the mother who had to try to hold the family together, although Henry’s case was an exception. There is a discontinuity in family and ‘professional’ structures and processes that had more of an impacted on the women than it did on the men, though evidently the men also had cause for depression. It is, therefore, not simply a product of ‘gendered’ assumptions that the children/participants accused their mothers of being emotionally inaccessible and unresponsive. Yet some of the respondents found criticizing their mothers to be unbearable. As Glassman (2013, 228) argues, second-generation daughters often wish to avoid conflict of any kind. Three out of the five women respondents refused me permission to publish their testimonials because they had been negative about or hinted at criticisms of their mothers. On the other hand, the man who did not want his testimonial included did so because he wanted more on his parents, not because he wanted material excluded. Maybe the identification of daughters with their mothers is so close that criticism of the mother becomes like failing them and, therefore, ourselves. To upset the mothers feels like killing them, when our job is to keep them alive. Or maybe it was that the participants themselves could not cope with the realization of what they felt about their mothers. Glassman (2013, 236) indicates a correlation between the daughter finding separation from the mother particularly difficult and—consequently—being a lower achiever, a correlation borne out here. Most of the respondents did not present themselves as coping well with troubled parents. Many of the participants felt a high, oppressive level of responsibility for their parents. As Peter matured, his withdrawal into himself increasingly turned into anger. Robert also expressed ‘guilt’: he felt that his silences and his failure to press for more information from his parents were interpreted by them as his not wanting to know. He came to feel a terrible sense of responsibility because ‘I wasn’t told because I didn’t ask.’ Henry too had taken on responsibility for his parents’ suffering. ‘It is true. I later began to think, for all the fact that they said I was the only reason for them to stay alive, that they wished I hadn’t been born.’ Even when the ‘children’ did have a relatively harmonious relationship with their parent(s), the impression was that this had been hard earned and had generally developed when the ‘child’ had themselves become quite mature. When the parents’ relationship was not harmoni-

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ous, there was a sense of greater responsibility towards them, even though their neediness on occasions upset and annoyed us. Sometimes, the remoteness between the parents caused the child fear. Children felt their needs were not being met. Many were close to their parent(s), yet at the same time there is a tension here with the resentment we appear to often feel towards them. Such is the legacy of exile. Moreover, responsibility for carrying the past impacted what we felt we could allow ourselves to do. Peter said: There was a mass of survivor guilt on my part. From my early teens, I felt I had a duty, not a very precise one, that I had to live life well. I could not justify life being trivial. I could not justify living in a way that did not have a clear social purpose, rescue the world at some level. It didn’t seem particularly important what form that would take. There was not permission just to be a child. Just to live. I had problems watching comedy programmes, and I think that as much as anything else has not caused me deep, deep problems through life. . . . I did see it as my responsibility to try to help them [his parents], to support them emotionally. . . . I’m not trying to suggest that the Holocaust is the only thing that defines me, but it clearly had an impact, but still in these kinds of very practical interpersonal ways, its legacy is still in some ways eating away at me in that very personal way.

It is not possible to disentangle the effect of some of the participants having a British mother and an exile father. John, with his Austrian father and his academic and British mother, the carer, did appear to feel a security and a sense of self-worth in who he was that was not as evident in some other participants. Peter saw his mother’s Englishness as ‘stabilizing’ because his mother had ‘a sense of rootedness, and that in some way gave me a sense of rootedness. . . . Part of me is rooted here.’ Peter highlighted the contradictions of growing up with an English mother and Hungarian father, another marriage where there were acute tensions and where the mother was in ‘a quasi-permanent mood of brooding anger’. There was, again, a clearly segregated role relationship between his parents; his father dominated and also ‘not infrequently’ hit Peter, which Peter explained in terms of ‘my father’s desperate need to be in control, because of my father’s own insecurities’. Yet his mother does not appear to have been able to stop the father from hitting their son or to protest his doing so and did not act as a counterweight to her husband, a result Peter said, both of the expectations of the age, but also of the insecurities of exile. Neither parent appears to have protected the child. What runs through this story is that it was because Peter’s father was an exile and his family was murdered that Peter felt the need to protect his father and

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sided with him. The safety of the mother’s English background did not act to counter his father, but it did allow Peter to side with him. The impact of his parents’ relationship on Peter left him unhappy and wanting to withdraw into himself. Another variable is whether the refugee parents had other family or friends from their country of origin at hand. Sarah was one of the only people who gave the impression that people came in and out of her family home. Sarah’s parents’ home had a stream of interesting political exiles gathering there whom her father had known back in Germany. But no other participant suggested such a network. Most refugees had arrived here without other members of their families. But many of the participants’ parents did not appear to belong in any organic sense to an organized community, Jewish or otherwise, with which they might have developed a sense of having soul mates and of solidarity and which might have lessened their sense of ‘nonbeing’. It is likely this was more the case outside London, for example, Peter’s parents in Leamington Spa, or mine in Durham. But isolation could also feature in London. Tom talked about his mother. She told this story, horrific really. . . . There was a bombing raid in the middle of the day . . . and she went down into the shelter, and there were other people from the same building, and they talked to her. And she thought, ‘Oh, they know I exist.’ They’d never said a word to her. She’d been living in this building for about a year. Invisible woman. Then the raid was over, and they never talked to her again. She was reinvisibilized. She must have been very lonely, perhaps very largely preoccupied by the fate of her parents, which turned out to be more awful than she could know at the time. She’s handled this by taking the edge of emotions. In English it would be ‘Let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill.’

In addition, the effect on the second generation of being born to parents who were still ‘aliens’ may depend very much on exactly which year the child was born and whether the parents had by then ‘settled’ in the UK. The baby born in 1938 to refugee parents will have had different experiences from the second-generation child born in 1948. Most refugee couples knew by the end of the war that the UK was their new home, even if that had not been their original intention; they had probably been naturalized and would have felt a greater security than in the prewar days when almost all had only temporary visas. The threat—and in my parents’ case, reality—of internment, had faded by 1941. The hope of there being family left to return to was slipping away. The fathers would have found jobs, and the children would not have gone to school during a war when the Germans were the enemy and many school children could not

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distinguish one foreigner from another. The child born after the war may well have absorbed less of a sense of impermanence or fear. Although nobody growing up in Middle Europe during the time of the First World War and before the next war can have had an easy time: mass slaughter, followed by political instability in Germany and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not to mention the economic crisis of the 1920s. I suggest there is a contrast between the relative insecurity into which we were born and the relative security of our parents’ childhoods, who had a secure foundation at a personal level, were part of extended families that regularly met and celebrated together and generally saw themselves as members of a society. Moreover, the second-generation person who was born towards the end of the war or soon afterwards, at the very time that the names of the dead were starting to emerge, was more likely to be affected by our parents’ discoveries. In my case, if the dates of the letters can be relied upon, my parents found out about the death of my father’s adopted father, Hermann, in Theresienstadt, while my mother was pregnant, and about the death of her father and sister probably soon afterwards. As I said in my interview, in my first years, there was a filament of grief just running through everything. Henry also commented on how he was born at a time when his parents were finding out about who was dead, who was alive and how this cannot but have affected him. Our parents turned their eyes from the living to the dead. I did not ask, and my guess is the participants would not have known, at what point their parents realized they were in the UK permanently and that Britain had become their and their second-generation children’s home. In my parents’ case—and others who had fallen out with the German Communist Party (KPD) but were still on the left—I guess the decision was finally made for them by two intertwined but discrete factors. First, the Cold War had placed East Germany under a Stalinist system. They would both not have tolerated and been mortally afraid of living there—indeed my father refused an invitation by Brecht to work with him in the East Berlin theatre. Second, West Germany had come under the control of ex-Nazis and was within the American sphere of influence. There was no ‘going home’. By the end of the war, most refugee parents wanted to integrate into English society. By the end of the war, fathers such as Tom’s had made a new start in the UK: in Tom’s father’s case as an art dealer. So, as suggested earlier, most of the second generation were born into families for whom the UK was unquestionably their home. What distinguishes the refugees from Nazism from many other refugees worldwide is that mostly they did not want to return ‘home’. There was nobody and sometimes nowhere to go back to.

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Mike told of how his father briefly went back to Prague but discovered that his family had all been murdered. Mike said his father was the only person he knew of who even considered going back. Many, including people of a Social Democratic persuasion, would not have wanted to live under Stalinism. Mike’s father returned to the UK, which became their home. One difference that did emerge was that the two Political families, John’s and Tania’s, were the only families of the participants who successfully ‘went back’. Unlike the other left-inclined parents who had fled their countries of birth, John’s and Tania’s parents had a commitment to Communism in general, but also to the German Communist Party in particular, which gave them sufficient reason to uproot their families once again. John’s parents’ believed in building a new and, for them, hopefully socialist society in East Germany. In Tania’s parents’ case, they went to West Germany in the hope they would pick up with their old comrades and carry on the struggle. Tania’s parents subsequently became painfully aware of how non-de-Nazified West Germany was. John’s father, who had been closely associated with the left in Vienna and still believed that the destruction of capitalism would bring an end to anti-Semitism, came to see his Jewishness as important much later in life. But maybe, to an incalculable degree, those who returned to build a Communist or Social Democratic socialism were just more optimistic. Though not all Communist Party members left the UK to go ‘back’, many did: one reason for my difficulty in finding their children.

When I started this study, I was interested in how much having parents who had to flee because of their ideological position against Nazism would affect their children, my assumption being that these parents were making a choice, not being the ‘victims’ of Nazi choices. Literature already exists indicating that it was the Communists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses who were most likely to survive the concentration—not death—camps because they knew what they believed in and why they were there; and here I am ignoring Primo Levi’s famous dictum that ‘the good did not survive’. Would the second-generation children of P/political parents be in any way differently affected from those whose parents had principally fled because they were Jewish? One evident difference is that both of the children of KPD parents spent their adolescence in East and West Germany before deciding once they were young adults to return to Britain and make it their home. Consequently, both have a network of close friends and/or family in

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Germany and both are bilingual. They both shared their experiences with me without finding it problematic and appeared able to address and conceptualize what had happened to their families. John had a measured and fond attitude to both his parents, whom he saw as having given him different but equally valuable gifts. Tania too appeared to have had a less problematic relationship with her parents than some of the others. Both remained committed to left politics and took for granted forms of political involvement, such as going to demonstrations and various other forms of protest action. In Tania’s case, she consciously saw herself as following in her parents’ footsteps. Yet one must be wary. Tania, who saw herself as proudly carrying on her family’s political traditions, nevertheless had been told very little by her parents. One person I talked to during this research whose parents had been sympathetic to the KPD, far from celebrating her parents’ politics, insisted her father did not want it known that he came from a Communist, nevermind Jewish, background, and neither did she. What also interested me were attitudes to victimhood. The issue of victimhood in relation to parents is complex: at one level our parents were in reality the victims of Nazism, but the way the word is often used is to mean the adoption of victimhood as part of who one is, as an internal state of being. This distinction was expressed by one of the women whose testimonial is not included, who put to me in an e-mail: ‘As my mother escaped, she did not see herself as a victim nor indeed, as a survivor. My father sometimes referred to himself as a victim of fascism, [but this was] more to do with opposing fascism than being a “victim” with all its connotations.’ Other participants rejected the concept of victimhood in relation to their parents. Mike admired his father, who became briefly sympathetic to the CP, and spoke about his father’s refusal to see the past as an excuse for the future. He said of when he knew his father: What I’m proud of is his thinking through things, his intellectual abilities, his artistic talents, his determination, his survivalism, his ability to get on with things and not to dwell on the past. I’m the one who dwells on the past! He started a new life and career. I’m very proud of that. I don’t think he ever used the word victim. I think he saw post-’45 as a massive challenge. The whole thing before had been madness. He was a rationalist. To base anything upon whether your grandfather might have been Jewish, and therefore you might be stigmatized, seemed barmy to my dad.

Kitchen’s (2013, n.p.) analysis that resistance allowed the anti-Nazi to maintain a less-fractured self and a greater ability to reassemble the pieces appears apposite.

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Tania viewed her non-Jewish parents with admiration because of their political activities. They had chosen to act against Nazism out of principle, knowing that they were putting their lives at risk; indeed, both were arrested and her father tortured before they first fled to Czechoslovakia. Although Tania never explicitly stated that her parents were not victims, it was the timbre of her testimonial. In a subsequent e-mail to me, she made the following point: ‘Many in the second generation feel sorry for their parents and want to make amends. . . . If you see your parents as victims, you feel sorry for them, if . . . you see them as heroes, you feel proud of them.’ Although at Second Generation meetings, victim was regularly applied to our parents, the only participant to use the concept of victim in relation to a parent was Robert, but that was about his father in a work situation in Britain, and I did not discover what the resonance of this word meant for him. At the same time what distinguishes the testimonials is the absence of pride in their parents expressed by some of the participants. One irony is that we were all the children of people who had enough awareness and courage to become exiles. Even if there was money, which often there was not, this takes spirit and determination. At one Second Generation discussion where I had made a comment about my parents, a woman suddenly said, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are to feel proud of your parents,’ to which there was much nodding of heads around the table. I surmise that many in the second generation do not take pride in their parents’ bravery and survival because they have absorbed a sense of their parents’ guilt at having survived. So, although the concept of victim was not used explicitly or implicitly by the participants about their parents, the absence of appreciation lends itself to the interpretation that they saw their parents as less than adequate. Thus our parents’ politics do appear to impact how we perceive them. There was a continuum, not a division, between parents who fled for Political, political or anti-Semitic reasons. At the one end are the people whose parents were Jewish, who only fled as Jews; at the other end is Tania, whose parents had fled entirely for Political reasons. In between were the parents of all the other people I interviewed. There is an underlying question as to why so many of the participants’ parents were, unexpectedly, political. There is, as detailed in part 1, little evidence on how many refugees who entered the UK, whatever their official reason, did so, either principally or partially, for political reasons. Though I am not aiming for representation, nevertheless there is a question as to how far this study illustrates a more general experience. Such a frequency of left-wing parents as emerges here may seem unlikely today. But these parents were young at the time of the growth of Nazism and when Germany started its march through Europe. It appeared to many at

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the time that it was Communism, or sometimes Social Democracy, that offered a hope, an alternative. Another reason for the frequency of political parents among the sample was that nonpolitical Jewish families may well have been less likely to flee. In Germany and later in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, many Jewish families saw the horrors of the 1938 pogrom as something familiar and failed to anticipate what was coming next. Centuries of antiSemitism had dulled their acuity to Nazism’s barbaric potential. Moreover, as argued in part 1, although this is controversial, I would argue that the lengths to which the Nazis would go in their hatred of the Jews was not generally obvious. This only became clear long after it was too late to get out. This study also does not include people who managed to escape from Poland by the time the Nazis’ genocidal intent towards the Jews was becoming clearer.

