Child of our time
Malcolm Elliott reviews a powerful personal narrative
It is hard to explain anti-Semitism. The Christian church once held the Jews responsible for the death of Jesus, despite the fact that his execution was carried out by Roman authority. Antipathy toward the Jewish race has persisted throughout European history, denying citizenship and restricting Jews to ghettos where they had no chance of making a living except by money-lending – a trade forbidden to Christians by the church’s fatuous refusal to allow the charging of interest. Jews were thus obliged to live apart from the rest of society, envied for their wealth and blamed for all manner of crimes that they almost certainly didn’t commit.
Simon de Montfort was one of the first to court popular favour by banning all Jews from Leicester in 1231 – a move copied by Edward I, sixty years later, for the whole country. Jews were eventually allowed back into England and anti-Semitism has not been among our more prominent national failings. So, it is difficult for most of us to appreciate how prevalent persecution of Jews was in many other countries. In France, Russia and Poland periodic Jew-baiting was endemic. Germany and Austria were notably less guilty, but in the economic depression brought about by the peace settlement after the first world war, when Germany was forced to make crippling payments – so-called reparations – to the allies, massive inflation followed, for which Adolf Hitler blamed the Jewish community. Ordinary Germans were mesmerised by Hitler’s vision of a proud and revitalised fatherland. They learned to shut their eyes to the fate of their Jewish neighbours.
Ruth David in Child of Our Time shows us what it was like to be on the receiving end of this policy. Her father owned a cigar factory in Germany and was the biggest employer in the locality. Ruth and her brothers and sisters went to school and played with the other children. But, after 1934, Nazi laws made normal life more difficult. Ruth could no longer go to school or play with ‘Aryan’ children.
Persecution came to a head in Kristallnacht, when mobs smashed the windows of Jewish shops and houses, and brutal attacks were officially encouraged against Jewish people and property. Ruth tells how she and her sister cowered in the family car to hide from the mob that destroyed their home, breaking every piece of furniture and even smashing the pots of jam and preserves that her mother had laid by for the winter, ‘the liquid mess oozing blood red through broken glass’ on the floor.
Ruth was fortunate not to have perished in the gas ovens along with the million and a half Jewish children murdered in Hitler’s ‘final solution’. Instead, she was one of nearly 10,000 children rescued and brought to England in 1939 in the so-called Kindertransport – organized by Quakers and others to save them.
Ruth’s book tells the story of how she was treated in England. The Jews who fled Hitler were regarded by most uncomprehending locals as ‘Germans’ (officially called ‘enemy aliens’) and even suspected of being spies. Ruth was interrogated as an eleven year old by the police after a vigilant neighbour saw her hiding a note to one of her school friends in the crevice of a dry-stone wall!
There are heroes and heroines in this story as well as villains. Above all there was Mina, the family retainer – cook, housekeeper and surrogate mother to Ruth – who refused to obey Nazi orders by working for the family and befriending them whenever she could. It was Mina who accompanied Ruth’s mother and father up to the time when they boarded the train that took them on their final journey to their deaths at Auschwitz.
When they made their farewell, Ruth’s mother thrust a bundle of papers into Mina’s hands. They were the letters sent by her four older children, who had all managed to escape abroad. These letters are the topic of Ruth’s other book, Life Lines, which forms a companion volume to Child of Our Time. Together they form an important contribution to the historical record of what is, arguably, the greatest crime in human history.
Child of Our Time: A Young Girl’s Flight from the Holocaust by Ruth David, I.B.Tauris, 2003, ISBN: 9781860647895, £22.50.
Correction (11/02/15): In December 2014, Barbara Butler at Christians Aware in Leicester published a new edition of Child of Our Time: A Young Girl’s Flight from the Holocaust. It is available from the publisher Christians Aware.
