Enchanted Parenthesis

Last July, the Sunday New York Times devoted a full page to profiles of seven elderly Jews who fled from Nazi Germany and Austria when they were children. Now ranging in age from 90 to 103, they told their harrowing stories in response to the gentle questioning of reporter Claire Moses. Their trips from home and family, often unaccompanied and mostly by train, were part of what became known as the Kindertransport, an evacuation effort hastily arranged by volunteers working alone or through Jewish organizations across Europe and the United States soon after Kristallnacht in November 1938. By the outbreak of world war in 1939, some ten thousand Jewish children had been rescued. The majority, including all the survivors in the small group interviewed by the Times, ended up in Britain or the United States, but some made their way to France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, and even as far away as China.

The planners of this massive, often clandestine, undertaking sought destinations where they believed the children would remain secure from the Nazis, and most of the receiving countries, including Britain and the United States, which took in the greatest number of children, managed to fulfill this hope. But in 1940, when the Nazis invaded France and the Lowlands, the small groups of children they had received became at least as vulnerable as all the other Jews living within their borders.

The Kindertransport children who came to Britain and the United States have received most of the attention of historians, but now Laura Hobson Faure, a modern Jewish historian at the Sorbonne, offers us a comprehensive study of the children who made it to France—probably fewer than five hundred in total.Precisely because of their small number, she has been able to produce subtle, psychologically insightful accounts of their experiences using their own diaries, autograph books, and letters and drawings as well as memoirs and other retrospective accounts. She traces the stories of a handful of specific individuals, some of whom eventually made it to freedom but others who became slave laborers or were murdered by the Nazis.

The evacuation of German Jewish children to France began after Kristallnacht, when Isidor Marx, the director of a Jewish orphanage in Frankfurt, realized that he and his charges were in danger and reached out to French colleagues in Strasbourg for assistance. Andrée Salomon, a Zionist activist who had founded a committee to aid Jewish refugees, responded by quickly securing visas for the Frankfurt children. She received the first group a few weeks later in early December 1938.

At the same time, Jewish organizations in Paris, which had been focused on refugees in general, began to address the plight of Jewish children. They joined a government committee formed to address the refugee problem and, with the urging of several prominent women, including feminist journalist Louise Weiss and socialite Baroness Germaine de Rothschild, focused on the German and Austrian children who were at risk.

By January 1939, Salomon was sensing the need to unify the disparate efforts in France to help Jewish children, and she called on the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris to lead the initiative. A few months earlier, Pierre Dreyfus, a member of the Alliance’s Central Committee (and Captain Alfred Dreyfus’s son), had spearheaded an initiative to ask the government to admit several thousand of the Jewish children then en route via the Kindertransport. Alliance representatives emphasized that, with proper training, these children could become useful French citizens.

The response of the French government was mixed, but in December 1938 it finally granted entry to fifty children sponsored by de Rothschild. The Alliance pushed to acquire additional visas but, among other things, had a hard time convincing the government that it could convert German Jewish refugee children into useful French citizens, in part because it had little experience advocating specifically for children, much less caring for them. (The Alliance was, Faure writes, a “masculine space.”)

As the efforts of the Alliance faltered, de Rothschild quickly stepped in and created her own organization, the Jewish Committee for Children from Germany and Central Europe (CIE). By the end of January, it had gained permission to admit two hundred more children. (Despite extensive research, Faure could not ascertain precisely how many children ultimately entered France on the Kindertransport, but she estimates that it was somewhere between 290 and 500.)

Bringing the children into France was one challenge; caring for them after arrival was another. Here again, as the Alliance dithered, de Rothschild and her socialite allies took the initiative. She and Count Hubert de Monbrison, offered their own châteaus to house some of the refugees. Meanwhile, her cousin Yvonne de Gunzbourg and her husband, Baron Pierre de Gunzbourg, working through the Union Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE, “children’s aid society”), a more conventional Jewish organization, bought castles to house the others.

Children in both de Rothschild’s Château de la Guette and the OSE homes enjoyed the attention of professional staff. Because most of them did not speak French, they could not attend public schools, so their benefactors had to hire educators as well as caretakers. Many of these teachers were left-wing Central Europeans who had been trained in the antihierarchical principles of progressive education, as espoused by John Dewey and others. Under their guidance, the refugee children were soon establishing “children’s republics” in castles on the French countryside.

Most of the children from Eastern and Central European families were accustomed to traditional Jewish lives, while those from established German or Austrian families tended to be assimilated—some even unaware that they were Jews until the Nazis labeled them as such. After some disagreement, the French philanthropists ultimately sought to avoid disrupting whatever identities the children seemed to be carrying with them and thus divided them along religious lines, with the Orthodox sent to OSE homes and the secular to those run by CIE, such as la Guette.

Nearly all of the formally organized facilities, even the religious ones, featured children’s republics with, Faure argues, paradoxical effects: “The children seemed to embrace these pedagogical experiments wholeheartedly, yet they also pushed back and learned how to assert their own opinions,” leading to conflict with the adults supervising them. At the same time, the children’s busy lives “masked . . . a deep longing for home and family.” Despite such conflicts and worries, Faure deems their time in France between late 1938 and early 1940 an “enchanted parenthesis.”