NOTES 1. For anybody interested in following up the debates on memory, a good place to start is Mary Fulbrook, ‘Historians and “Collective Memory”’, in Writing the History of Memory, ed. Bill Niven and Stefan Berger (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2013), and Fulbrook, ‘Generations and the Ruptures of 1918, 1945 and 1989 in Germany’, in Aftermath: Legacies and Memories of War in Europe, 1918-1945-1989, ed. Tim Haughton, Nicholas Martin and Pierre Purseigle (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013). 2. I place the words knew and unknowable in quotation marks because I am using them to mean that the child had a sense of the troubles and pain associated with their parents’ pasts without having any real concept of what the troubles and pain were. This idea is developed on in the rest of the paragraph. 3. Articles that usefully also address ‘parentification’ include Jenny Macfie, Katie Fitzpatrick, Elaine M. Rivas and Martha J. Cox, ‘Independent Influences upon Mother-Toddler Role Reversal: Infant-Mother Attachment Disorganisation and Role Reversal in Mother’s Childhood’, Attachment and Human Development 10, no. 1 (2008): 29–39, and Jenny Macfie, Nancy L. Mcalwain, Renata M. Houts and Martha Cox, ‘Intergenerational Transmission of Role Reversal between Parents and Child: Dyadic and Family Systems Internal Working Model’, Attachment and Human Development 7, no. 1 (2005): 51–65, accessed 20 September 2013, http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rahd20#.Ujw_DsakrGA.

CONCLUSION

What

I am suggesting is that it was the people with some political understanding, in Germany in particular, who were more likely to try to flee before the Nazis made this almost impossible. This population had enough of an understanding of the nature of Nazism that they were not taken by surprise by what happened beginning in 1933. Political awareness allowed people to see beyond the Nazis’ assurances and lies. They also had to be willing to leave their homeland; if they had wealth, be willing to relinquish it to the Nazis/state; and, sometimes the most difficult of all, to get into the UK they had to obtain a reliable British sponsor and a visa. Political refugees, such as my father, would also have had an advantage here in that they were more likely to have more of a Europeanwide political network that could be tapped into to provide a sponsor; in my father’s case, a British Labour MP. But there is the additional factor that as Nazism intensified its grip, many politicals either had to go underground or escape. Indeed, while our parents were not Holocaust survivors, nevertheless, at least five of us—Henry, John, Robert, Tania and Tom—had at least one parent who had been imprisoned in camps or prisons or both, except for Robert, as a result of their politics. In Tania’s case her father had been tortured. These experiences were something parents were even less likely to talk about and which will have had affected us. All the respondents saw what happened in the prisons/camps as having affected their parents. As John said of the few months his father had spent in prison: ‘What only emerged very gradually was that he had been really badly traumatized by his time in prison. Sharing a cell with these fascists. The fascists taunted him. I don’t know exactly what they did to him. He had a terrible, terrible time in prison.’ 277

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Robert’s father had spent time in Dachau. Robert said: ‘He thinks that the thing that saved his life was a German Communist, and he stressed that this was not an Austrian or Catholic, saying, “You must go to the middle and not be bruised. If you are bruised or damaged, then they won’t discharge you.”’ Robert suggested, with much feeling, that his father had been marked by this: ‘And I [Robert] thought what is it to push against the other people from Graz, and for them therefore to be further out.’ Robert said: ‘I told my parents I’d joined the Labour Party. It was bad enough I’d joined CND. My mother actually said, “They’ll come for you in the night”, and I kind of laughed.’ Tania stated: Due to their inexperience of conspiratorial or underground work, the group [that her father belonged to] were arrested in June 1933. My father was tortured in the Gestapo cellar at the Düsseldorf police station; he bore the physical and psychological scars for the rest of his life. He spent time in prison in Düsseldorf and Wuppertal until he was transferred to the concentration camp in Esterwegen Börgermoor.

Released in 1935, her father fled to Czechoslovakia. Tania’s mother, who was also in the German Communist Party (KPD), had also been imprisoned, though not, as far as Tania knew, tortured. Her mother never talked about it, and Tania wished she knew more. Maybe the mother living in postwar West Germany saw her days in the resistance as not fitting in with the gender stereotype of the time. Tom’s was the only case where it was his mother, not his father, who was the more politically committed and active. Though both of them were picked up, it was his mother who had been imprisoned. ‘My mother was a member of an illegal party in Austria at the time: the Young Socialists. . . . She had been posting bills on telegraph posts and stuff. She was arrested and put in a prison. She said it was the best education she could have had.’ Asked if she talked about her time in prison, Tom replied, ‘Not very much.’ Asked how it had affected her, Tom replied: ‘It affected her career. I don’t know about the emotional landscape.’ Yet although the participants did not expand on their responses to their parents’ imprisonment, my sense was that this mattered greatly and that their desire to know how their parents had fared was more intense than usual. For Tania, I felt that a question hovered as to how her father had coped when tortured: Did he talk? If he did, how did he live with that afterwards? If he did not, how did the pain and fear he had gone through subsequently affect his ability to live in the here and now? Did he live with the ghosts of those he had known and who had not survived?

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An additional aspect of having Political parents is that they were from a group who were more likely to continue to remain silent. First, there was a continuing fear after the war had ended. There are a variety of possible explanations for this. At least for many Social-Democratically inclined exiles, their ideological expectations of the state as a protective force had been at best severely dented and maybe shattered. Unlike the ‘disappearance’ of institutional anti-Semitism, for anybody who had been a Communist or a fellow traveller, the British and American states in the postwar period—with only a very short pause—continued a virulent persecution of anybody they saw as having Communist sympathies. Although McCarthyism is associated with the US, there were also purges in the British civil service, though, notoriously, the real spies for the USSR, such as Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, were missed. Political parents had good reason to feel they needed to keep silent about their pasts. But there were other equally profound reasons for keeping silent. In a period of anti-Communism at a popular as well as governmental level, parents who had been close to Communist organizations were less likely to want to draw attention to themselves and ideas that had become marginalized. Crucially, even if they no longer had an allegiance to the Communist Party at an organizational level, if they maintained a belief in the future possibility of socialist transformation, they would not have wanted to give succour to anti-Communist attitudes by giving voice to their disquiet or disillusionment with what the Communists had done in the 1930s and during the war (Gradvohl 2013b, 7–9). On the other hand, if they had moved to the right politically, as Sarah’s father had, they may well not have wanted to remember or discuss their past political mistakes (Gradvohl, pers. comm., 2013). Moreover, although there certainly were exceptions, many Communists or fellow travellers will have wanted to avoid the sanctification of those who struggled against the Nazis or were imprisoned and sometimes murdered, and in particular will often have wanted to avoid drawing attention to themselves (Gradvohl, pers. comm., 2013). Instead, as Delbo’s stupendous novel reveals, their emphasis would be on the importance of class and of others’ experiences (Gradvohl 2013b, 7–9). Such imperatives of silence will, in some cases, have been laced by paranoia about the state. I will draw on my own experience, which, though not typical, represents one extreme of the effects of political persecution. My mother had to escape from the USSR in 1936, having fled Germany three years earlier. While Nazism came to an end as a system in 1945, Stalinism lasted far longer. My mother, I now realize, was terrified that she was on a GPU (the Soviet secret police) list; indeed, opponents of Stalinism were still being murdered in the 1950s. But in addition, my parents were convinced that the British state had them listed. My mother had been impris-

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oned as a possible spy, probably for the USSR, in 1940, and both my parents had been interned. Indeed, in my mother’s case, MI5 were still sending notes about her to the CIA as late as 1953. So my parents’ experience was of persecution by three different states, Nazi, Stalinist and British, and this left them lacking a sense of security or agency. Whichever state’s agents they were afraid of, the front door had five locks, all in use, and my father believed that the house was being watched. As a child, the phone would be buried under a pile of cushions so, I was told, nobody could listen in to conversations in the home. To quote from my interview: ‘The phone was an issue in the family. R. [my boyfriend] was not allowed to phone me because R. was an undesirable . . . They used to take the phone off the stand, but I didn’t know that because you can’t tell if it’s covered . . . They were crazy.’ It was not a secure background and encouraged in me both a mistrust of the Other and a hatred of my parents. Except for Tania, all the respondents were Jewish in one sense or another. All to a greater or lesser extent had lost family. All were haunted by the ghosts of the past. Almost this entire little group, the children of ‘Jewish’ and political parents, tussled with how they understood themselves in terms of their Jewishness and their politics. Nevertheless, I have been left with the impression that the participants who had parents who actively opposed the Nazis were more likely to feel a greater pride in their parents than those who did not, and they carried in themselves a confidence that they could stand up and fight and, if not win, at least survive. Yet many of us emotionally walked away from our parents’ overprotectiveness and neediness and, as adults, feel guilt because we were not able to protect them. So we became the people who did not talk to our parents rather than them not talking to us. I want to end this section with an extract from my interview: It’s impossible to know how far my parents would have been strange if they hadn’t had such a terrible, terrible [pause]. It doesn’t get anywhere to ask anyhow because they did have a terrible time. One of the things that I’ve thought is that when my mother was pregnant with me they were finding out about [pause]. And then when I was born, they found about more people being murdered. So my first years, it’s like there’s a filament of grief just running through everything all the time. I think they wanted me for all sorts of reasons, and I was part of the celebration of a new, post-Nazi world. There I was, and I suspect as they found out about what had happened to their families, it became interwoven with their pleasure or whatever at having a child. . . . Had they been in Germany, had they been in Berlin, had they been part of a family, had Nazism fallen or never succeeded, they might have been much better parents. Who is to know? Who is to know how these things weave together, contribute to how I was moulded? They

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were very impressive people. They were terribly impressive, but they weren’t very impressive parents.

US: BEING THE SECOND GENERATION When we were born, mostly in the 1940s, our parents’ desire was largely for us to be integrated, to conceal difference. Yet we children were deeply aware of our differences and the forms these differences took, and this alongside how we, the second generation, experience our own lives is now explored. What Does It Mean to Be Jewish? One issue that appeared in most of the interviews was what Jewishness meant to the participants. Only one person had no Jewish ancestors. Many in our parents’ generation were assimilated, especially if they were from Germany. Yet the meaning or poignancy of Jewishness for our generation is inseparable from the systematic murder of millions of people for being Jewish, among them family members of the participants. But for a complexity of reasons, many of our parents did not emphasize their Jewishness to their children and regularly did not circumcise their sons. In the interviews, we have a range of differentiated responses to what being Jewish means to the participants, many of whom, despite the Holocaust, found this issue problematic. Being Jewish is now associated with a modern cultural currency that not all the participants uncritically accepted, and the ambiguities of Jewishness regularly appear in these testimonials. The one person who embraced his Judaism was Henry. Yet even here, there were complications and ambiguities. His father had been brought up in an Orthodox household but had then become an atheist, though he reverted back to Orthodox Judaism, albeit in a critical fashion, later on in the UK. Henry’s mother had been passed off as a Christian in Budapest during the war, which had saved her life. Henry too had gone through an atheistic phase at university, but, already into middle age, had reverted to his Judaic beliefs and prayed ‘far more than once a day’. But while proud of being Jewish, he said: ‘The adult values I’ve got stem from Judaism, but they aren’t exclusively Jewish. They also draw from Christianity and Islam. I find the particularistic parts of Judaism hard to justify. In terms of how I pray, I practice. . . . It’s largely just rote.’ The limit on who is Jewish as understood within Orthodox Judaism was exposed in a Second Generation meeting. A woman, whom I also

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talked to, asked about whether or not she could call herself Jewish. The issue mattered to her deeply. Her parents had both lost almost their entire families in Germany. She had been brought up as a Jew, although her ‘fully Jewish’ father had never seen himself as Jewish and presently saw himself as a mix of a refugee and English. In her mid-teens, she had realized that she was technically not Jewish because her maternal grandmother was not Jewish, and she subsequently ceased to feel that she could attend a synagogue with a clear conscience or be secure in seeing herself as Jewish. She told the Second Generation meeting about how she really did not know who she was. For her, the conventions of Judaism were more important than they had been for her parents, displaying what I suspect is a tendency that some in the British second generation find Judaism to be more significant to them than it was to their parents. In Mike’s case, his Jewishness was central to his being, although his English mother had not been Jewish, so according to a stricter Judaic interpretation, Mike was not Jewish. His father was Jewish but had seen himself as an integrated Czech, without any sort of religious belief. Asked whether he knew he was Jewish as a child, Mike replied: ‘I had an affinity, though I had no faith. Dad had many Jewish friends, but he was an atheist. He had no interest in religion per se, although he loved photographing the designs of cathedrals all over the world.’ But for Mike, his Jewishness became important in his teens. Mike had not been told he was Jewish but seems to have realized when young, in part because of the hostility shown his father. ‘I was very conscious of having a Jewish heritage in my teens. . . . I knew he [Mike’s father] was Jewish because my grandparents on my mother’s side were terribly English and unconsciously anti-Semitic in their attitudes. . . . They didn’t like him at all. He was a foreign Jewish Communist intellectual.’ Mike was one of the few people who told me about an explicitly anti-Semitic incident when a student had had ‘Yiddo’ sprayed repeatedly on Mike’s bedroom door at university in the 1960s. Mike had not been brought up by his father, although he did see him regularly. But the Holocaust had seared Mike’s soul. Asked what he saw himself as, Mike had various attempts at an answer, but being Jewish was clearly of immense significance to him. His answer to the question of whether he was circumcised was poignant: ‘The funny thing is that I wanted more and more when I was an adolescent the notion that I had been circumcised. It was very important early on to see myself that way. I feel myself circumcised. That was my identity rather than the English identify. I wanted to be proud of that. Of course, I saw my dad naked later on. I didn’t say to him ‘why wasn’t I circumcised?’ As already discussed, circumcision is seen, presented and valued within much of Judaism as what marks the male as a Jew.

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Robert had an ambiguous attitude to his Jewishness; while important, he stated it was of a lesser significance than his political beliefs. Robert saw being a socialist as the most important aspect of him, despite his father’s time in Dachau, where he had been sent as a Jew. Robert was, as he put it, a ‘hidden Jew’—his parents had insisted he did not let on to his younger brothers or to the wider world that they were Jewish. Robert said it was like being a spy, always having to conceal who he was. In addition, Robert’s rejection of any identification with Israel felt to him like preventing an uncritical adoption of Judaic belief. He also loathed Orthodox Jews, who he saw as essentially nonrationalist, or ‘crazies’. ‘I didn’t want to play the Jewish card. My distaste for the state of Israel, and I would say, “It’s a genocide. Of course there were large numbers of people who were killed, but there are other genocides. Why is this being privileged?”’ Later in the interview, Robert said: My position is that I don’t want to be a religious Jew. So I’m not a Jew. Obviously I knew I was a Jew, but not that kind of Jew. I’m a child of refugees. I’m the child of Austrians. . . . I didn’t deny . . . if a Jew asked me about being Jewish, I’d say, ‘Yes, I’m Jewish’, and to socialists, people I could trust, I’d say that. To people who weren’t going to harm my brothers or my parents.

