Berlin station, each carrying one small suitcase. After arriving in Britain, Ruth lived with a Jewish family, but their children did not treat her well, and in July the Committee moved her to a hostel for refugee girls in Hackney run by B’nai B’rith — ‘Children of the Covenant’ — a Jewish welfare organisation set up in New York in 1843. The girls all went to Lauriston Road School in Hackney. Ruth shared a room with Gretel Heller from Berlin, also twelve years old, who had arrived in London in June 1939. Her father had also been imprisoned on Kristallnacht. Gretel had lived with a German Jewish family for a month, but then they had emigrated to the USA.
By the end of August 1939, over 10,000 children had come to Britain on the Kindertransport scheme. The last train left Germany a few days before war broke out, and from that moment the British government cancelled all outstanding visas, and borders were closed. The last children arrived in England on 2 September. Another train, containing 250 children, was about to leave Prague on 3 September, but the Germans did not let it leave the station. In future, for Kinder-transport children in Britain, communication with their parents was limited to twenty-five-word Red Cross postcards.
As soon as war seemed inevitable, the Committee for the Care of Children from Germany made plans to evacuate all the girls in the B’nai B’rith hostel out of London. They left on the morning of Saturday, 2 September with other children from Hackney. It took them all day to reach Swaffham in Norfolk, a journey that normally took about two hours. With two million children being evacuated from cities all over Britain and thousands of soldiers returning to their posts, the nation’s transport system was in chaos.
Village halls all over the country became billeting stations where anyone with a spare room or a warm heart turned up to collect as many children as they could manage. Not many people wanted children who spoke the language of the enemy, but in rural Norfolk lived a landowner who understood their predicament and wanted to help. Sir Samuel Roberts owned the small feudal village of Cockley Cley, close to Thetford Forest, and employed everyone who lived there apart from the postmistress.
‘It seemed to take forever, sitting on railway platforms,’ recalled Gretel Heller. ‘We finally arrived in Cockley Cley village hall, along with some English children also evacuated from Lauriston Road School, Hackney. We were lined up and the villagers of Cockley Cley picked the children they wanted to take home. They were looking for children who spoke English, and who could be useful.’ This left a dozen girls from the B’nai B’rith hostel who spoke little or no English, including best friends Ruth Wassermann and Gretel Heller.
The Robertses had been expecting twenty-five children, but by the time Lady Roberts arrived at the corrugated-iron village hall, she found that most of them had already been billeted around the village. She took nine of the Kindertransport girls, aged eight to thirteen, back to Cockley Cley Hall, a four-storey Victorian house where she and her husband lived with the ancient Dowager Lady Roberts and their son Peter, who worked on the farm. Working for them were a butler, two teenage footmen, a lady’s maid, a cook, a scullery maid and a head housemaid with several maids under her.
Sir Samuel and Lady Roberts welcomed ‘the Jewish girls’, as they called them. Escorting them was their rather bossy matron, Miss Kohn, who had been a teacher in Germany, Mrs Reissner the cook, and her twelve-year-old daughter Hanna. Both women had arrived in London in early 1939 and found refuge in the B’nai B’rith hostel. Lady Roberts understood that they would need a special kosher kitchen, and gave them the scullery. ‘We had our own kitchen downstairs,’ said Gretel, ‘and the top floor for our bedrooms — five to a room — and a sitting room. We were not permitted to go into the Roberts family part of the house.’
‘We kept kosher in the sense that we did not eat any meat,’ said Ruth, ‘except on the rare occasions when it was sent from London. By the time it arrived in unrefrigerated trains, it was not the freshest, but “waste not want not” was the motto.’ The girls ate mainly turnips, potatoes, cabbages and greens grown in the Hall garden. In the summer, Lady Roberts treated them to baskets of soft fruit. ‘Lady Roberts was very elegant looking,’ said Gretel, ‘very stately, tall, always neat and properly dressed. She came into our sitting room about once a week and would pat a girl on the head.’ All the girls were homesick, but during the day they never showed it: they were expected to be grateful. At night their bedrooms were filled with the sound of muffled sobs as they cried into their pillows.