In promoting the republics, the Paris-based child philanthropists cleaved to one prominent trend in contemporary child welfare circles, but they differed from the rest of the field on another: favoring communal facilities over foster homes. By this time, Faure explains, experts in the United States and to a somewhat lesser degree in Britain had come to reject group institutions as too regimented to allow for individual development. Particularly in the case of these traumatized Jewish refugee children, American and British professionals contended that foster homes would prove more nurturing, and they planned accordingly. But this policy, too, had its drawbacks: It was often difficult to locate Jewish homes, slowing down the evacuation of children who would be allowed to immigrate only if placements were available. (Some Kindertransport children did go to Gentile homes but often found them—or felt—alien.)

Faure quotes the vivid, if nostalgic, recollections of one resident of la Guette, Werner Matzdorff:

We were grouped by age or origin, in “packs.” A small store was managed by the children. We found stationery, darning thread, some sweets paid for in “guettes,” our currency, which was earned not according to results but for our efforts in school. What adventure the vaccination was, the first shower taken together, naked! Waking up early and doing gymnastics . . . in the open air. For lack of knowing better, at meals, we sometimes ate the artichokes, leaves and hay included. . . . We sang. We came and went as we pleased in the woods.

Along with their lessons in democracy, children learned useful skills such as sewing, leatherwork, shoe repair, and carpentry; two boys built a model of the castle that had become their home. Hanna Papanek, who went on to study at Harvard and become a noted feminist scholar and anthropologist, recalled that on Purim she was told she could “dress up as a boy,” so she became “a shoemaker’s apprentice with . . . leather apron, pair of boots slung over [her] shoulder.” A male friend appeared as a girl, with “wire glasses, big ears, blondish hair, blonde braids, wearing a dirndl.” When the other children realized who it was, they “went crazy.”

Overall, Faure concludes, the children “maintained full lives” until “the declaration of war put a brutal end to the children’s republic at the Château de la Guette” and elsewhere. After the Nazi invasion of France in May 1940, children in homes near Paris were evacuated to the unoccupied zone for their own safety, though this meant yet another displacement and often much poorer living conditions. To protect them from being identified as “enemy aliens” and interned, older children were spread out and hidden in individual Gentile families, some of them more caring than others. As arrests of adults and teens increased (often witnessed by children), many youngsters, including toddlers, were abandoned. The OSE did what it could to gather such children and place them in its facilities, but these soon overflowed.

Although it was becoming clear that France could no longer serve as a haven for Jewish children, efforts to bring them out were slow to materialize, partly due to Nazi and Vichy policies but also to the pervasiveness of antisemitism in potential haven countries, notably the United States. American child welfare organizations expressed reluctance to focus explicitly on Jewish children, supposedly out of concern that they would face hostility from potential supporters, though perhaps, Faure suggests, because they were antisemitic themselves. Thus they promoted “mixed sailings” that included non-Jewish as well as Jewish children.

In 1939, New York Senator Robert F. Wagner and Massachusetts Representative Edith Nourse Rogers introduced a bill in Congress to suspend existing national immigration quotas and allow twenty thousand German children to enter the country. Though the bill was presented as a nonsectarian measure to protect all children from Nazism, both its proponents and opponents assumed the beneficiaries would be disproportionately Jewish, and this understanding helped drive it to defeat.

The following year, however, the US Committee for the Care of European Children (USCOM) was formed, and it succeeded in gaining permission from the State Department to bring in thousands of children, first from Britain and then from France. This effort brought many to safety but could not accommodate all of those in peril. By 1942, the situation in France had become even more desperate, with tens of thousands of children at risk. In November of that year, OSE, working with the American Friends Service Committee, managed to assemble several thousand children in Marseilles, where they were to board a USCOM transport. But at the last minute, Pierre Laval, Hitler’s puppet prime minister in Vichy, refused to grant them exit visas, effectively consigning them to slavery or death.

Laval’s rationale was twofold. First, he needed more Jews to fulfill Nazi deportation quotas, and second, he understood the children’s propaganda value. Images of children in peril (Faure shows the reader one in a USCOM poster) were effective tools. According to Laval, the Americans wanted “to parade these children down Fifth Avenue and show everybody what the terrible French people have done to them,” and Laval was having none of it.

In the end, most of the children brought to France by Kindertransport did survive, largely by making it onto one of the USCOM transports, but the transition was not easy. As Henri Parens (born Aron Pruszinowski) put it:

It was not until a decade after I came to America that I knew my original life was over. That it had been shattered. But . . . life went on, and from the fragments, with the help of many on the way, it evolved into this very different, new and eventually very good life.

Parens and his fellow survivors were only a few compared to the 1.5 million children murdered by the Nazis, including thirty-six of those who briefly enjoyed that enchanted parenthesis in France.

Faure’s arresting microhistories avoid sentimentality by demanding explanation, which she provides with deeply researched accounts of the complex forces and heroic individuals shaping child rescue on both sides of the Atlantic. She emphasizes, too, that despite their age, limited experience, and indifference as well as the hatred they faced, the children were more than passive victims. Indeed, she contends, they were able to exert a certain degree of agency. I leave it to readers to determine how much, given the forces of evil arrayed against them that Faure herself documents so powerfully.