But as Robert grew older and further away from his parents, he had come to see his Jewishness as a crucial though perturbing part of his identity. Some of his close female friends had encouraged him to see himself as Jewish. Finally, and only recently, he made a trip to Vienna to find out what had happened to his family. In one sense, my immediate reaction was kind of nothing, a kind of horror at a distance. . . . I think it’s a degree of shock which doesn’t manifest itself as shock, but manifests itself as a kind of ‘Oh, yes.’ Though that isn’t quite right. I looked at this blue screen with the white writing on it [on the computer]. I can see it. And I thought. . . [Weeps] And I hadn’t seen their names [before]. [Weeps]

Yet when asked about his present attitude to Jewishness and Judaism, Robert’s answer reveals conflict. He described a recent scene where his friend had dropped in and wanted to show him something about Auschwitz. So I read it at the bus stop, and right on the back page it says you enter the Auschwitz centre through the K. family home [Robert’s surname], which is next to the synagogue. . . . And I look at this, and my first

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reaction is horror that I might have something to do with people associated with synagogues. [Laughs]

But then Robert described ‘an epiphany’ when, already in late middle age, he had realized the centrality of his being Jewish. At a party, he heard somebody say ‘fucking goyim’ (a slur for a non-Jewish person). I know it means me. It’s a kind of projection. That’s where I was. It feels as if the voice has come from outside of me. . . . I know immediately I’m imagining this. . . . But what’s interesting is the fact that I used ‘goyim’. What is happening is . . . ‘Jewish’ is already in my mind, and it doesn’t take much. . . . All it shows is that I had a deep-seated sense of being Jewish, which I didn’t realize.

Almost at the end of the interview, Robert said: I don’t know what I call myself. I would first of all call myself a socialist. . . . I infer I’m a man from my behaviour, from sexual attraction . . . and then I think very close behind I’m a Jew. I probably think I’m a Jew before I was a man. I was a Jew until I was eight years old. I didn’t go to the Christian assembly [at school] in Kilburn. I’ve not been circumcised. I’ve never been to a Jewish religious ceremony. When I asked my father at one stage, and I think it was after my mother had died, why I wasn’t circumcised, his reaction was a very strange one. He said—there were tears in his eyes, and he found it very hard—he said ‘I didn’t want you to be hurt.’ And I thought, ‘You are lying.’ And I thought, ‘You’ve been in Dachau, haven’t you.’

For Robert’s father, ensuring his son did not look like a Jew was a way of protecting him from future Dachaus and hurt, and that overrode all reasons in favour of circumcision. John, Tom and Sarah’s parents had all fled for political reasons as well as because of anti-Semitism, but even here there were important differences in their present attitudes to Jewishness. John’s father had been in the KPD; indeed, after the war, he went to work in East Berlin. My father didn’t talk to me at first about being Jewish. I think, like most Communist Jews, he hoped it would be irrelevant. He saw himself as Communist first and an antifascist and a human being. I had very little inkling of all this. . . . There were a lot of rabbi jokes, but my father was an atheist. My father didn’t go to synagogue. There weren’t even trappings of cultural Judaism. His mother kept just the high holidays, but his father did not even keep those. They were already entirely assimilated, bourgeois. There are many ironies to anti-Semitism. . . .

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I knew there was something strange about us. I knew our family were different. But that we were Jewish?

John then described a scene in his Viennese school when he was about ten years old: a classmate made anti-Semitic remarks, and John realized they were directed at him. John clearly defined himself as on the left, but also crucially as Jewish. He preferred to attend a book group that was Jewish and appeared to find friendships came easier and were more interesting with people who were Jewish, a common theme among people I chatted to informally who told me they felt more at ease with other Jews. Sarah’s maternal and paternal grandfathers were Jewish, but her paternal grandmother was not. Her father, who had briefly been in the KPD prior to 1933, had never seen himself as Jewish. In London, her father had maintained strong connections with Neue Beginnen, a group who had broken with the KPD/CP. Her mother came from a family of wealthy, cultured Jews who did not practice. Most of her mother’s family were murdered: ‘There’s no family left.’ Yet despite the decimation of her mother’s family, Sarah had adopted a position similar to her father. She insisted, ‘He [Sarah’s father] just wasn’t interested in the Jewish thing.’ He did not see Jewishness as significant to who he was. Sarah at one point stated: [Being Jewish] goes through the female line in the scriptures. . . . I don’t give a toss. Technically, my son is Jewish because I’m Jewish, and I’m Jewish because my mother was Jewish. . . . I resent all this Holocaust stuff, and it pisses me off. That’s why I like the Imperial War Museum exhibition, because it mentions homos, gypsies and lefties. None of the others do.

Sarah took a course at Birkbeck College about the Holocaust: ‘All they talked about was Jews. It was crap.’ Tom’s mother had been a member of the Austrian Young Socialists and an activist, and Tom hesitated when asked whether being Jewish or a socialist was the more important factor in her having to flee, but then opted for being Jewish. Tom’s father, an art dealer, also lectured in Marxism. While not rejecting Jewishness to the degree Sarah did, Tom saw socialism as having defined who he had become in a way that Judaism had not. Tom made an emphatic distinction between being Jewish in a technical sense—both his parents were Jewish by birth—and identifying himself as Jewish. His parents had not seen themselves as Jewish in a sense that Tom recognized. There had been no Jewish rituals or customs in

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Tom’s childhood, and if anything, Judaism had become less important to his mother after she arrived in the UK. Yet Tom was deeply aware of an ambiguity in himself. He said: ‘What does “being Jewish” mean to me? Deeply hostile.’ Yet when once asked to say ‘we Jews’ in a therapeutic setting, he found a profound difficulty in doing so, which he would not have experienced if asked to say ‘I’m second generation’ or ‘a Holocaust survivor.’ He continued: ‘It’s not a neutral term for me. Neither is it full of positivity or negativity. I’m not sure what my relationship is to it.’ He elaborated that he did not want to be ‘a dark Jew, carrying all that stuff . . . I want to be a light Jew; I didn’t want to be somebody carrying the history and weight of persecution and so on.’ Peter presented an unusual reason for seeing himself as Jewish. Peter’s father had had to flee Hungary as a Jew and had been just about the only member of his family to survive. Politics were not any part of the cause for flight. In the UK, his father had converted to Christianity and married a woman who was not Jewish. Peter’s father did not want to bring up Peter as a Jew. ‘It would have been the last thing my father would have wished for me, to feel Jewish. He wanted us to escape from all that. He himself had converted to Christianity while not denying his own Jewishness after the war. And he wanted to free us from all of that.’ There was a deep ambiguity in Peter’s father’s attitude to Jewishness. Peter’s name was itself symbolic of the claim to Englishness, he said. Like every other male respondent where the issue was raised, Peter was not circumcised. I [was] not circumcised. It’s classic about the ambivalence of it. He [Peter’s father] insisted when we were bathed, on pushing our prepuce back so as to make it look not quite as if we were circumcised but so that we wouldn’t look like gentiles either.

Even though brought up as a Christian, Peter picked up from the fragmentary clues when very young that he was Jewish. His father did tell him his family had been exterminated as Jews, while keeping silent on all other details. Peter saw his search for his grandparents as having to do with his search for his Jewishness. But his search had nothing to do with Judaism as a religion. He said: I have a right to this stuff. . . . At that time, too, it felt quite ideological. One of the problems can be of being second generation, and particularly if where you live is geographically displaced, the connection can be very cerebral. And you can create the most awful phantoms.

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Peter developed on the reasons for his identification with Jewishness towards the end of the interview. ‘The truth is I’ve hugely identified with it [being Jewish]. . . . The English side of my identity is not a problem. It’s the Jewish side that needs defending. That’s a conscious choice.’ He continued, revealing some of the many ambiguities around this issue: The Jewish part [of me] had nothing to do with being Jewish. It is saying what can the world be if you are bullied out of having a different culture from the dominant one. It could be Martian cultures; it could be being gay. I don’t give a damn. It’s the right to inherit the cultural traditions from your environment, whether it’s your family or the world around you. . . . To look at it freely and to say that’s crap and that’s good. . . . That’s the beginning and end of it. I’m interested in aspects of Jewish culture, but that’s not the point. I’m also interested in Islam.

One of the participants whose testimonial is not included told me that although both parents were Jewish, she never felt Jewish and did not want to be Jewish. She said she was British and only when she was with close Jewish friends might she mention her Jewishness. She was the second woman who said something to me along the lines that she did not want to be identified as a possible candidate for being gassed. Another of the women participants whose testimonial is not included explained that, although her nonpolitical ‘Jewish’ refugee father had not defined himself as Jewish, she did think of herself as Jewish, but, she said, she was not English Jewish but Continental Jewish. Many of these testimonials suggest that the meaning of being Jewish is of greater significance for the British second generation than it was for the parents. While this is not a comparative study with the first generation, so any suggestions for why this might be are conjectural, I suggest that the greater stress by the second generation on the importance of Judaism arises partly as a result of many of their parents growing up as what they understood as ‘assimilated’. But the second generation lacked the relative security in terms of self and background that their parents had grown up with and, unlike their parents, grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. My own case represents an extreme of being brought up non-Jewish. I quote from my own interview. I was not brought up to be Jewish at all. . . . My parents came over very early because my father had been an active anti-Nazi. And they’d always been able to hide behind that, and it was more than hiding because that is what they identified themselves as. And so I was brought up entirely within that paradigm.

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Then I visited Germany with a second-generation non-Jewish friend, I. And suddenly, I became aware that I. has family because the Nazis did not kill the family of Communists, but they did kill the family of Jews. . . . It really has brought it home to me in a way that nothing else has brought it home to me before. That is why so many of my family were murdered. That was a shock.

What the respondents and others meant by the concept of Jewishness evidently varied. Except for Henry, none of the sample were practicing. Mike, with a non-Jewish mother and Jewish father, had no reservations about his Jewishness. But, noticeably, none of the participants except for Henry suggested that they even respected, at least on any sort of regular basis, the major religiocultural traditions, such as the high holidays. For some of the participants, for example, Robert, their identification with Judaism was within the tradition of cultural Judaism, not an attachment to Judaism’s religious manifestations. Although this is not the place to explore this, there is a well-sustained position that these cultural manifestations cannot be completely separated out from a variety of religious traditions and beliefs. Can somebody be Jewish just because they identify with the cultural aspects but not the religious aspects of Judaism? To varying degrees, the existence or fear of anti-Semitism was suggested in almost all of the interviews. Two of the women whose testimonials are not included suggested that anti-Semitism had impinged on their lives, in one case at work, in the other case it was the woman’s fear that if people knew she was Jewish, she would be at risk. Robert too seemed to have lived with a deep fear that he would be at risk because of being Jewish. He was bullied at school for being a German, which he took to mean Jew. Certainly Peter’s presentation of himself as Jewish was a response to his perception of the present-day existence of anti-Semitism. Henry had been persecuted at his Jewish school for talking funny. Like Robert, Sarah was accused of being a German at school, an accusation of difference interchangeable with being called a Jew. As a university student, Mike had ‘Yiddo’ sprayed repeatedly on his door. But Tom’s presentation of why he was bullied at school was different. He believed he had been bullied because of difference, being a foreigner, not because of his Jewishness, though he stressed that being Jewish, unlike, for example, being American, had not been a power resource at school. In my interview, I talked about ‘soft anti-Semitism’, raising the issue of how much anti-Semitism is still part of popular culture, even among the highly educated. I described being at a small party where people had known me for a long time. A friend came up to two of us and said, ‘Oh, you Jews look all alike.’ When I said ‘Nonsense’, she said, ‘Oh, you

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don’t look alike, but you have a similar look.’ Later, I mentioned that I was speaking at a conference, and she immediately inquired whether it was a Jewish conference. It is against such a background of continuing and underlying racism that some in the second generation present themselves, sometimes in defiance, as Jewish. Though some of these examples took place over forty years ago, do not assume that the anti-Semitism some of the respondents had experienced or feared is just a decaying relic of the twentieth century. Recently I talked with two or three British young male Jewish students who were easily identifiable because they wore kippahs. They all told me that sometimes when they were outside London, they run the gauntlet of young people jeering at them and hurling anti-Semitic taunts. The students were gently amused by my alarm. The Importance of Displacement and Dislocation I want to focus here on the intertwined concepts of displacement and dislocation and their manifestation in the lives of the British second generation. Issues of dislocation resulting from our parents’ forced relocation can impact the British second generation and detract from our sense of belonging. The experience of dislocation from place is inseparable from the experience of the loss of family. Peter’s father’s family had come from a small town outside of Budapest, and, except for his parents and one other family member, had been entirely wiped out. Peter expressed a profound sense of loss about the place where his father had grown up and the absence there of any Jews and of a memorial stone to his father’s parents or any other Jew. He said: There is something about that place which is a black hole for me. It’s somehow transferred from my father. It’s the place of utmost awfulness. . . . That’s very hard to talk about. It’s to do with the fact that the actual loss of his own parents, for my father, is unbearable. . . . I feel close to wanting to cry every time I think about Siklós, which is where my father is from.

Peter stated he feels as if he has taken on his father’s grief at what happened in his ‘homestead’, and he doesn’t know if he can get beyond it. Peter described being with his father during a commemoration service in the district in Hungary his father had come from, when the name of his father’s town did not appear on the list of places that were being read out where Jews had previously lived. Peter said:

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In terms of emotional identification, that was the nearest glimpse I ever had of what my father went through. Everything had gone. Everything. I was emotionally shattered. . . . I haven’t come across anywhere else where the decimation was so complete and utter. That’s part of what makes this so impossible. This black hole of Siklós. There aren’t even the little fragments left that you can claw your way up to.

Peter has been left with no stories, no hinterland. There was nothing to go back to; there was not even an extended family to tell family stories or provide the child with a sense of a past. There was no one left to remember. There was no family to be reconstituted. Hungary is an extreme case. But Mike also revealed the long-term consequences of dislocation. His father’s family, about whom Mike knew very little, had all been murdered in Czechoslovakia. Mike finds it hard to identify himself with any country, whether the UK, Czechoslovakia or Israel. A woman I talked to whose father’s Jewish family came from a rural part of Germany is dedicating her middle age to discovering and commemorating her extended family, of whom there is almost no trace. One variable for whether people survived or died was how easily they were able to get out from their country of origin. Tom’s parents, who came from Austria, were able to get visas in 1938 to get out of Vienna, despite his mother having been imprisoned for political activities. She did not need to go underground as my father did as early as 1933 to get out of Germany. This softer Austrian fascism was still acting on the logic of anti-Semitism, namely that they wanted to get rid of the Jews, not actually murder them, so these exiles at least did not undergo the additional stress of illegality. Similarly, as long as the person was not wanted for political or other subversive activities and as long they had money, the inclination and visas, Jewish people had almost six years to find a legal way out of Germany. However, in Czechoslovakia, Hungary or, indeed, Poland, once the Nazis had arrived, nobody could leave. Mike’s father had escaped from Czechoslovakia with the help of a friend who had joined the Nazi Party. ‘What are you still doing here?’ the friend had inquired of Mike’s father in early 1939. ‘Isn’t it time for you to leave?’ The friend explained to Mike’s father how to get a visa. I pressed Mike on whether his father would otherwise have found it especially difficult to get a visa because he was Jewish. Mike said that, at that point, anti-Semitism was not the issue. The Nazis were not expected to murder the Jews. The Nazis were seen more as foreign invaders than as antiSemitic crusaders. Thus there was not the same urgency to flee. Mike’s father was the only person from his family to survive.

