I first met a refugee just before the second world war broke out. Not that I knew it. As far as I could tell, “Miss Cohen” was just one of the aunties who flitted in and out of my grandfather’s house in Brondesbury, north-west London.
All I remember about her was that she was a smallish, dark-haired woman who sat in the corner of the front room, and was a little scary. She never took me on bus rides like Auntie Betty, never came with presents like Auntie Hetty, never told me stories like Auntie Leila. No, not much fun. I suppose she hadn’t had a lot of fun in her life. But to me that didn’t matter. It was my grandfather’s house, and Grandpa Freedland had enough love in him to make up for anything I didn’t like or was afraid of. Besides, he had just fitted a light to the clockwork train he kept in the house for my visits every Sunday. I could never wait for it to get dark so that we could see the lit train run across the dining room table, underneath the floral china chandelier.
Grandpa was a kind old man, but I didn’t know just how kind he truly was. And that was how Miss Cohen came into the story. It was years before my parents let me into what had plainly been something that the family had kept fiercely secret – in case, perhaps, the Home Office would get to hear of it and she might be returned to the arms of the Gestapo in her native Germany.
The Jewish press, and some national titles too (except, of course, the Daily Mail), was replete with appeals for homes for German refugees. About 70,000 of them were to come to Britain, but they had to be sponsored, so that they wouldn’t be a drain on the state. If they could show they had gainful employment, it would be a lot easier. Grandpa Freedland answered an advert from someone who, I suppose, was a fairly young German woman offering her services as a “domestic”.
He was what was called a diamond merchant, which made him sound very rich. He was nothing of the kind, although he might at one time have had a little money, enough to buy the semi in Dartmouth Road. One day, “Miss Cohen” knocked on his door, metaphorically carrying her mop and pail. She was, I understand, invited into the house, given a cup of tea and shown to her room at the top of the house. When she came down, Grandpa settled her in the big armchair and said he had something to tell her. Actually, he said, he didn’t need a domestic and perhaps couldn’t afford one. But, he told her, “this is now your home”. That simple act saved her from the Holocaust and made her one (the scary one, it’s true) of the family.
If more people had answered the call in that way, the 70,000 might have become hundreds of thousands saved from the gas chambers over a period of, say, the six years between Hitler’s rise to power and the outbreak of war. But even that 70,000 figure dwarfs the tiny numbers of refugees admitted today. Today for a politician to talk of admitting 10,000 sounds like recklessly generous humanitarianism. It’s quite a contrast.
I suppose there was a reason for my grandfather’s generosity, besides his innate kindness. He had, himself, been a refugee 60 or so years before, from the village of Baisogala in Lithuania. It was a brave thing to do, to look for a new life in England, but before the Aliens Act of 1905, there were no restrictions on prospective immigrants. It wasn’t just a better economic situation he was seeking. There were too many stories of rampaging Cossacks raping and killing Jews in a succession of pogroms nearby.
For much the same reason, my maternal grandfather Barnet Mindel left the shtetl of Dunilovichi in what is now Belarus. I went there with my son Jonathan a few years ago to do a Radio 4 programme, seeking our roots. We found a gravestone in the old Jewish cemetery, bearing the name “Mindel”. Who he was, we have no idea, but plainly a relative who was fortunate enough to die before the Nazis rounded up more than 800 Jews in a barn and shot the lot of them – in one day. My grandmother, Annie, left the port city of Libau in Latvia at the same time as the man who became her husband and for the same reasons he did. No one there knew when the next pogrom was going to come their way.
Barnet Mindel was luckier than most. He brought his parents and his four brothers with him – and a young girl whom he didn’t know. Apparently, there was a sister called Leah who had died shortly before they were due to leave Dunilovichi in about 1904. A neighbour asked them to take their daughter along for the journey. She became the Leah Mindel on the family passport. What happened to her, I have no idea. What happened to Barnet Mindel and his brothers is a different matter. They decided they wanted to show their appreciation for their new home country.
My grandfather and two of his brothers served in the first world war, Barnet as a lance corporal, Nat as an officer who became a senior Colonial Office mandarin in Palestine during the British mandate, and Lou in the Royal Flying Corps. That, to them, was what being a refugee meant – not just saying thank you, but showing it. I imagine Miss Cohen did that for the rest of her life.
