... And the Policeman Smiled Read Free Page B

pacifying the Arab majority.
    With the annual limit on refugees from all countries set at 40,000, it was clear that Palestine could only be a part solution to the German problem. The total population at risk was over half a million. But there was reason to believe that pressure could be brought to persuade Britain to relax her grip. After all, there was, or so it seemed to Zionist leaders, a moral commitment to the National Home which Britain would find all but impossible to abrogate.
    Meanwhile, the call that went out to young people to come to Palestine found a ready response in Germany as Nazi legislation aimed specifically against Jewish youngsters began to bite. As early as April 1933, German state schools were ordered to limit the number of Jewish pupils to under five per cent of their total intake. With the crazed logic of all racial legislation, exemptions were granted to those Jewish children whose fathers had been front line soldiers in the Great War and to children who had one Aryan parent or two Aryan grandparents.
    More invidious than the restriction on numbers was the prejudice against Jewish children by teachers who were also Nazi sympathisers. Their bigotry was given full rein by the 193 5 Nuremberg Decrees which deprived all non-Aryans of German citizenship – no state employment, no access to the professions, no vote and no right to the ordinary decencies of life.
    Johnny Blunt, then Johnny Eichwald, aged twelve, was at a school in north Germany, just twenty-eight miles from the Danish border. His father was a tobacconist, the only Jewish trader in the small town of Kappelin.
    Teachers started calling me ‘Jewboy’ in front of the class. And even my friends in the class got so used to it, they didn’t even know what it meant. We accepted. I accepted the same as my friends. Then there was this yearly occasion – I don’t know what you call it in English – it’s like a sports day which is once a year where everybody shows their prowess in various fields and we used to have shooting. Now in this particular year I was the best shot. I had three shots right into the bull’s-eye, but when the prizes weregiven out I was put in second place. I heard one of my schoolfriends tell a teacher: ‘There must have been a mistake, surely Johnny had three.’ And the reply was: ‘We can’t have a Jewboy as king of the shots.’ I was very upset about it.
    Even the youngest children were not immune to persecution. Edith Taylor, then Birkenruth, was born in Neustadt, near Bremen. Her family, of Dutch descent, had lived there for more than a hundred years.
    I was supposed to go to nursery school at the age of five and there was such a hue and cry that they wouldn’t take me so I went to a Catholic nunnery. They were very kind and nice to me. Then at the age of six I had to go to the regular school and the first thing that greeted me was the children saying that I was a dirty Jew and I must eat in the toilet. My brother and I were the only Jewish children in the school and we had to eat our sandwiches in the toilet – the teachers were aware of this but did nothing. Sometimes I would eat my sandwiches near the toilet so that if one of them came along I could dash into the toilet and not get bashed over the head. We were at this school for three years and this sort of thing went on all that time. Classes were all right at first but then here and there would be a very anti-Semitic teacher who would do things such as send me out of the classroom saying I was a Jew and I didn’t have to learn this and then call me back in and ask me questions. She would then say to the others: ‘You see, the Jews aren’t all that clever, they don’t know everything.’ She liked to make fun of me and my brother. The children would laugh, they thought it was very funny.
    Occasionally, a teacher showed a little sensitivity, as Hannele Zürndorfer remembers:
    At school