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This wiping out of families and places makes this second generation’s experiences different from other second generations whose immediate or stem families escaped repression and where there is usually an extended family of sorts still living, even if radically dispersed. This, for example, could be seen as the case for the second-generation (Northern) Irish families in the UK or the Bengali diaspora. The absence of family is associated with the loss of a sense of belonging. It is not just that family has been murdered and that the children who would have been the second generation’s ‘cousins’ were never conceived. The participants all came from small families. Exile often does not go well with having large families, especially if the woman has ‘lost’ crucial biological years ‘in transit’. John commented on how small his family was: It was a huge family [in Austria]. When he [his father] was a child, his parents used to test him: ‘Who is the auntie of so and so? Who is the cousin of so and so?’ There were so many of them. . . . They’ve all gone. They were killed by Hitler. There are a few remnants in Brazil, who didn’t have children. An uncle in Australia who didn’t have any children. I’m in touch with a few relatives in Chicago.

He said he had replaced his family with friends in Germany and the UK, most of whom were Jewish. Mike lamented the absence of aunts and uncles and was upset and sometimes annoyed when people talked about their grandparents. I still remember how puzzled and pained I felt when, at my local authority primary school, the teacher asked us to draw our families. Everybody around me was happily drawing a galaxy of faces. Mortified, I drew myself and my parents. In addition, the British second generation themselves have fewer children than the norm, so that some in the British second generation are not reproducing the ‘average’ family network. Another aspect of dislocation is that while some family members did survive, they are strewn over the surface of the earth. Some people fled west to different countries in South America and a lucky few to America; others went east to Turkey, the USSR, China and elsewhere; very few returned to their countries of birth. So one characteristic of many— though not all—of the British second generation is how few of our extended family network live in the UK. Even when far-flung members of one’s extended family did end up in the UK, as revealed in Robert’s testimony, this may not be a sufficient basis for mutual affection or support. Dislocation ruptures the family and in so doing, ruptures the second generation’s sense of belonging. The possibility or the absence of the possibility of the reconstitution of a family is key to both the first and second generations’ experience of exile.

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The intertwined nature of dislocation and displacement is again revealed in how much the British second generation identify with the country they were born in, that is, with Britain, or indeed with their parents’ country of origin. Though any concept of belonging is value ridden, nevertheless, one theme that emerged was the importance of place, or rather, the absence of a sense of place. All the second-generation participants had at least two grandparents who had not been born in the UK, and most of their parents were also not born here. There were a range of responses on the participants’ identification with their parents’ country of origin. For Peter and Henry, there was nobody to go back to in Hungary. At the other end of the spectrum, Tania, whose parents were both German, had a raft of relatives living in Germany whom she visited and who visited her regularly in the UK. Similarly, John, with his British mother and Austrian father, had a network of British friends but tried to keep up with German contacts and felt he had lost a bit of himself because as time went by it became more difficult. These are all complicated relationships different from the person who grows up in the UK in the bosom of their family, who has the personal security of identifying with place and people from birth. Peter said he had a deep identification with being a Hungarian Jew but saw Hungary as not having faced up to the Holocaust in the way that Germany had: ‘That’s another reason why Hungary continues to feel more problematic and painful, though more personal as well.’ Then he said: I’ve got a British passport; English is my first language; my biggest cultural influence on me and my everyday culture is English culture. . . . There’s simply no doubt about that. Am I influenced by my father’s Jewishness? Were any Jewish values transmitted? Yes, without a doubt. . . . I do say I’m English if somebody asks me, but I’m quite guarded. I might then go on to explain that my father was Hungarian.

But where most people in the long-standing British Jewish community would define themselves in some fashion as British or English, what was marked was the frequency with which the respondents stated they did not feel English. (When I refer here to ‘English’, that is because it was the term used by the participants.) Although born in Britain/England, the respondents generally did not feel as if this was, in some way, their home. Robert called himself a ‘Central European’. Tom stated at one point that he was a relic of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, though he later modified this by emphasizing how nonsensical it is to deny the influence of English culture. So many people called themselves outsiders—this was the word

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used by Robert, Tania, Sarah and John. Sarah expressed profound unease about whether she really fit in. She said: ‘You never fit in. I always felt like an outsider. I was born here, but I never feel English. I’m a rootless cosmopolitan.’ Nobody defined themselves in simple terms as English/ British; indeed most people rejected the idea of being English/British. Robert was especially reflexive about how he saw himself. He said, ‘I don’t know what I call myself’, listing three dominating characteristics: a socialist, a man and a Jew. Earlier in the interview he said: I’ve never regarded myself as English . . . I’m not English. For God’s sake, don’t call me English. . . . I’m a Central European. That’s who I am. I don’t behave properly. I appear to be foolish or behave foolishly. I express myself halfway. I don’t feel comfortable with small talk. I don’t feel comfortable with the lack of passion.

John, not surprisingly, did not see himself as English/British, although he had lived here for most of his life. When people ask me, ‘Where are your roots?’ I have no answer. In fact, I answer with George Steiner’s saying, though I think he may have taken it from somewhere else: ‘Trees have roots, human beings have legs. And that is an advantage.’ It’s not just a stance. I certainly don’t feel German, although I went to school there, and I have lovely friends there. Some of my best friends live in Berlin. I don’t feel German. I don’t feel Austrian. I don’t particularly like the Austrians, though I’m very fond of Vienna. The Austrians are quite reactionary, and they don’t like foreigners. I couldn’t possibly say I’m English. I feel at home in London and my kids are English. I would have thought they would see themselves as English. They were born here. They are very interested in that [whether they are Jewish]. . . . I’ve always felt an outsider, and being an outsider does, I suppose, create a degree of insecurity. . . . Even now. I’ve lived in London now for thirty-five years. It’s difficult to reflect on it because I don’t know how other people feel. I don’t know how integrated one can feel. I certainly don’t feel integrated, though I certainly feel at home here. I live in a lovely community.

Tania, the other participant whose Communist parents had returned to Germany but who then had returned to Britain as a young adult, when asked where she saw herself as belonging replied: ‘That’s a question I don’t understand. I don’t think it’s important. I don’t understand nationalism. Doesn’t make sense to me. . . . I belong with people who want justice and who want change, but not on any particular patch.’ Tania was the only person for whom a history of dislocation did not appear to intensify

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the importance of place, largely, I suggest, because of her left-internationalist politics, but also because she felt as much ‘at home’ with her family in Germany. Mike, despite his English mother, expressed an admiration for his Czech father’s traditions and did not appear to find the English bit of him so important. When asked whether he saw himself as English, he replied: ‘I perceive myself as an English Jewish Londoner. I was born in St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. I think I’m most proud of my Jewish background from my father. It means more to me than whether I’m English or not.’ The one participant who saw themselves as unambiguously British was Henry, despite not being born in the UK. He was also one of only two people to refer to Israel as a possible source of identification or nationality. Henry said: I call myself British. I might add Hungarian to make it exotic, but I have no positive feelings about Hungary whatsoever. I see myself as British. I also see myself as Jewish. British comes first. I don’t see a tension between them. If it was a question of Britain or Israel, I think Britain comes first.

He later explained that he bought into the importance of ‘Churchill’s finest hour’ and the mythology of the Battle of Britain. But some of the participants were careful to recognize the importance of having grown up here. Peter commented on the tendency by many in the second generation to say they don’t feel English. In the Second Generation Network discussion group, and it happens frequently, you go around and people say, ‘I just feel so un-English.’ . . . I want to say, ‘You are off your heads. You people are so English.’ I know what they are saying, there are strands of themselves that are not English. But to deny that a huge part of them is not the product of English society seems quite crazy.

Tom also highlighted the tension between his not identifying himself as English and yet being seen as quintessentially English when abroad. When the issue of feeling English came up in a discussion in the Second Generation group that I attended, one woman stated that she did not feel English but felt she belonged here because she didn’t belong anywhere else, an interesting distinction not made elsewhere. The acknowledgement that having one English parent could be stabilizing was highlighted by Peter. Peter was one of three people with an English-born mother. Peter explained how it made a difference:

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I didn’t need to say I am a complete alien in this situation. Part of me is rooted here. I could say in some way I do belong here. But what it did make difficult—where do you place all this other stuff? The school, social, linguistic environment is all English. . . . But all these other strands—we had goulash once a week.

On the other hand, as already observed, Mike did not feel any more English for having an English mother, rather identifying with his Czech father. Mike’s father had returned to Prague after the war and had found nobody—fourteen members of his immediate family had been murdered. But Mike felt an affinity to Prague. When asked whether he felt any identification with Czechoslovakia, he replied: Oh, yes. When I walk round, I see people who look like me. OK, they are in their sixties now. But when I first went there, I thought, ‘Oh, God, this is where my dad came from. They have the same sort of [Slavic] eyes as me.’ Prague is also a beautiful city. It’s a great place.

Mike was the only person other than Henry to express ‘an identity with Israel’, where he felt at home, almost despite himself, and where he and his then wife considered moving, suggesting how ‘displaced’ the second generation can become. The exiles from Nazism in this study differ from many other exiles who maintain some sense of belonging to their country of origin and some hope of returning. Even Tania and John did not express any desire to return to Germany, and certainly none of the rest of the sample showed any inclination to return to their parents’ countries of origin, even if a few of them, for example, Mike and Robert, said they felt an affinity when they visited. While doing this research, I also asked people who had not grown up in London whether they felt a sense of belonging or identification with a geographically defined area. I was not and am not suggesting that identification with nation is or should be a primary identifier. As explained by third-generation man whose grandparents had arrived in Britain as refugees shortly before 1933 and whose parents had been born here, he did not call himself English/British, not because he identified with the nations of his grandparents, but because any appeal to nationalism or a national category creates artificial—and often lethal—divisions. Indeed, what I discovered among my inevitably skewed selection of personal acquaintances was not an identity with Britishness or England, but rather a sense of identification with the local area that the person’s family had come from—for example, in Scotland or the North of England—even though they had had lived in London since going to university. ‘Why?’ I press. It’s the colour of the sky at night, the smell in the breeze, the way people

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speak, I was told. It’s knowing the lay of the land. One man still supported his ‘local’ football team, whom his father and grandfather had supported before him. They take their holidays back ‘at home’, visiting people who knew their parents when their parents were still children, comparing stories with old men and women about how the place has changed, visiting the graves of their grandparents. For the British second generation, this is mostly impossible. There are also the more economic aspects of dislocation, which people the world over will experience. Henry had emphasized the bread-andbutter effects of dislocation: ‘Shortage of food. Anxiety about where the next meal is coming from.’ Let us not ignore that many of the parents of the British second generation suffered financial hardship as well as deep insecurities. But soon after the end of the war, most of the refugee men, like Robert’s and Tom’s fathers, had secured jobs. Until my father got a job in late 1938, attached to Oxford University, and with it a proper visa, my parents were constantly anxious about whether they would be allowed to stay in the UK, a state of insecurity undoubtedly not helped by my mother’s gallivanting about. But by the time I was born in 1944, although my cot was apparently the top drawer in a chest of drawers on the landing, my parents were able to rent a small attic flat, even if they were sharing the bathroom with the other lodgers. In terms of the materiality of existence, the later the second-generation child was born, the more secure the parents probably were. Another aspect of the twin hydras of dislocation and displacement is the change in language between refugee parent and second-generation child. Language was a symbol of difference or belonging, or somewhere in between. Everybody I interviewed spoke fluent and unaccented English except for the two people who were bilingual. But our first language, with the exception of Sarah, was not our parents’—and this divided us further from them. We lacked a familiarity with our parents’ literature, their children’s stories, their playground slang, their jokes. I still have a couple of German children’s stories my parents gave me when very little before the penny dropped that I wanted Red Riding Hood, not Max und Moritz, and that I, like so many of the other participants, wanted nothing to do with my parents’ first language. The relationship to language was not simple. Tom’s parents spoke German to each other when they wanted to keep secrets, though they denied this, and spoke English to Tom, who never advanced beyond a ‘kitchen’ German. Though fluent in other languages, he never felt drawn to German. Mike never learnt Czech. Even Henry’s parents, although they had not settled in Britain until he was three, only ever spoke to him in English, never in Hungarian. John and Tania were both bilingual.

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Tania had spoken German at home, despite having been born in the UK. John had spoken to his mother, who was English, in English and to his father in German. Now English has become his more used language, and he keeps the German-language bit of him alive through reading novels and poetry, something which is very important to him. As he said, the two languages carry meaning differently, and he does not want to lose the bit of himself that he inhabited with his father. Sarah’s situation was uncommon. She stated: Being born to refugees affected me quite badly. I spoke German before I spoke English. Ridiculous to speak to me in a language they couldn’t speak themselves . . . We spoke German at home. Pretty unusual. . . . I was embarrassed. . . . I can’t remember what language she [her mother] spoke when she picked me up.

The girls at school accused her of not speaking English properly. The British second generation’s use of a different language from their parents’ first language is likely to exaggerate the rupture in discourse between refugee parent and British child, contributing to our limited ability to understand what went before and to place ourselves securely within a family map and history. Another issue was how often German was the parents’ preferred language even when they lived in Czechoslovakia or Hungary. The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had left a tidemark of many German speakers who were not German. They may, like Peter’s father, have had an ‘emotional attachment’ to German compared to Hungarian. German was seen as the more progressive, more literary language. Peter’s father used to throw the odd German phrase, not the odd Hungarian phrase, into his conversation with his son, which was otherwise held in English. It was the German language that Peter rejected as a child. In his middle age, Peter is acquainting himself with Central European literature, primarily written in German, and feels he is getting to know his father better through doing so. But the use of German does reveal how much some of the parents were already distanced from their original communities and how fractured their experiences already were. This in turn is likely to have further detached their second-generation ‘children’ from their parents’ ‘homeland’, whose language even their parents did not favour. One detail in terms of the disjuncture that different languages create is that any correspondence the British second-generation person inherited was not in English. Most of the respondents were not confident in their parents’ first language. When Mike got his hands on his father’s papers, which were in German, after his father’s death, he needed a translator to

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find out what they said—never the same as picking up the nuances of language oneself. I had to have my parents’ voluminous German records and writings translated.

One recurrent theme was that as children, and even as young adults, many in the sample were bullied. Language was itself a source of bullying. Sarah, who spoke German and English at home, got taunted at school about how she spoke, although her chief persecutors were English Jews, giving extra emphasis both to the isolation of the second-generation families and revealing the deep fault lines within the British Jewish community itself. Sarah’s lament about bullying was the most evocative, but not unusual: I did get embarrassed [at primary school] because my mother was old. She was thirty-nine. They [the other children] said things like, ‘Is that your granny picking you up from school?’ I was embarrassed. . . . I was badly bullied at primary school by a Jewish girl. In Crouch End. She got her fat minder to beat me up. [I was] about nine. Every German is a bad German. Once I got so upset at what was happening, my mother went to the head and sorted out what was happening. The girl had been told all Germans were bad. I was very shy. . . . And bilingual. So my start at school was not very auspicious.

