Kindertransport Commemoration

Baroness Henig Excerpts

Monday 26th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Henig (Lab)]

My Lords, I also congratulate my noble friend Lord Dubs, not just on securing this debate but on all the work he has done over the years helping refugees, refugee children and their families. My Aunt Alice, whom I never had the opportunity to know, faced an agonising dilemma after Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938: should she put her two young sons on the Kindertransport scheme and send them away from danger? She made that heart-breaking decision and, a year or two later, found herself, her husband and a new baby son trapped in an overcrowded ghetto in northern Germany, where they all soon died from typhus fever. Her sons, my cousins, were by then safe and settled in the United Kingdom. The real question is, surely, why Alice and her husband, along with many thousands of other Jews, could not leave with them. The Nazi Government were happy for them to leave, but they could not take money or possessions. They needed a visa to go to another country, a sponsor, a job offer or access to funds abroad. For many, this was impossible to organise.

My father found one solution to this. In 1936, hearing from a friend that the Gestapo was after him, he drew out all his savings, taped them to the underside of his car, and drove across the German-Dutch border, telling the guard that he was on a business trip. Fortunately, the border guard did not examine the car in any way and waved him across the border. Once safely in Holland, he applied for political asylum and was granted it. However, so many people found themselves trapped in Germany—a country whose venomous attacks against them grew ever more lethal. As noble Lords have heard, as the 1930s went on fewer and fewer countries offered them a way out.

Against this background, saving 10,000 Jewish children was undoubtedly a great achievement, but the British Government’s role was decidedly minimal. They issued the vital visas and facilitated entry for the children, but the people we should really celebrate are the religious groups—mainly Jewish and Quaker—which raised the funds and shouldered most of the administration of the scheme, the families who took in the children and the sponsors who liaised with them. My cousins were brought up by a family in Reading, but never lost touch with their sponsors, the Sainsbury family. My elder cousin, on leaving school, went to work in Sainsbury’s. When he later told Lord Sainsbury that he really wanted to become a journalist, he was helped with that too. The sponsors played a major role in the scheme.

The reason for that was the Government’s view that the children must not be a burden on the public purse. Thanks to the organisers, host families and sponsors, they were not. Reading the House of Commons debate from 1938 about the plight of Jewish refugees—which the Library briefing helpfully made available—was a depressing experience, because little has changed in the intervening 80 years. Governments are as unaccommodating as ever. People are sympathetic, but not to the point of doing anything concrete to help. Sir Samuel Hoare’s warning in that 1938 debate rings even truer now than it did then: that there is an,

“underlying current of suspicion … rightly or wrongly, about alien immigration on any big scale”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/11/1938; col. 1468.]

Are we challenging it? Quite the contrary; we are now asked to clamp down even on the freedom of movement that currently exists. Yet those refugees and immigrants who have made it into the UK since the 1930s are among the most patriotic of our people. It was the proudest day of my father’s life when he became a British citizen. These people are patriotic—they want to join and to be in Britain, and it is so difficult for people to get here.

Philip Noel-Baker was absolutely right to say in the 1938 debate that the refugee problem could not be solved by private charity. It could not then and it cannot now. Only concerted action by states or international bodies can tackle the issue with any success. In the next 30 to 50 years, the movement of individuals fleeing oppression, war and poverty will be one of the most pressing issues we will all have to face. We cannot keep ignoring it. We cannot just keep fishing desperate refugees out of the Channel and the Mediterranean and returning them to north Africa, or wherever. Can the Minister say what our plan is as a country, to learn from the heart-rending experiences of the past and to deal with this most pressing of human issues?