Sabit Jakupovic came to the UK from Bosnia at the age of 25 in September 1992. Having spent the previous 120 days in two different concentration camps – one of which was the notorious Omarska – he was taken straight to Hertford County Hospital. At six-foot tall, he weighed just under seven stone.
“When we arrived, I was asked by one of the nurses using hand gestures if I wanted a bath, shower or to eat,” he says, 30 years later. “I hadn’t taken a shower in 120 days. Afterwards I went outside for a cigarette and that is when it hit me I was actually free.
“I felt the indulgence of complete strangers. We left so much injustice behind but came to such kindness. You can’t describe it. We were very, very welcomed. The hospitality shown by British people, I don’t think you have that anywhere else. No other country has people as friendly as Britain.”
Violet Wilson was a teenager in Liverpool when her family took in a young woman fleeing Nazi Germany – 15-year-old Marianne Frey. She arrived via the Kindertransport evacuation with little more than her parents’ canteen of cutlery, which she treasured.
“We were not well-off, we were a working-class family, not many pennies to rub together,” recalls Violet, now 98, living on the Isle of Wight. “But my parents felt proud to give help where it was needed. The experience definitely enriched our lives. Marianne became like a sister to me.”
In Scotland, former miner and National Union of Mineworkers activist, Iain Chalmers, treasures similar memories of two Chilean families taken in by his community in Cowdenbeath and the nearby town of Lochgelly, both in Fife.
“Before we adopted the two families, they were in concentration camps,” he says. “People welcomed them in, they set up a Chilean welcoming committee. There was never any animosity.”
Now in 2022, the British welcome is needed again. Yesterday, the Disasters Emergency Committee launched a Ukrainian Humanitarian Appeal, bringing together 13 leading UK aid charities to support those fleeing the conflict.
Around 874,000 people have fled the Russian onslaught in Ukraine since the war began, according to a recent estimate from the United Nations.
The EU Commissioner for Crisis Management says they could be followed by another 3.2 million people.
The UK response so far has been sluggish with temporary visa concessions for family members of Ukrainians already settled in the UK. Meanwhile, in the coming days, just when the world needs us most, MPs in our parliament will be asked to vote on the most vicious piece of anti-refugee legislation ever proposed in the UK.
The Borders Bill is not who we are. Britain has a long history of taking in refugees.
In the 16th century, we took in Dutch Protestants. In the 17th century, Jewish people from Holland. In the 18th, French Protestants known as The Huguenots, and Roman Catholics after the 1789 Revolution. In the 19th, it was French dissidents and tens of thousands of Russian Jews fleeing pogroms.
More than 250,000 Belgian refugees fled to the UK during the First World War. Some 4,000 Basque refugee children arrived in 1937, fleeing General Franco.
Britain accepted Jewish refugees in the Second World War, and 250,000 people from Poland. In 1956, we gave sanctuary to Hungarians, in 1972 Ugandan Asians, in the 1970s, Chileans and Vietnamese people, in the 90s Bosnians and, later, Kosovans. We also supported South African exiles during the apartheid regime.
People continue to seek asylum here from conflicts all over the world, from Somalia to Sri Lanka, and now Ukraine to Afghanistan.
Over the years, we have gained so much from the people who came to join us – weaving and banking skills, doctors and nurses, friends and family.
Yet today, we host just 2% of the world’s refugees. Under Home Secretary Priti Patel, Theresa May ’s explicit “hostile environment” has become something even more toxic. The Borders Bill threatens to criminalise refugees coming to the UK – just as the world needs us to open its arms.
The legislation threatens to tear up the Refugee Convention Britain proudly signed up to in 1951, and the rights of the most vulnerable refugees. The Borders Bill will allow the Government to arbitrarily remove people’s citizenships, erode asylum seekers’ rights, and institutionalise systemic racism. That is why it has been denounced by hundreds of organisations, over 1,000 faith leaders and the United Nations.
A number of senior Conservatives, including David Davis and Dominic Grieve, have written to the Prime Minister warning that the policy is “dangerous” and would see Britain “significantly breach key international obligations”.
The Home Office says: “The Nationality and Borders Bill, which has already been backed by MPs, will deliver the most comprehensive reform in decades to protect the vulnerable and ensure fairness in our asylum system. This Bill reduces the incentives for people to make dangerous crossings and introduces a maximum sentence of life for evil people smugglers.”
Iain Chalmers, now 70, and still in Cowdenbeath, often thinks of his Chilean friends Juan and Jose. “Jose told me their door was kicked in at 3am, his wife and children screaming, and he was put into a concentration camp,” he says.
But then he smiles remembering how the Lochgelly Women’s Group laid on a small welcome event with tea and cake for Jose’s wife Maria. “She was asked if she would like a piece of gateaux which sounds like the word cat – gato – in Spanish and she was horrified and jumped back in her chair,” he explains.
Maria went on to become a lynchpin of Lochgelly’s community, supporting striking miners. Jose, a pitman himself, showed solidarity with Scottish miners too, joining them on the picket lines.
Ana Grout remembers Scottish miners paid for her ticket when she and her family escaped Chile’s Dictator Augusto Pinochet, although her family settled in London. Her dad, aged just 19, had been accused of leading a Communist group and was imprisoned when she was nine months old.
He was tortured, including with electrocution, for three-and-a-half years, and twice escaped execution. Her mum endured her own ordeal.
Now 49, Ana went on to marry a Scot and have four children. “We were one of the first few families to come to London,” she remembers. “Sugar Puffs were the first thing I had. Every time my children eat them, it takes me straight back. Britain opened the doors for us when our own country, our own people, closed them.”
Sabit Jakupovic, 55, now works in social services, but has never forgotten arriving in the UK from “hell on Earth”. He says: “Emotionally, physically and mentally I was in a very bad state. It was 120 days of horror. Thirty years later, I still have flashbacks.”
For Violet, growing up with Marianne changed how she saw the world. “When she first arrived, Marianne’s mother used to send cakes from Germany for us,” she says. “But that soon stopped. She was sent to a concentration camp with Marianne’s sister, Baerbel, where they were gassed. We’re pretty sure it was in Auschwitz.”
Marianne’s father also died in a concentration camp.
Violet’s grandparents had been Jewish refugees from the pogroms of Eastern Europe, arriving in the UK in the 1880s. Sheltering a child from Hitler was a way of passing kindness on.
In Liverpool, Violet and Marianne visited beaches, dances and swimming pools. “I remember visiting Ainsdale Beach and sliding down the dunes with Marianne,” she says.
Marianne died last October 2021 in a care home in Bolton having lived a full life, although Violet says she was always haunted by the Holocaust.
“The thing I am most proud of when I think about Liverpool is that my grandparents were welcomed. In terms of what this country has done for refugees, it gives them opportunities. It has been my family’s saviour as well as helping Marianne.”
How to help
Donate: donation.dec.org.uk/ukraine-humanitarian-appeal
Oppose the Anti-Refugee Bill: togetherwithrefugees.org.uk
Community sponsorship: sponsorrefugees.org