Ironically being the child of Jewish refugees became synonymous with being German. The girls at school had said, ‘Miss, you don’t speak English properly.’ Another said, ‘Miss, you are ugly.’ A lot of anti-Semitism at the time. People did not think of me as Jewish. It was the anti-German feeling that affected me. It was the anti-German feeling at the time.

It is also worth noting in passing that it was not the Jewishness of the children that was the source of the bullying—English Jews were not similarly persecuted and in this case were the bullies. Though Henry was at a Hassidic school where almost everybody’s parents and almost all the teachers were some sort of refugee or exile from Nazism, Henry had an accent stronger than the other children and, unlike most of the others, had not come from Germany or Austria and, therefore, even within this ‘community’, was different. Asked about whether his past had contributed to his fears, Henry replied:

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It’s more than fear. It’s the laughter at my accent. I had a recurrent nightmare when I was at primary school, which was that I was trying to speak to people, but they couldn’t understand me. I was screaming and screaming, and nothing came out. That did actually happen to me. People said they couldn’t understand what I was saying. If they did, they laughed at me because I talked in a funny way.

Henry explained how bullying made him feel: ‘You are persecuted and bullied by others because you are disgusting. You assimilate that.’ Being a refugee among other refugees was not a protection if one was the wrong sort of refugee. Such experiences will have reinforced any tendency towards viewing the world as a hostile and fearful place. Tom illustrated the intertwining of language, Jewishness, difference and bullying. He talked of a sports day at his small, private prep school: ‘I remember quite vividly . . . I remember being quite embarrassed by my father at [his] having quite an expensive fur coat and speaking with a definite Austrian accent.’ Tom said that at the time he didn’t think of it as a Jewish accent. Later in the interview, he said: I wanted to conform, between five and fifteen. I don’t want to be special or marked in any way that I haven’t myself chosen. If I’d had a pronounced Spanish accent, or my father had had, I wouldn’t have liked that either. It’s something to do with being foreign in xenophobic England, 1945 to ’55, where the exotic is not welcome. Between five and fifteen, primary and early secondary, up to O level, how I would have thought at the time. I think it would be a difference that justifies persecution . . . I was more conscious of the dangers of persecution because I wore glasses, so I could not do contact sports. And also I was relatively small. The last thing I needed was another attribute that called for persecution. . . . The school playground is a scary place, and you know the wash of people picking on people, just wandering around. . . . People amuse themselves by picking on others. So in that sense, being Jewish was not a power resource, if anything, it was a ‘not one of us’. Being Spanish would have been similar. . . . I think it’s about difference, what particular difference it is. I think if I’d said I was American that would have been a source of power. Whatever being Jewish was, it wasn’t a power resource.

A man who is third generation but who also went to primary school in the 1950s wrote the following to me: I certainly remember the anti-Semitism of the 1950s. It seemed to drop off when the black and Asian people arrived and the racists had a new target. The anti-Semitism at school sometimes took the form of kids

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saying—probably repeating what they had heard at home—‘I don’t know why the Jews went into the gas-chambers without fighting’ . . . I also recall the appalling level of bullying at school, often encouraged by the teachers which picked on any difference. I got it in the neck for having a stutter—which only made it worse.

Henry said: I was bullied terribly. By the children and the teachers. By the children because of my accent. They said they couldn’t understand me. I didn’t want to go to primary school at all. I used to follow my mother home, which was only a few minutes away. Then she would return me to school. Then at secondary school, a lot of emphasis developed on my being academically successful, so I was sick every morning, literally every morning, I was so nervous about not performing well. If I didn’t perform well enough, I’d be hit.

Henry was also bullied by the teachers. ‘I don’t think a day went by . . . and this went on for two or three years. . . . [Mr G.] hit me all the time if I made mistakes. It wasn’t usually a formal caning with the stick; it was usually a slap in the face. All sorts of ingenious ways. I was scared stiff.’ Yet Mr G. was, in a way, his favourite teacher because Mr G. had high expectations of him. ‘He used to call every child “an ox” if they made a mistake, but me, he called a “capital ox”. [Said with a smile.]’ The significance of bullying is that, far from it just being an occasional event, school ceases to offer a safe space and limits the possibility of countering the insecurity of the family. Yet as Peter highlighted after the interview, bullying is not synonymous with feeling bad about oneself. He was bullied through much of his time at secondary school, but because he excelled both academically and in sports, he never questioned his sense of self-worth; indeed, he stated that he felt good about himself most of the time. The participants did not generally talk about having childhood friends. But Henry said: [In sixth form] I developed friends with the other ‘capital oxen’. . . . In fact, we went to university together and we remained lifelong friends. . . . I had hardly any friends at primary school. . . . [He made friends with a local Polish Catholic boy who was] gentle, but he also had friends with the tough boys in the street, and he brought them around and they said if anybody comes for you [which had been happening], we’ll defend you, but they didn’t come.

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The sense of displacement and dislocation is not just a consequence of how the participants perceived themselves and their place in the world or of their parents’ lack of security or sense of not belonging. From a young age, a series of institutional processes occurred that located the British second-generation child in the place of Other. Much of the British second generation’s experience is, I suspect, a part of the common territory of being the child of refugees. But the lack of generosity by the host country at both a state and civil level that their parents dealt with, the frequent near-destruction and absence of a wider family, their problematic relationship with their parents, and the British second generation’s lack of a sense of belonging has left them with a particularly deep sense of displacement and disconnection from the ‘now’. Of Pain, Not Pathology Much of this section, ‘Us’, has already highlighted many zones of our fears and sense of loss. Here I want to focus on our internal emotional landscape and how it impacts our ways of relating with others outside our birth families. Most of the people whose transcripts make up the core of this book had successful careers. Yet I suggest that many of us were more anxious, had lower self-esteem and had more troubled relationships than was typical of our professional peers—or, indeed, was the experience of many of our parents. I did not ask specific questions about psychological legacy, but it was an interwoven and recurrent theme. Though Glassman (2013, 228, 229) is writing specifically about second-generation women, she says that they often saw themselves as failures as children, partners, mothers, friends and at work, are disproportionately anxious and have issues of intimacy. Questions around anxiety and low self-esteem, in more or less acute forms, permeated many of the interviews, as has already been alluded to. I am not suggesting that the British second generation is unique in their pain: the process of disengagement from parents, the impact of any war or being any second generation will always create loss and anxiety. Nor am I suggesting that there is a ‘Ms Average’ out there with normal responses to normal situations from which in some fashion the British second generation deviates. This is a position I reject. The issue here is how far the British second-generation experience is distinctive. How our parents’ experiences ‘transferred’ their impact onto the second generation is the stuff of ‘transferred trauma’. While transferred trauma theory shows, often on a quantitative rather than qualitative basis, some link between the experiences of the parent and the psychological

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health of the child and gives us some useful insights, its emphasis is on internal psychological processes and on traumatized behaviour as generally problematic and probably inevitable. My position, however, is that pain is not desirable, but this does not make it pathological. The participants’ insecurities, fears, sense of Otherness and of being the victim of circumstance are rational consequences of a real context: our parents were affected by Nazism, the Holocaust, dislocation and death. Our sense of displacement may link with what would be defined by some professionals, trauma experts and some in the second generation as problems of mental health; I am not suggesting that forms of therapy may not help in some cases. But this help has to be centred on us working towards accepting ourselves, on transcending passive acceptance and instead having agency. Peter was the one person to comment explicitly that the process of finding out about one’s murdered family may not be good for one’s emotional and mental health. The implications of what he said could apply to almost all of us. [I know researching my grandparents] in Auschwitz, I know it’s very [emotionally] costly. After the last trip back to Hungary . . . when I went there with my partner . . . I got quite seriously ill afterwards. . . . I find it hard not to imagine there was some sort of connection . . . But I know dealing with that stuff comes at a cost. At the time it feels so imperatively important to be engaging with all this stuff emotionally and ideologically, just to try to keep a level of awareness, what’s the cost to you. Is it worth it? . . . Or are you going to make yourself ill again? That’s not resolved.

He had already become ill after going to Hungary with his father. As he said, ‘However much I may think at a rational, conscious level, this [finding out about his family] is OK, in practice, it’s incredibly punishing.’ Photos were a recurrent issue in a way no other object was. Tom gives us a glimpse of the cost of researching the past when he talked of his resistance to looking at family photos. He draws our attention to how, when we observe the people in the photos, we both do not know who they are and also fear these are the photos of people who were murdered. And if they had not been murdered, we are still aware of death, for the photos do not just remind us that the images are of people who are no longer alive, but also about why we do not know who they are. In Tom’s case, there was a large trunk of photographs. That’s an emotional time when I go and look for them. . . .

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I don’t know most of these people. There’s a family album that my mother kept. Some of the photos have names, but I don’t know anything more about them. There is a resistance there somewhere. If I go into that, I will start to discover all the things I don’t know. Is there a way of discovering all that? If they were people I knew very well or had lots and lots of stories about so I felt I knew them or had met their children or something.

Similarly, Peter said: I suppose the Holocaust was something in which six million people died, but in which there was hardly any concept of my own grandparents there. My father had had pictures of both of his parents by his bedside. It was another strand of the confusion. We were told nothing about them. It was symptomatic of the confusion. What could be more important than having those photos by the bedside but you know nothing about them.

Before he had even sat down, Mike pulled out a photo and said: ‘OK. I just wanted to show you. That’s the only picture saved of my family. That’s my dad as a young boy. That’s his family. None of those people survived. They are his parents.’ The photo was permanently on his father’s desk ‘in front of him every day of his life, always. That was my image of the family. I had no others.’ Photos can provide a single source of knowledge. Robert said: My father’s family comes from Galicia. I only know that from some photos I found after his death. A postcard his father sent to a girlfriend who then became his wife. It’s in the Polish surname . . . Zosha. Then became Sophie. . . . [The postcard had been sent from somewhere] which I think is now in Ukraine and was then in Poland.

But parents do not always want photos to be seen by their children. Robert said: My father once showed me a photo of a large family—there’s Zilla, there’s Doja. [Robert was unsure of the spellings.] I was at uni. I said something to him, and we went to his secretaire [desk]. . . . My father had obviously locked up the photos, and he was laughing [in the photo]. He was a very kind and tender man to his death. But he was very brusque. It was so nice to see him laughing, smile. We walked from the front room and my mother must have known [they were looking at photos], and she went into a tirade, and she said, ‘You think you’ve suffered.’

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Until I cleared my parent’s home, I had seen hardly any photos or photo albums until I disinterred them from under piles of paper that kept them hidden and inaccessible. I am puzzled by whether my parents did or did not want me to find the albums. Sarah highlighted the role of the photo as commemoration. ‘There’s no family left. I’ve got these gorgeous photos of these kids [her cousins who were sent to a death camp], and I had them up in the [Church of England] altar church for Memorial Day [Holocaust Day].’ She elaborated during our informal chat. She said she did not usually go to church but that this was a way to ensure the children were remembered as they should be and in an appropriate communal setting, rather than that she had any religious affiliation. Photos can provide the only possible, though inevitably constructed, link with the murdered grandparent. Mike said: ‘There was this one moment when my father photographed us staring at these cards [sent by relatives] from Auschwitz-Birkenau, the family’s last contact with the world. It was revelatory but very painful.’ Though any words to do with ‘mental health’ are open to a multiplicity of meanings, many of the participants presented themselves as anxious or hinted at having had periods of depression or worse. Depression or anxiety will have a range of meanings in psychiatry and psychology, but that is not how I or the participants were using the words. This is about how the participants perceived themselves. Peter stated he had been depressed through much of his childhood because of, though this was only implied, his parents’ difficult relationship, itself the legacy of his father’s exile. It had taken Peter a long time, he said, to come to terms with who he perceived he was. Two of the women whose testimonials are unfortunately not included spoke extensively about bouts of depression. Yet at the same time, a reader of the testimonials might perceive what is being said as indicative of depression or anxiety or of a state of being that is almost too painful or upsetting to read about, while the participant is presenting their suffering as the everyday or just the way things were. Mike presented himself as a confident, successful and sociable man, much, he suggested, as his father had done. But as the interview progressed, Mike started to unfold and said that he had suffered repeated and sometimes intense periods of depression and insecurity. The effects of having a mentally unstable mother, with whom he largely grew up, cannot be separated from the effects of the legacy of the Holocaust. Still, the Holocaust provided the frame within which Mike lived his life. Mike’s reaction is instructive: I have always felt I had a mission to explain, to make sense of the family catastrophe. It gives one’s life coherence. . . . It has given me a

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structure. I could go barmy. Sometimes, I think I could possibly become ill like my mother. It worries me. But I also think, because I’ve got this damned mission, I’m not going mad, I’m going to stay as rational as I can.

Sarah saw her mental illness as a by-product of her mother’s, itself a product of exile. Her mother had been less than emotionally stable prior to her forced exit from Czechoslovakia. ‘If I think about it, E. [Sarah’s mother] was always very overanxious, and her mother was even worse.’ The murder of so many of her family, including her beloved nephews, meant ‘[Sarah’s] mother had a bit of a traumatic time’, which had aggravated this tendency, and she spent long periods in mental hospitals and clinics. It affected me [Sarah] because I didn’t realize my mother was mentally ill till I was about fifteen. I just thought she was annoying. . . . She made huge mountains out of molehills. . . . If I did x, my mother would say, ‘Why don’t you do y?’ . . . I was very rebellious and very nasty to her in my teenage years. I carried it on. My illness. Carried it on. When I retired I had a nervous breakdown.

After a second-generation meeting that I had addressed about the connection between being second generation and health, a woman, L., wanted to talk to me. I took notes. L.’s parents had fled Czechoslovakia at the last possible moment and almost had not made it. The suggestion was that this had affected L.’s mother profoundly. My mother was a frightened lady. . . . She used her body to show fear. I could smell the fear on my mother. I learnt that from her. I used to tell her to go away from me. I know what fear smells like. It’s an animal thing. I picked up that fear. I didn’t like people coming too close to me. I didn’t like their smells, their breath. I also went from doctor to doctor. I also was concerned about my health. Afraid of what my body would do.

At the age of sixteen, L. had a complete breakdown. Her father forbade her to talk to a psychiatrist about the family. She was frightened of hurting her parents, of making worse what she already knew was there, afraid she had damaged them terribly. L. said she still had no real sense of herself but insisted on how happy she was. Henry used a similar vocabulary about himself: ‘You hated yourself. . . . You were disgusting; you were dirty, sweaty, smelly. . . . It’s not hate, it’s contempt, shame for the body and its sweats and its odours.’

