How the Girl Guides Won the War. Janie Hampton

as a “wicked step-aunt”.’

      A week later, Brown Owl met Alice in the street when it was nearly dark. ‘I shan’t be coming to Brownies no more,’ the child said. ‘Brownies often said this, perhaps to get extra attention, but they did not usually mean it. One Brownie, who never missed a meeting in three years, said it frequently, giving such excuses as “because we’re getting a built-in fireplace” or “because Dad might be coming home.” But Alice, who was wearing her usual fur-lined boots and a coat but no frock, explained: “Auntie’s washing my frock, for going back to my dad. She’s putting me on the Glasgow bus tonight.”’

      Brown Owl was appalled, and went home to find some barley sugar to give Alice for the journey. But she was too late. ‘Alice had already gone and I knew I should never see her again. I lay awake that night thinking of the bus creeping up England and Scotland with my naughtiest little Brownie slumped in a corner, moaning her vows never to go roaming no more.’

      A few days later a letter came with a Glasgow postmark. The note inside was a bit sticky, but the message was a joy: ‘Dear Brown-Owl dear,’ Alice had written. ‘There was a woman on the bus worsen me. She felt a lot better when I gave her an emergency smile and told her I didn’t mind a wee bit if she threw up.’

       4 Kinder-Guides

      While people in Britain were living through the Phoney War, in Germany Jewish people had been suffering horrendous persecution since the start of the 1930s. Their shops were plagued by pickets, and in September 1935 Hitler had passed the Nuremburg Laws, depriving ‘non-Aryans’ of citizenship. Jews’ passports were marked with a large ‘J’, and they were forced to wear a yellow star as a means of identification. Jews were banned from public places and schools and had their property confiscated. In 1935 Samuel Hoare, the British Foreign Secretary, made it clear that Britain would be hospitable to individual Jewish refugees with sponsors, but not to Jews en masse. However, after the events of 9 November 1938 he rethought his policy.

      On that night ‘The entire Jewish population of Germany was subjected to a reign of terror,’ reported the Daily Telegraph. ‘No attempt was made by the police to restrain the savagery of the mob. Almost every synagogue in the country was burnt to the ground. Scarcely a Jewish shop escaped being wrecked. Looting occurred on a great scale. Jews of all ages, of both sexes, were beaten in the streets and in their homes. Jewish patients in hospitals were dragged outside in their nightclothes.’ The Nazis imprisoned 30,000 Jewish men on what became known as ‘Kristallnacht’, or the Night of Broken Glass.

      Two weeks later, Hoare, now Home Secretary, held a breakfast meeting with Jewish, Quaker and other religious leaders, and the Committee for the Care of Children from Germany was formed. He proposed that Britain should admit European Jewish children as long as organisations or families agreed to sponsor them once they arrived. He had been assured by Jewish organisations that in order to save their children from the Nazis, Jewish parents in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia were prepared to send their children to a strange country and an uncertain future.

      Later that evening, a full-scale debate on refugee policy took place in the House of Commons. Hoare announced that the Home Office would allow entry to all child refugees whose maintenance could be guaranteed. The Commons resolved ‘That this House notes with profound concern the deplorable treatment suffered by certain racial, religious, and political minorities in Europe, and, in view of the growing gravity of the refugee problem, would welcome an immediate concerted effort amongst the nations.’

      Hoare agreed immediately that in order to speed up the immigration process, travel documents would be issued on the basis of group lists rather than individual applications, and from December 1938 Jewish children began to arrive in Britain from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Their parents had taken the agonising decision to send them away, not knowing what the future held. The Nazi authorities decreed that leave-takings must happen quickly and without fuss, so farewells were brief. The trains carrying the children often left at night, and while some children saw the journey as an adventure, most were frightened and distressed. Few would see their parents again.

      The first two hundred children of the ‘Kindertransport’ departed from Berlin on 1 December 1938. After that, an average of 250 children aged between four and seventeen left Germany and Austria every week, arriving by train at the Hook of Holland, where they were despatched onto night ferries to Harwich in Essex. A few travelled on to stay with relatives in America, others went to Paraguay, but the majority remained in Britain. Some went to live with Jewish relatives; others were offered homes with families of other religions, often Quakers. Upon arrival, many of them stayed in wooden chalets in Warner’s Holiday Camp at Dovercourt near Harwich. ‘The whole camp was charged with anxiety and fear,’ wrote Hugh Barret, a volunteer student. ‘It was there I first heard the word “angst” and appreciated what it meant.’ When the children heard a rumour about a pogrom in Vienna, they started wailing, and panic soon spread among the Viennese staff. Shouting above the noise that it was only a rumour did not help, and the refugees only calmed down when one of the older Jewish helpers started to sing a Hebrew song of courage and hope, that every child knew. Within minutes, the camp hall was filled with the sound of soothed voices, united in song.

      Ingrid Jacoby, an eleven-year-old growing up in Vienna, was not a Guide, but her diary reveals the painful and challenging experiences endured by many Kindertransport girls. On 11 March 1938 she wrote: ‘My father is in a terrible state because Hitler has marched into Austria. It happened two days after my eleventh birthday and I couldn’t have my party. I cried. Still no period. I pray for it, but Granny says it’s wicked to think of God in the lavatory.’ Just over a year later, her aunt had secured visas for her and her older sister Lieselotte to go to England, and in a matter of days the girls were taken to a station in Vienna. ‘We were each given a cardboard number on a string, to hang round our necks. As I lay in Mummy’s arms, saying goodbye to her for heaven knows how long, I still didn’t realise what was happening. We joined a queue with hundreds of other children, and stood about for a very long time. Then suddenly we were on the train and waved to Mummy until the train took us out of sight. The other children were all talking and shouting and running about. We sang Viennese songs and some of the children cried. When we crossed the border into Holland and freedom, a great cheer went up. Some Dutch people handed each child a bar of Nestlé’s milk chocolate through the train windows.’ The children were all sick on the overnight Channel crossing. They then took a train from Harwich to London, where Ingrid and her sister were put on another train on their own to Exeter.

      Three weeks later, now living in Falmouth with a solicitor’s family, Ingrid confessed to her diary in German: ‘I’m tortured by homesickness. If only I could be back in Vienna, going for walks with my parents. I wish Austria was a monarchy and that Hitler didn’t exist. Everything is destroyed. But I must keep telling myself that everything will be all right in the end. Now I must explain to you the meaning of the word “melancholy”. It is when one doesn’t feel like doing anything any more and believes that nothing will ever make one happy again. It is wanting to cry all the time. It is looking forward to nothing and suffering from homesickness and memories of the past.’ A week later: ‘Homesickness is terrible. I used to pray and pray and long and long for my visa to come to England. My wish was granted. Now I pray and long to be back in Vienna. To think I may be here for months, years! I feel I shall die of misery. If Mummy had the slightest suspicion, how upset and unhappy she’d be. She must never, never know!’

      Unfortunately, Ingrid’s foster parents, Mr and Mrs Robins, never recognised this melancholy; they saw only a lazy girl who didn’t tidy her room, and wrote to her parents to tell them they preferred her older sister. They told the girls how to stand, sit, throw a ball and breathe; and then went on holiday for three weeks without them. On their return they announced that if Ingrid’s English didn’t improve they would send her away. ‘It seems I can’t do anything right,’ poor Ingrid wrote. On 2 September 1939 she wrote in her diary, ‘Hitler, I hate you even more than I hate Mrs Robins!’

      On 18 April 1939, Ruth Wassermann, aged twelve, said goodbye to her family