Not all the Kindertransport girls lived in the Hall. Mr and Mrs Howard, the cowman and the dairymaid of the Cockley Cley estate farm, picked twelve-year-old Cilly-Jutta Horwitz from Hamburg and Lotte Levy from Cologne. In the Howards’ cottage, water came from a well in the garden, the floors were made of stone and there was no electricity. Cilly-Jutta, later known as Celia, and Lotte were both used to living in middle-class urban homes. Celia had been learning English at grammar school in Hamburg for two years, and had arrived on the first Kindertransport train in December 1938, so her English was already good, but even so, things were very difficult. ‘Living with the Howards in a small village in Norfolk was a real culture shock,’ she remembered. ‘Everything was a blur. You no sooner seemed to have settled somewhere than you were off again. My first homes in Britain were two holiday camps in the south-east. After three cold months I was taken in by a Jewish family in Hackney and then by a hostel for young refugees.’
Lotte was braver than Celia, and told the cook, Mrs Reisner, that she was unhappy at the Howards’. The girls at the Hall were asked if any of them would swap places. ‘I was very stupid,’ said Gretel. ‘I said yes.’ Gretel, brought up in Berlin, found life with the Howards no easier than Lotte had: ‘There were paraffin lamps and we went to bed with a candle. Mrs Howard treated me and Celia like servants. There was no heating and I had perpetual colds living there. I soon regretted it, especially when winter came and it was so cold.’ The winter of 1939—40 was the coldest for decades: even the River Thames froze for the first time in over fifty years. ‘Mrs Howard cooked a delicious dumpling stew on our first night; she was a good plain cook,’ remembered Celia. ‘But after that she was quite mean with the bread and margarine. I liked the countryside, but not the outside toilets.’ Exiled from Germany for being Jewish, she was now taunted by some of the other refugee girls for being only half-Jewish — her mother had converted to Judaism before marrying her father. ‘That counted as Jewish to Hitler,’ she said. ‘When my parents divorced, my father insisted that my mother renounced being a Jew to save herself. In addition, standing up in class in England was agony when I had to say my name, “Cilly-Jutta”. The children always laughed.’ After she was married she changed her first name to Celia. Mr and Mrs Howard had two teenage sons — the oldest was Nigel, aged fifteen, who looked after the pigs and had a slight squint; his younger brother Geoffrey, who was fourteen, sometimes took Celia around the village on the horse-drawn milk cart, doling out fresh milk into housewives’ jugs. ‘I had a bit of a crush on Geoffrey,’ said Celia, ‘so that was always fun.’
Cockley Cley village school had closed down a few years earlier due to a shortage of children. The few local children went to school in Swaffham, three miles away, and did not mix much with the evacuees. The village school was reopened for the British children from Hackney and the eighteen Kindertransport girls. Two teachers were drafted in from London — Miss Gadsby and Miss Payne — one for the five-to-eight-year-olds, the other for nine-to-fourteen-year-olds. ‘They had to cope with a wide range of children,’ said Gretel, ‘including some very naughty London evacuee boys. One was beaten with a cane often.’
The teachers had to deal with both homesick London evacuees and girls who spoke little or no English and had even more reason to be homesick. ‘Miss Payne was a very good English teacher, especially for poetry,’ said Celia. Ruth described how the teachers ‘taught us songs and poetry by rote. Arithmetic was easier since they could use the blackboard. They also taught us drawing.’ Ruth enjoyed art: her grandfather had been a folk poet, and encouraged her to embellish his poetry with drawings while listening to music. The children learned English quickly: ‘The teachers took an interest in us, and found creative ways of teaching. We wrote essays, read English books and got a good appreciation of English songs, poetry and literature.’
Miss Gadsby had been a Guide, and after a couple of months she suggested starting a Guide company in Cockley Cley. ‘Those of us from Germany had never heard of such a thing,’