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Although this is a topic for a different book, some light is shed on how some of the participants viewed their bodies by the work of both Gilman and Seidman. In terms of the discourses that could have influenced our parents and grandparents, Gilman (1991, 41–48, 171–81) argues that in Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, there was an obsession to mark the Jewish body as racially inferior, whether by virtue of the shape of feet, the colour of the skin or the shape of the nose. Seidman (2013, 1, 3–25), considering the modern construction of Otherness, states that alienation from familial-civic life marks the Other, the outsider as not quite human, that the ‘conflict-ridden social condition of Euro-American societies might unconsciously evoke bodily and psychic unease’, both giving rise to a sense of defilement and disgust towards the body. Though this is a topic unto itself, did Henry ‘take into’ himself the suspicion of collusion in Henry’s family, furthering his sense of disgust? Henry, who had a difficult time both at school and home, described some of what he saw as the effects on him of this past with awareness and clarity. He did not present them in terms of any kind of breakdown: ‘The main thing is that I have incredibly serious problems with anxiety and fear.’ He went on to give the examples of how difficult it is for him to fly or use escalators. He continued: ‘But leaving aside those concrete fears, I’m just constantly anxious. Free-floating anxieties. It’s physical, but it’s also social. . . . I’m still scared every time I stand up and lecture. This is to PhD students. At the beginning of the year.’ He went on: ‘I suppose there are two or three things I’m scared of. People laugh at you. I lose track of what I’m saying. . . . I still worry every time I write an article . . . It doesn’t matter what it is, I’m scared of it. I’m scared of people.’ Later in the interview, he explained he has difficulty sleeping, though these days this is more to do with free-floating anxiety about specific things rather than panic attacks. Henry ended his interview by commenting on how, despite his considerable academic and other public achievements, his ability to secure jobs has also been effected by how he feels about himself. Moreover, he draws our attention to how his successes would not have occurred today. In real life, I’m about to discuss the terms of my retirement with my head of department, but J. [his wife] says don’t go in losing. Already having conceded what is reasonable for you to ask for. I’m selling myself for half of what I’m doing. I’ve been lucky. I’m not very good at interviews or applying for jobs. All the jobs and promotions I’ve got I have done without interviews. That wouldn’t be possible now.

Anxiety alone can contribute to underachievement. Unlike most people, my expectation is, however improbable a catastrophe, it could well hap-

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pen. So I too find any sort of formal assessment terrifying. Once, taking my final university exams, for which I was thoroughly prepared, I was in such a state of anxiety, shaking so uncontrollably, that one of the examiners kindly escorted me out of the exam hall. One question I asked of almost all the participants was about their relationship to food. I had expected food to be a territory of some symbolic significance, associated with their parent’s country of origin, lost family, cultural traditions, a cause for anxiety on the part of parents and/or children and even of conflict. But the only person who responded as I had anticipated and for whom food carried great meaning was Henry. For him, food was a source of deep anxiety. His attitude to food was closely linked to his—often negative—attitude to himself. I shall quote from his interview at length. I’ve got food phobias, very closely related to sex phobias. I was aware of food phobias when I was a child. It’s a self-hating thing. . . . I don’t like food I associate with Eastern European women, unless I’ve cooked them myself or a man has cooked them. When we went to restaurants when I was younger, I made my father go into the kitchen and reassure me there wasn’t a woman cook. It’s something to do with my love-hate of my mother. I don’t want food cooked by anybody in any way like my mother, in any way associated with Eastern European–looking women. Being an English Jew is not enough. It’s if they look Eastern European, are dark, Jewish looking . . . Elizabeth Taylor sort of looks. My first wife was blond and Germanic, Anglo-Saxon looking. So is my present wife. I hated me and people like me. I always ate my mother’s cooking with enormous gusto and by extension my aunt’s, my father’s sister, who was like a mother to me. When it came to my mother’s other sisters or my first wife’s mother and they cooked food lovingly for me, I found it incredibly difficult to eat her food on a Friday night. It’s also a question of what they’ve cooked. The more homely it is—chicken soup, stews are the worst. . . . It’s such an ordeal to eat. . . . [It’s] a very mixed thing. You hated yourself, had contempt, it was disgusting. You were disgusting; you were dirty, sweaty smelly. . . . It’s not hate, it’s contempt, shame for the body and its sweats and its odours. . . . The ambivalence is that you love yourself . . . you are fundamentally a good person; you are persecuted and bullied by others because you are disgusting. You assimilate that. When I was a child I wanted to have food that was out of a tin or frozen, cooked by a super-chef in a highly scientific way. English food. Women and sex was the same. I always only fancied Anglo-Saxon-looking women, a sort of Portnoy’s complaint. . . . Jewish-looking women, however beautiful, women like

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my sister, say. I can see they are attractive. They are too close. They are like me.

Anxiety takes many forms. In Tom Wengraf’s interview of me, I expanded on how afraid I had become of the everyday when still only five or six: The bus [that I caught from infants’ school back home] was always crowded, and I was always frightened that I’d miss the stop. I was always terrified I would not be able to say: ‘The Hospital’. That’s where I got off. I was really scared that the words just wouldn’t come out. And I remember my parents offered to make me a sign saying ‘The Hospital, please’, to wear round my neck. Can you imagine a five-year-old with a sign round her neck saying ‘The Hospital, please’? I often used to have terrible nightmares that I couldn’t get off the bus and it would take me to places I didn’t know.

An anxiety about the self affects our ability to develop relationships, though this was a zone that I did not set out to explore. Henry said: Obviously it [being scared of people] does affect relationships. . . . I’m scared of girls is what it comes down to; I’m also scared of boys, but less so. I’m particularly scared of girls. I assume they will reject me. . . . There’s cartoon [in a book by Skinner and Cleese] I identify with, with a man falling under the table and the woman across the table says, ‘But I said yes’.

Rosenthal (Rosenthal et al. 1998, 65) suggests a link between the second generation’s upbringing and the partners we choose. The second generation, she suggests, are likely to suppress their aggression and therefore seek partners who can express this for them. Indeed, what emerged about these participants was that most of the sample had not had conventional and/or permanent marriages/partnerships. Both Sarah and Robert went through a series of serious relationships, none of which lasted. Robert had no children. Mike had been through two marriages—he has maintained close contact with his exes and their children—and was in another relationship. Tom was onto his third—and successful—marriage and able to work hard to sustain it. Judith’s only marriage had failed early on, without children. Tania’s long-term partnership dissolved after some years, though they had a son. Although Henry had had two long-standing, successful relationships, explaining his ambivalent attitude to some women, he said: ‘Jewish-looking women, however beautiful . . . I can see they are attractive. [But] they are too close. They are like me.’

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Peter had finally settled into a relationship in his forties and also had no children. He presented a clear connection between this and his family’s experiences: A form of survivor guilt . . . left me with such a sense of duty to live for the social good and to justify every minute of my existence that I was very uncompromising in relationships and very moralistic (even self-righteous!). This led all too often to my withdrawing from them, unable to negotiate my way through various kinds of difference. It also made me feel that one of the worst things one could experience was to feel trapped in any kind of relationship. The withdrawal and fear of ‘entrapment’ was, I’m sure, one reason why I didn’t get into any very meaningful relationship until I was over thirty.

However, the absence of a stable partner is not the only response to insecurity. At a conference, I was chatting to a second-generation man who had had a particularly disrupted childhood and adolescence and who had been in the same relationship for close on fifty years. When I expressed some surprise, he explained that otherwise he would have completely sunk emotionally. Another second-generation man in a forty-yearold marriage also stressed how important his wife was to his ability to cope. So for some of us, relationships can provide the raft of being and the security upon which we float. Though I am not trying to suggest that the experience of the second generation is not frequently painful, not committing oneself to a longterm relationship is not necessarily a sign of failure. The person might be protecting themselves from further pain or have preferred not to settle down. And the decision not to have a child can make good sense if the person does not feel, for whatever historical and personal reasons, that they can or want to carry out the role of parent. Indeed, as is apparently a pattern among the British second generation, the participants had fewer than average children, though some people had stepchildren and Tom, exceptionally, had two children and one, then two, stepchildren. Three out of the eight participants did not have any children. Two of the five women I interviewed had only one, both outside marriage and many of the conventions of conception. Although carried out in Germany, with its own distinctive history, Grünberg’s (2007) study’s conclusions are still significant: ‘A relatively large proportion of the descendants of Jewish survivors in Germany that I interviewed were childless. This particularly applies to relationships with non-Jewish-German partners’. At a meeting, chatting to a second-generation woman, many of whose large, Germany family had been murdered, I asked why she had not had children. ‘Too messy’, she replied, and visibly shuddered.

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Indeed, I had put off having children until I was almost too old. I was committed not to give life to somebody who could be as unhappy as I had been. Tom also told me informally that he postponed having children until he felt grown-up enough to take responsibility for a child—and that this had happened quite late. We appear to reach our personal milestones a bit later than the norm, and some of us, especially if women, miss the conception milestone altogether. Those of us who are parents continue, despite ourselves, to feel insecurity towards our own children. A second-generation woman who I talked to informally after a Second Generation meeting told me how, when her son returned home during the university holidays and already in his early twenties, she would go to bed but be unable to sleep until she heard him come home, even if it was in the early hours of the morning, because she was so anxious that something had happened to him. She did not switch on the light because she did not want her son to see that she was waiting up. She had laughed apologetically when telling me this story, but many second-generation—and first-generation—mothers will understand it all too well. To quote from my interview, where I was talking about how anxious I got about my son, I gave an example: ‘I remember one time when there was a school trip. He was eight or nine. The coach was very late . . . and I just assumed it had crashed. And I was crying.’ I continued: ‘Even though I make strenuous efforts to almost push him [my son] out [from home], I did the opposite deliberately to my parents, I always encouraged him to look outwards, but I was always anxious. . . . [I was] very loving and caring, but very anxious. And his response to that is to be angry . . . History has a long arm.’ Yet if I consider my level of anxiety towards my son and compare that to my parents’ anxieties towards me, I do realize there has been progress. While they locked the front door with me inside, I may have been in a state of terror, but at least my son was on the outside of that door. I had learnt and was able to give my son space, ironically more so, I suspect, than many of his peers, because I had not had any space. But I was not able to still my terror every time he went out. Who we became has to be understood in terms of the history into which we were born. I said in my interview: I think there is a question how on earth I’ve managed to mess up my life. You know I’m bright; I wasn’t unattractive. So theoretically I had an awful lot going for me. I came from a high-culture family, incredibly so. I went to Oxford [University]. So what the fuck happened? . . . And I was a woman. If I’d been a man, and everything else being constant, I’d have had a different purchase on all this. Being a woman intensifies the sense of lacking worth.

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I was the only interviewee, from the women and the men, to touch on how far there is a different trajectory for women.

One of the inspirations behind my research was to deconstruct the concept of victimhood. As already discussed, the current discourse on the Holocaust has generally cast those who went through it and their children as survivors and victims. The presentation of self as the object, the person done to, without agency and outside any historical positioning, has become a feature of much second-generation thinking, though one not accepted by all the participants. While none of the participants voiced a belief in themselves as victims, both John and Tania explicitly voiced their refusal to be a victim. John, whose father was Jewish and who identified with his Jewishness, said: ‘I never joined any of these [second-generation] groups. I read a few newsletters. And what didn’t ring a bell with me was this idea of being a victim! [Laughter] I never saw myself as a victim.’ Within the interviews, nobody presented themselves to me explicitly as a victim, and I leave it to the reader to decide whether such a mind-set lay beneath any of the testimonials. Yet I know, as John’s testimony suggests, the culture of many secondgeneration group meetings emanates from an emotional place closely associated with victimhood. The argument, much along the lines of transferred trauma, is that they were victims because the persecution of their parents had a knock-on traumatizing effect on them. My supposition is that the issue of agency is fundamental: that when children had been brought up by parents who had chosen to act against the Nazis, irrespective of their precise political hat, the children would be less likely to see themselves as victims. Yet the term victim itself has to be decoded. There is a porous line between a concern that present and active anti-Semitism might make one a target and a fear that one is a hypothetical target because one is a Jew, as came across in a couple of the interviews with women whose testimonials are not included. Indeed, I am left wondering whether an unintentional selection process occurred: that the people who were willing to be interviewed and allow their transcripts to be made public are the people who were the least likely to see themselves as victims. Tom was the one person to talk explicitly about resilience. I had asked how his family’s past had affected him and he said:

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It’s a source of resilience for me. One can survive. Even though I was six weeks premature and expected to die, I didn’t die. My parents were determined that I would live . . . and I did live. It’s a source of resilience . . . Even when I’ve had ‘suicidal thoughts’, I’ve thought of what my parents went through, and I say to myself, ‘Our family does not commit suicide.’ Things may be very bad, but my parents didn’t give up, and they came to England and they didn’t give up, and I haven’t given up.

Tom’s testimony also reminds us of the degree to which our internal states cannot be isolated from the effects of the real world and of class. When I asked him: ‘Do you think the glass [of the “bell jar”] is thinner for you than for your mother?’ he replied: Yes, I think that’s true. . . . The glass is thinner now. I’m more in touch with the emotional life of myself and others than my mother is. But I don’t claim that as a credit. I’m living in a moderately prosperous part of the world in a relatively stable part of history. It’s lucky. I haven’t had to develop such furious defences against the present and the past. I’ve been a member of a relatively privileged class in a relatively privileged part of the world at a particular time. The welfare state plus the golden 1945 and all the rest of it. If I’d been subject to the same pressures, I might well have turned out to be more peculiar than they were.

Much of this study has been about events that have caused many of us overwhelming pain: the pain of seeing our parents unable to cope with their losses; their pain of exile and dislocation; our pain of not knowing; the pain of silence; our pain of estrangement from our parents; our pain at being the outsiders in school and beyond and the pain of difficult personal relationships. But what I am suggesting is that our responses need to be seen within the paradigm that they can help us cope, be protective and encourage a sense of self and agency rather than being problematic or pathological.

BREAKING THE SILENCE? I began this book with a quote from my mother: ‘I am history, you are the postscript.’ This book has been a postscript: a script post the event, which aims at a reclaiming of ourselves and our pasts. This is a study that has allowed the participants to tell their own stories and allowed the reader to gain some insight into the participants’ lives; something, I would argue, that could not have occurred in a more suppos-

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edly representative and larger sample. I do not lay claim for this book and the testimonials included here to be presenting a representative—or indeed nonrepresentative—sample of the whole of the British second generation. But the many and divergent issues that emerge from the testimonials do cast some light on the experiences of many second generations. Although I started this study intending to interview people active in the Second Generation Network, the vast majority of people I spoke with had never or rarely been to a Second Generation meeting. However, for the participants, noninvolvement with second-generation organizations did not mean that being second generation was not significant. Asked whether he thought the concept of second generation was useful, Mike, who never went to meetings, replied: Yes, I think it’s important to acknowledge the impact that the second generation have had, has a great deal of potency. I do. . . . When I meet [second-generation] people who have had a similar type of experience, there is a sense of something we need to discuss, stuff that wasn’t discussed properly.

Moreover, the range of meanings associated with being second generation did not correspond to whether or not people attended meetings. Peter, who did attend meetings, was the only person for whom a secondgeneration identity was key and largely unproblematic. Peter stated that being second generation was the most important part of him and had been since his teens. It defined who he was. ‘Being second generation is top of the list, without question, and nothing else comes anything near. . . . If I was explaining why I am as I am and why I give a priority to the things I do, there’s no question, that’s the first thing on the list.’ On the other hand, Tania’s main source of identity was her political beliefs, although she too regularly attended meetings. Robert’s response to whether being second generation was important to him was: ‘To me there is no question. I am an outsider. I am in exile from myself as well as from whatever Other. I don’t think of myself as a refugee. That would be disgusting, pretentious. I’m the child of refugees, asylum seekers, whatever. . . . I’m a Central European.’ At the other end of the scale, Tom did not see himself as second generation, and he also rejected the tag because of its political use. I have rather a horror of tags, including the tag ‘second generation’, unless a technical description. If I’m asked if I’m Jewish, I’d answer I’m technically Jewish . . . but I don’t know a Jewish ritual. . . . I don’t feel any sense of solidarity with being Jewish or second generation . . . What does the term mean to me? I don’t like identity terms. Give me a list of as many identity items as, say, twenty, and I would not think of

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myself as a second-generation Jew or anything . . . as a description even if I had a forty-item list . . . It’s a hostility to the concept [second generation] because of its political use.

Tom and others’ doubts about the links between their identity and being second generation plus the diversity in the testimonials raises the question: Does the concept of second generation carry enough coherence to make it meaningful? As a term of self-identification as opposed to a technical or definitional term, even a few of the people who agreed to be participants in a study of the British second generation did not identify themselves with it. Many people born to refugees do not define themselves as second generation, either because the concept of being second generation is not sufficiently formulated or because it is not sufficiently prominent to their sense of who they are compared to other possible identities. Moreover, it is impossible to define the contours of the second generation. Henry’s parents arrived here with their child, yet Henry saw himself as second generation. Tania moved back to Britain but, despite her adolescence in Germany, is committed to being British second generation. Peter’s mother was English, yet Peter stated that being second generation was the most important aspect of himself. Yet Tom, with his two foreign refugee parents, did not see being second generation as of special significance. Some in the second generation were born in the late 1930s, others in the 1960s, a span of almost a generation. Nor is being second generation synonymous with being Jewish, as I hope this work has demonstrated, though some would lay claim to that equation. The second generation encompasses many identities and perspectives; there is no simple answer as to who we are. Indeed there were as many significant dissimilarities as similarities among the participants. First of all, the reasons parents left had different effects on their children. The children of parents who fled more for political than for other reasons had slight but significant differences in their sense of their own experience from many of the other participants. Their parents had known what they were doing and would have had a good idea as to what the consequences could be. At least in Tania’s case, her parents and some of their comrades, whether Jewish or not, had been imprisoned, tortured and murdered for their political commitments, not for who they were. Both John and Tania identified with their parents and both saw themselves as socialists and activists in their own right. Their binational status and political beliefs accentuated a distance from issues surrounding nationhood; at least in John’s case, his circle of friends, many Jewish, provided him with pleasure. John saw himself as Jewish and a socialist. Both John and Tania were keen to reject any idea that they or their

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parents were victims. Sarah refused any idea that Jewishness could be ‘inherited’ and scorned her father, who had previously been in the KPD, for moving dramatically to the political right in the UK. But even days before her death, she retained an excoriating and energetic view of people who did not stand up for themselves and fight back. The meaning of Jewishness to the participants varied considerably and was frequently distinct from that of their parents, who often took measures so that they and their children would assimilate. The issue of what being Jewish meant to all the participants, except Tania, was a profound, even overriding, concern. Indeed, the annihilation of family distinguishes all second-generation people of any form of Jewish background, including those who have a low identification with being Jewish. There is a spectrum of people who can be defined as or who define themselves as Jewish. For those at the lower end of identification, the destruction of family is the primary identifier for defining themselves as Jewish, rather than Jewishness being lived in the present or identified with. For those at the other end of spectrum, primary identification is with being Jewish as such, though what that meant to or how it affected the participants varied. Thus, we return to the signifier of loss and the intractable issue of mourning as common factors for the second generation. Another difference, though one I suggest regularly lay hidden as an issue, was that our experiences were mediated by gender. Gender was one influence on our sense of overriding responsibility towards parents and family that connected with the willingness to see interviews in print. It was noticeable from all the women I interviewed that we had not done as well professionally as the men. With such a small sample and only two women agreeing to have their testimonials included, any analysis as to whether the women were more concerned with ‘finding their dead’ or, in line with Wardi’s (1992, 31, 32) suggestion, were more the ‘memorial candles’ than the men has to be tentative, but among these participants, this pattern did not emerge . However, one gendered pattern that applied equally to the male and female participants is that the ideological construction of the mother role appeared frequently to create an animosity towards the mother, one of the building blocks in our sense of dissociation from our families and our pasts. One issue that raised its head if only by omission was that of class: I cannot know whether any working-class members of the British second generation would have perceived themselves differently as there were none involved. Most of the participants grew up in middle-class families and all were, in one sense or another, middle class. What is significant here is the disjuncture with our feelings of uncertainty. The relative economic security of our positions makes the level of insecurity and displacement we experienced more noticeable.

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But I want to return to the commonalities that ran strongly through the testimonials and also often applied to many others I talked to while doing this research and that indicate the meaningfulness of the category of British second generation. What emerged vividly from all the testimonials were the often extreme gaps in knowledge about family. This had deeply affected all the participants and is, I suggest, one of the key elements of one layer of the British second generation. The participants did not feel that they had been told family stories, with their usual weave of the real and fable, which normally helps to locate a child within a web of identifiers. Nor did they feel they could ask, whether because when little and when patterns of relationships were being set, they did not want to upset their parents or, as they grew older, because of a reaction against their parents. The testimonials testify to an acute sense of loss, both of family and information, a failure of parents to give a coherent and ordered story about our pasts that fed into a sense of being outsiders and not belonging and an insecurity about self and relationships. When parent and child did speak, it was more likely to be in trivialities or unrealities. Any possibility for meaningful exchange eroded. Conversations became about the everyday, a surface reality, not what lurked beneath. Despite my reservations about the use of the concept of ‘haunting’ in an uncritical and too liberal way, haunting aptly describes how many of the participants felt. They ‘knew’ without ever being told that there were terrible secrets that it was wiser not to enquire about and learnt when young not to ask questions. The secret, the thing that could not be talked about, was the deaths of the participants’ grandparents. I had not anticipated the intensity of feelings the participants showed about people they had not known. This was not some playing out of sentimentality or formulaic kowtowing to notions of commemoration or laying a claim to the horrors of the Holocaust. To use Wardi’s (1992, 27–39) phrase again, many of the participants acted as the ‘memorial candles’, the people who carry the burden of remembering or, rather, of trying to piece together a memory. Late in life, and at deep emotional cost, the participants went to libraries, searched websites, wrote letters to bureaucrats in Germany and elsewhere, had fragile dusty slips of letter-paper translated into English, looked for the places where grandparents had lived and just maybe, persuaded parents before their deaths to speak, even if briefly, about their murdered dead. It seems that so much of what this work has been about is an often subterranean process of mourning, which, for some of us anyway, late in our lives, has become a key aspect of our being. Yet though this study has been about why so many of the second generation so often have not been able or wanted to break their parents’ silences, what has emerged from these testimonials are also the manifold

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differences in types of silence. Many parents could not talk of their own murdered parents. However, what runs through most of these explanations is the Holocaust and how to remember murdered loved ones. But there has been little written systematically about why this is. In the past, there was an emphasis on guilt—on silence being the consequence of being alive while one’s family was dead, of having escaped, leaving parents to be murdered. Then the emphasis switched to explaining silence in terms of shame, of something that is outside of the individual, a concept that appeared in some of the testimonials. Then there is an explanation for the parents’ silence in terms of atonement, and/ or of feeling that to speak of such terrible things is somehow to betray the dead. Or maybe silence is a result of the past being too unbearable to think about. Or again, maybe that it is better to bring up the secondgeneration child without the cloud of such barbarism. But, as the section on the silence of the Political parents indicated, for this group, there may be divergent reasons for silence—a refusal to betray beliefs even if those beliefs did not work out as one had believed they would and/or an abiding fear that to be open about one’s past would increase the possibility of state harassment. Moreover, as already suggested, anti-Communism, often very loosely interpreted at official and civil levels, only abated in the 1960s, unlike anti-Semitism, which has been seen generally as beyond the political pale since the end of World War II. Yet what is also intriguing is why none of the second-generation interviewees was able to successfully confront their parents’ silences, at least for most of them, until late in middle age when many of those interviewed had started a painful search for family. There are no clear answers. Children did not want to upset or confront their parents. They absorbed into their deepest psychic being that to step into the past was emotionally dangerous; as indeed it was. Going on these voyages had left almost all the participants emotionally drained, on occasion seriously so. It is hard to get to know the ghosts who have haunted you since childhood. But what has to be recognized, at least for most in the British second generation, and as a leading member of the Second Generation Network stated recently at a meeting, ‘To be second generation means the Holocaust.’ Unlike our exiled parents for whom there was little public recognition of either the consequences of the camps for the survivors or for the children of those who did not survive, since the late 1960s, the construction of the Holocaust and the meanings attached to it have both allowed for a far greater and legitimate focus on the effects of murdered family on the British second generation, but also made that murder a key ‘existential’ point of identity for many in the second generation, often leading to a

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sense of victimhood. However, as both John and Tania’s testimonies explicitly reveal, as does Tom’s by implication, this interpretation is not always shared. The significance of the adoption of an explicitly political analysis of Nazism is explored in part 1. Yet as the participants reached middle age, in some cases late middle age, as an examination of the testimonials reveal, most of the participants became almost driven in their search for relatives murdered in the Holocaust, although never known to them. Mike, Robert, Sarah, Tom and I have all undertaken searches that are so painful that to stop would appear as the most sensible course of action, and yet we do not stop. Similarly, Isaac has been going to the many addresses listed in the Berlin Jewish library of relatives murdered in Germany, of whom he knew no one. Mike has stated he has committed his life to finding out about what happened to his and other families in the Holocaust. Thus, although the grandparents and other murdered relatives were never known to the participants, many of the participants feel driven to dedicate themselves to finding their dead, a feeling which their parents did not share. Yet what was also marked was how many of the participants, either in the interviews or when we were chatting informally, told me they had never spoken before of how much the Holocaust had impacted their lives. I can only suggest some of the reasons why, as this is something I did not set out to explore. First, as argued in part 1 and as seen in many of the testimonials, until very recently the refugees and their children were largely invisible, including among the established Jewish community. Thus there was no established discourse to facilitate communication. Indeed the experience of being a refugee or the child of a refugee was, arguably, more alien to the established Jewish community than they were to many other ‘non-English’ communities in England. Although refugees from, for example, Poland were not relevant to this study, again as argued in part 1, this exiled group was more likely to identify themselves as Jewish in a religious sense and to become integrated into an existing, long-established Jewish community on this basis; for them, therefore, identification as second generation was unlikely. As the second-generation participants were brought up to keep silent by their parents, they had not learnt a way of speaking about the murdered members of the family. Many of the participants found difficulty in describing exact relationships, even confusing who was whose relative. As Mike said, we have never become familiar with family trees. Rather, the personal impact of the Holocaust became a part of oneself that may have appeared as ‘haunted’, of living with ghosts, of experiences that nobody else would have any understanding of, not even those with whom one is intimate, which was on the very edge of the normal, a private zone that it was dangerous to talk about.

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Moreover, again as described in part 1, unlike for example the US or Israel, in the UK there has not been a vocabulary that celebrates ethnicity or diversity. There is another key defence in that the people who went to the US and Israel were most likely to have gone after the end of the war and were far more likely to be survivors, mostly from the camps. As shown in part 1, almost none of the exiles who arrived in the UK had been Holocaust survivors; almost all had arrived before the outbreak of war. Therefore the resonances of the Holocaust were different. In the UK, unlike Holocaust survivors, parents had left their families behind, and so they carried that cross on their backs. Moreover, especially in Israel, and increasingly from the late 1960s, unlike in the UK, victims of the Holocaust were celebrated. As already discussed in part 1, there was a Jewish/political spectrum in which many of the participants’ parents were, in some senses, both political and Jewish. Therefore even when parents fled as much or more for political reasons, they still lost family. In the sample, only one person’s parents had fled for exclusively political reasons, but they were part of the significant cohort of Social Democrats, Communists and others who also had to flee Nazism. All the participants in my study, whatever else was different about them, had a sense of exile and dislocation, and though this was expressed in different ways and with different levels of intensity, it characterized everyone. Exile had fractured our parents’ ‘normal’ social and individual relationships and their children’s ability to articulate who they are or were. This has been explored at length in part 1. The British second generation’s parents were ‘strangers in a foreign land’, and although some organizations and individuals were welcoming, as a generalization, the British state created problems that left a deep sense of insecurity and a need to hide one’s foreignness. And the Jewish establishment generally were of the opinion that too many Jews could upset both the assimilationist apple cart and the government with whom they were working closely. The echoes of exile applied without geographical displacement to the British second generation. There was an inner sense of displacement despite the external reality of always having lived in the country of birth. Dislocation created a hiatus between present and past. Defragmenting the past became impossible. This disjuncture is magnified by the absence of the common methods of recuperating—through a family network, by storytelling, familiarity with place and other cultural identifiers. The web of memory is broken.

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The participants expressed ambivalence and unease about how they identified themselves. While there is presently an enthusiasm for identity, which is not a universal theme, it is one characteristic of many an exiled community. This focus increases the British second generation’s obsession with who we are at the same time as it increases the sense of insecurity because of the absence of so many of the usual cultural ‘signs’ of identity. How far the experiences of this British second generation are common to most exiles in the UK or elsewhere is worth further research. I am not asserting a uniqueness to the British second generation’s experience as exiles. There are obvious similarities: the impact of dislocation, the child speaking in a different tongue from the parents, the dissimilarities in cultural assumptions between parents and child and that the family will be at a distance from most of their family network, if such exists. But our families were very much the product of a particular time, a particular barbarism, and a particular genocide. This genocide was orchestrated by the state against certain groups, defined by ascribed biological/genetic characteristics deemed as inferior. This distinguishes it from many other genocides of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which, although millions have been murdered, were not orchestrated by the state machine. Even the genocide of Srebrenica, where around eight thousand were murdered, the worst mass murder since the Holocaust, was carried out by units of the Bosnian Serb Army, a ‘rogue’ body not recognized internationally. Moreover, those born around the time of the war or soon afterwards grew up in a period when the horrors of the Second World War, even if not spoken of, hung over many of the young in the UK and far beyond like an indestructible fog. It was not just us who lost family. Tens of millions of people died as a result of the Second World War, leaving behind fatherless and motherless children and children without grandparents. Even after the end of the war, refugees and their children, whether Jewish or not, were often seen as outsiders, particularly if they were understood to be German and if they spoke ‘funny’. Our parents—and then us—generally had no sense of a home, a place, a family to return to in the parents’ country of birth. Our families became permanent exiles. We may have been told erroneously that the war was to rescue the Jews, but anti-Semitism did not stop in 1945. Many of us were born around the time our parents were searching for their dead. We were young at the beginning of the Cold War, when enemies were seen at many a gate and difference was suspect. Our refugee parents, who had endured so much, did not want us to stand out, did not believe—for this was the 1950s and 1960s—that talking could make things better. The aim of many of our

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parents was to assimilate, and this was the background that we grew up in, knowing all the while that we were somehow different. We were left haunted by ghosts, many of which those interviewed both felt they lived with for much of their lives and had dedicated much of their lives to find.

It would be too easy to marginalize much of what has been written here, to decide that the losses and suffering to which the testimonials attest are somehow on the margin of the British second generation’s life or identities. After all, are most of the participants in this study not successful? But look closer, and I suggest that the displacement that the testimonials reveal was at the core of whom the participants were—and indeed of many in the British second generation. At the same time, these testimonies bear witness to the struggle that so many of us have been through and, far from always, a certainty that we emerged from alive and fighting. Here we have people who, sometimes painfully, broke the silence that had left us unable to ask questions about how we came to be born into British society, why we felt Other and why we did not have more family. These are testimonials of courage, of people who refused to passively accept what the past might ascribe them and have given voice to who they are. The interviews provided a means for the participants to ‘break the silence’ in which they had, to a greater or lesser degree, been living—and I thank them for it. For many, it was the first time they were able to articulate in an ordered and—relatively—calm fashion something of who they felt they were and what they felt about being the child of refugees and the grandchild or relative of people who had been killed by the Nazis, either for being Jews or active anti-Nazis. My hope is that in this process of articulation, they were able to further piece together and come to terms with the reality of what happened. This study is for them and for all of the British second generation.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND HER FAMILY

My parents, my aunt on my mother’s side and my cousin, who came out on the Kindertransport and was my mother’s niece, all fled Germany for the UK at different points in the 1930s. Their different approaches to who they were illustrate the different meanings of being in exile and therefore the meaning of being second generation. My parents, both of whom had been part of the Berlin left intelligentsia and who had to flee in early 1933 because they were political opponents to Nazism, yet whose families were murdered as Jews, believed in the policy of integrating into British society. They brought me up not even knowing that anti-Semitism had destroyed many in their families. This approach was reinforced by my father’s job as a university lecturer; my parents perceived themselves as continuing members of a European intelligentsia—seeing indeed the English academics generally as a rather lowly breed—and continued their support, though very low key, for leftwing causes. Their command and use of the English language was better than many English people, even if slightly accented; my mother had a play put on in the West End, and they both had poetry published. They refused German reparations—‘blood money’—and would have nothing to do with West Germany, which they saw as still under the control of many ex-Nazis, at least till Brandt became chancellor. They did not see Jewishness as part of the lived definition of who they were. There were no ‘signs’ of Jewishness in our home. Indeed, I could put this more strongly, that despite members of both their families having being murdered by the Nazis at least in part for being Jewish, my parents positively rejected presenting themselves as Jewish, including to me, their daughter. Though whether this feature of their pasts emerged in their private dis323

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course I cannot know. They did not hanker for Germany. My relationship with them was difficult. They died as they had lived: as committed socialists. My father, especially, believed that socialism would succeed where capitalism had failed. On the other hand, my aunt, my mother’s sister, who left Germany in 1939 having lost her teaching job because of the anti-Semitic laws and then helped organize the Kindertransport, saw herself, partly as a consequence, as a secular Jew. But her commitment, when I knew her, was to CND, which she was active in, and to Tribune, a left-leaning periodical to which she subscribed. I only found out much of this, particularly her role in the Kindertransport, after her death. Unlike my parents, she spoke a highly Germanized form of English, in which, though a highly literate woman, she evidently never felt as comfortable as in her first language. Her sentences would be a confusing mix of both German and English. She did accept reparations. She never had children or got married. I suspect she always hankered after what she had lost. My cousin, whose parents never lived to know their daughter had been saved, and who arrived here aged ten in 1939 on one of the last Kindertranports, wanted nothing more than to marry a nice Englishman and settle down into Englishness and put the past behind her. Three models of exile within three members of one family.

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INDEX

Academic Assistance Council (AAC), 44 Anglo-Jewry’s attitude to refugees, 25, 30, 38, 42 anti-Nazi refugees, xiii, 5, 62; attitude to second generation children, 53; at British tribunals, 36; culture of silence, 81, 247, 279; and Jewishness, 287; trauma and resilience, 78, 273. See also Communists; Social Democratic (SPD) refugees anxiety: death anxiety of second generation, 73; dispossession and disconnection, association with, 69, 77, 296; food, association with, 307; of second generation, 301, 304, 306, 308, 310; transference from parents, 67, 70. See also trauma Appignamesi, Lisa, xviii Bolshover, Richard, 27–29, 40, 42 Brinson, Charmian, 36, 41, 44, 103n37 British Union of Fascists (BUF), 38–42, 50n6, 51n17–51n18 Burleigh, Michael, 56, 59, 61 Butler, Judith, 78, 83 Cesarani, David, 51n18, 52n23 Cohen, Susan, 21–22, 43 Cold War, impact of, xvi, 54, 149, 205, 214, 271, 320

Communists: British Communist party and members attitude towards refugees in 1930s, 29, 39–40; British State’s attitude to Communist refugees in 1930s, 22, 37, 279; children’s admiration for anti-Nazi parents, 274; Communist exiles’ silence towards children, 81, 279; Czech Communist exiles, 22; German Communist Party exiles, 4, 7, 13n3, 42, 44, 46, 78, 81, 85, 89, 239, 246, 252, 271–272, 274, 278–279, 284–285, 315; numbers of German Communist exiles in UK, 86; political, 66; refugees’ effect on second generation children, 86, 272; second generation’s perception of parents, 252, 273–274, 278, 311, 315; return to Europe after war of Communist parents, 272 dislocation, effects of on second generation, xi–xiii, xvii, 75, 77, 79, 81, 90, 289, 291–293, 296, 302, 312, 319–320 displacement, significance of for second generation, xii, 75, 77, 90, 246, 302, 315, 319, 321 Einstein, Albert, 14n4, 42, 45 Endelman, Todd, 19, 24–25, 38–41, 49n4–49n5, 50n9, 238 331

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Epstein, Helen, xviii euthanasia, Nazi programme of and its implications, 56–58, 61, 97n3, 98n5 exile of first generation refugees: British responses to the refugees, 37, 42–45; causes of exile and numbers exiled, xv, 3–6, 18, 20–21, 23, 47, 246, 290, 297–299, 319; comparative effects of exile, xii, xvii, 75, 81, 295, 320; consequences of exile on the first generation exile, 37, 44–45, 57, 74, 77, 79, 81, 83, 237, 247, 253, 258–259, 260, 270, 291, 296, 305, 319–320 fear felt by second generation, 70, 73, 80, 306, 309; of anger, 265; of antiSemitism, 288–289; of death, 265; and otherness, 299, 302; and silence, 74, 243, 245, 253, 264, 317. See also trauma Feather, Howard, 65, 77 Fossian, Pierre, 69–70 Fremont, Helen, xviii gender, the significance of: attachment of daughters to mothers, 72, 80–81, 237, 267; daughters as ‘memorial candles’, 70, 72, 315–316; entry requirements into UK, impact of, 35; gendered relationship with refugee parents, 72, 77, 80, 268, 315; methodological issues, 58–91, 268; occupation of women refugees, 35; trauma, transference of from mothers to daughters, 73 Gilman, Sander, 303 Glassman, Gaby, xviii, xxn8, 72, 80–81, 100n20, 267, 268, 301 Goldhagen, Daniel, 59 Gradvohl, Paul, xiii, 247, 279 grandparents, loss of: commemoration, 242; country of origin, identification with, 292; dislocation, effect of, 241; emotional cost of discovery for second generation, 253–254, 302–303; emotional legacy of murders and silence, xii, 73, 83, 239–241, 253, 259; finding the dead, 67, 96, 240, 248–250, 318; graves, absence of, 252, 296; and

INDEX

Jewishness, 77, 282, 286; mourning the unmourned, 242; murder of, xi–xii; natural deaths, implications of, 241; possessions, importance of, 241; the secret of grandparents’ ‘deaths’, 77, 238–240, 243–244, 247–248, 250–251, 281 guilt of second generation: at being born, 66; meaning of, 71–72; PTSD, association with, 71; refugee experience, 79, 244; relationship with parent, 70, 274, 280; shame, relationship with, 71; silence, association with, 71; survivor guilt of second generation, 269, 309 Hass, Aaron, 73–74, 78, 103n38, 253; being ‘haunted’, 63, 74, 245, 316–318 Hobsbawm, Eric, 7–9, 11, 45, 158 Holocaust, pattern of : Bauman, Zygmut, 59, 99n9–99n11; Browning, Christopher, 55–58, 98n5, 99n11–99n13; Evian Conference, 32–33; Finkelstein, Norman, 52n21, 97n1; Friedlander, Henry, 83; Friedlander, Saul, 55, 59, 98n8; functionalists, 59, 98n7–98n8; intentionalists, 59, 98n7–98n8; Kershaw, Ian, 41, 98n7–98n8; Longerich, Peter, 57–58, 61, 97n3, 98n8; Novick, Peter, 54–55, 64, 97n1; structuralists, 59, 98n8; Wannsee Conference, xixn2, 58, 60, 158. See also euthanasia; grandparents, loss of home office, role of towards refugees pre1945, 18, 22–23, 25, 27, 33–35, 43, 113; Coordinating Committee for Refugees, 27, 34–35 Jewishness: anti-Semitism in the UK in the 1930s; organised opposition to it, 29, 37–41, 49n5–50n6; arrivals of refugees in Britain, 19–23; British government’s policy and practices on Jewish refugees, 30–34, 37; Central British Fund for German Jewry, 26–27; circumcision of new-born, 246, 281–282; contemporary anti-Semitism, second generation consciousness of, 288–289;

I N DE X

identification with grandparents, 77; Jewish ‘community’ in UK and attitude to refugees in 1930s, 24–29; Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, 29; meanings of being ‘Jewish’ for the second generation, xvi, xxn5, 23, 281–288, 315; victimhood, sense of in second generation, xiii, 311; which countries did the refugees come from?, xiii, xixn4, 5–12. See also Holocaust, pattern of; trauma Kapp, Yvonne and Mynatt, Margaret, xviii, 6, 10, 19–22, 32, 36, 43–45 Karpf, Anne, xviii Kellerman, Natan, xviii, 63, 65, 68–69, 81, 100n19, 101n24, 102n32–102n33 Kitchen, Ruth, xiii, xxn6, 74, 104n53, 273 Kushner, Tony, xixn4, 35, 37, 41, 51n18, 105n55 K.P.D. See Communists, German Communist Party exiles Lasker-Wallfisch, Anita, 243 Leys, Ruth, 71–72, 127 London, Louise, 24–34, 37, 39–41, 43–45, 50n6, 51n18, 52n21–52n22, 78, 84 Lurie-Beck, Janine, 71, 102n34–103n36 Mason, Tim, 59, 167 Mazover, Mark, 4 memory, rupture and reconstruction: absence of family stories, 83, 243, 247, 254, 290, 296; commemoration, ix, 240, 242, 289, 304, 316; dislocation and, 319; fragmentation of memory for first and second generations, 243–244, 275n1; letters, importance of, 76, 241, 249; memorial candles, 70, 72, 315–316; memorialisation, xiv, 65, 70, 289, 304, 309; photographs, importance of, 249, 302–304 mental health: limiting access to UK for refugees, 11; resilience of second generation, 311–312; second generation effected by parents’ mental health, 261; second generation’s mental health, 302, 304–305, 307; shame of, 256. See also euthanasia

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Moore, Bob, 7, 22, 35–36, 42, 45 parents’ exile, consequences for their second generation children, 75, 179, 238, 241, 270, 291, 295, 319; second generation perceptions of relationship with parent(s), 81, 249, 251–252, 255–256, 261–270, 274, 280, 290, 298, 315 politics in second generation, 313 Rathbone, Eleanor, 43 Rosenberg, David, 25, 29, 39–40, 51n18 Rosenthal, Gabriella, 67–68, 74, 101n26–101n30, 103n42, 231, 243, 245, 253, 308 Salaman, Julie, xviii Scharf, Miri, 57, 68, 72, 103n37 Seabrook, Jeremy, 43–47 Second Generation Network, xiii, 67, 84–85, 87, 104n54, 201, 211, 214–216, 294, 313, 317; sense of victimhood, 311, 318 shame: body, associated with, 305; PTSD, association with, 71–72; response to parents’, 74, 244; shame and silence, xiii, 245; shame of refugees, 244 Sherman, Ari Joshua, 5, 18–19, 21, 26, 31–33, 41, 43, 55 silence: appeal of, 250; breaking parents’, 245, 248, 253, 317, 321; complicity in parental, 255–256; difficulties and fears about confronting parental, 57, 253–256, 268; effect on secondgeneration child, 73–74, 245, 247, 250; explanations for refugees’, 54, 74, 83, 91, 245–247; fragmentation of memory of refugees, 243; about grandparents’ murders, 243–245, 248–249, 316; guilt associated with, 317; knowing the unknowable, 245; the meaning of memory, 83, 91; as mourning, 245; pain of, 22; parental prohibition to speak of past, 70, 74; of political parents, 247, 252, 317; protection of, 254; responsibility for parents’ silence, 253; significance of interviews, 91, 94, 318; silence of refugees, including towards

334

INDEX

child, about refugees’ parents, 46–47, 70, 73–74, 83, 245–248, 250, 253–254; about surname, 256; syntax of, 249; types of silence, 47–48, 52n21, 52n23, 83; ‘reading’ the silence of the parent, 245 Social Democratic (SPD) refugees, 4, 14n4, 14n10, 20, 22, 78, 104n50 Society of Friends (Quakers), 42–43

resilience, importance of, 69, 71, 103n38, 311–312; second generation syndrome, 69; shame v. guilt, 71–72; transference of, xiv, xviii, 66; usefulness of concept ‘transferred trauma’, questions about, 71, 73, 78, 102n32, 102n33, 103n36, 301–302; victimhood, second generation definition of self, xiii–xiv

trauma: American Psychiatric Association, 68; attachment theory, 70–72; death anxiety of second generation, 69–70, 73, 265, 302; dislocation of second generation and, xii, xvii, 75, 77; exile of refugees, relationship to, 75–77; fear, 241; grandparents’ deaths, impact of, 243–244; historical contextualisation, 47; imprisonment and incarceration of parents, effect of, 277–278; knowledge as trauma, 302; meaning of, 62; political refugees effect on children, 78, 311; post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) of second generation, 66–69; psychological distress of second generation, 72, 247, 258, 302;

victim, sense of for second generation: agency, sense of in comparison with, 44, 86, 272–274, 311, 314; meaning of, 311; sense of for second generation, 55, 97n1; trauma, associated with, xiii, 67, 78, 81. See also Jewishness Wasserstein, 20, 27, 31, 37, 43, 49n3, 51n16 Wardi, Dina, xviii, 65–67, 78, 103n41 Wedgwood, Josiah, 10, 14n8, 21, 27, 34, 43 Williams, Bill, 41 Yehuda, Rachel, 61, 65–67, 78, 103n41

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Merilyn Moos was born in Oxford in 1944 to German anti-Nazi refugee parents. She grew up in Durham, studied philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at the University of Oxford, and took an MA in cultural studies at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) under Stuart Hall. She became a lecturer, writer, union activist and active antiracist. She also became a mother to her son, Josh, the third generation. Since retirement, she has published a semi-autobiographical novel and a biography of her father.

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