Cleaning up after Kristallnacht. Photo: Dalbera / flickr CC
The missing chapter
Peter Kurer’s family escaped from Nazi Germany with the help of British Quakers. He tells his story to Ian Kirk-Smith.
‘If anyone was in any doubt what the Nazis were about, and what they represented, then ‘Kristallnacht’ should have opened their eyes. Not one country in the world showed the slightest interest.’ There is anger, and a trace of despair, in Peter Kurer’s voice. On Kristallnacht, the ‘Night of Broken Glass’, in November 1938, Jewish homes and shops all over Nazi Europe were attacked. Around 1,668 synagogues in were ransacked and 267 set on fire. In Vienna alone 95 were destroyed.
Four days after Kristallnacht a powerful delegation of British Jews visited the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, including Chaim Weizmann, who was to become the first president of Israel. They expressed their profound concern over the fate of Jews in Germany and Austria.
Chamberlain
‘Chamberlain could not understand why they had come and told them Hitler was a gentleman and he was doing business with him. He sent them away,’ Peter Kurer explains.
Six days after this meeting, when the Jewish delegation was shown the door in the House of Commons, a Quaker delegation arrived, led by Bertha Bracey. They came, not to see Neville Chamberlain, but the home secretary, Samuel Hoare, who was a member of a prominent Quaker family. With his approval, and the support and assistance of Philip Noel–Baker MP, the House of Commons agreed that Britain would take 10,000 Jewish children between six and eighteen years of age.
Hitler had decreed that Jews were not allowed on public transport. So, how did 10,000 Jewish children get to England? The first children arrived on
2 December 1938.
After the first world war, when some relief agencies had left, Quakers stayed on in Germany and were involved in basic social work, like soup kitchens, helping German children in need.
Peter says: ‘Some of the children that Friends assisted were now officers in the German Army and gave instructions – hands off the Quakers. It was the Quakers who waited for the Jewish children at the railway stations. Quakers travelled on many trains, ensuring children were only bringing that which the Nazis permitted. At the Hook of Holland, they ensured the children caught the connection to Harwich and then the train to London’s Liverpool Street Station. There are two statues at the station today in recognition of this Quaker work.’
Kindertransport had two parts to it. The first was getting legislation through Parliament to allow it to happen. The second was getting it to actually work.
‘Entirely due to the Quakers,’ Peter says, ‘both parts worked and 10,000 Jewish children were saved; but I was not on Kindertransport. My family were saved by Manchester Quakers’.
The Goodwins
Jacob Kurer, Peter’s father, was a dentist in Vienna in the 1930s. Peter was born in 1931 and his brother Hans was born in 1929. Jacob Kurer had spent a year of his university studies in Germany in the early days of Hitler.
‘He was appalled and frightened,’ Peter remembers. ‘He wanted out of Vienna but my mother, Dora, with two young children and Jacob just starting his dental practice, pleaded with him to stay. Whilst Jacob agreed to stay, he cultivated every possible contact aboard.’
In 1936, Jacob and Dora attended a funeral in Manchester and met two Quakers, Horatio and Mary Goodwin, jewellers in Swan Street. Their three sons had married and left the parental home. The Goodwins agreed to help the Kurer family and to open their home to them.
Hitler was welcomed into Vienna in March 1938. In June 1938 Jacob, Dora, Hans and Peter were in Manchester - thanks to the Goodwin family. They arranged and paid for ‘guarantees’ to the British government to ensure that the Kurer family could come to England.
A ‘guarantor’, at the time, had to pay £50 for each individual who they agreed to stand guarantor for. That is £2,500 in to day’s currency. The Goodwins found other Manchester Quakers to guarantee five other members of the Kurer family, including three grandparents and a great-grandmother, who was then ninety-one years of age.
Peter says, ‘When we got to Manchester the Quakers took over. We lived in the Goodwin’s House. Hans and I went to Friends’ School Wigton and Quakers paid for the first two years there for us, after which my father could afford the fees. We had all our school days at Quaker boarding schools.’
Yad Vashem
By raising ‘guarantees’ the Quakers helped around 7,000 Jews escape from Nazi Europe. In the late 1930s the entire membership of the Religious Society of Friends was only about 20,000. It is thought that the Quaker movement paid £350,000 to the Home Office as guarantees for Jewish refugees. It is equivalent to £17.5 million to day. The Quakers also brought in a further 6,000 as domestic workers.
The gratitude that Peter Kurer feels towards Quakers has not been held quietly, in his mind as a memory. He has spent many years actively working to have the Quaker contribution recognised by the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem.
Individuals who helped to save Jews, such as Oskar Schindler, are recognised in Yad Vashem as one of the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ – but there is no similar recognition given to groups of people, such as the Quakers.
Peter realised that one way to gain official recognition of the contribution made by Quaker was to have a piece of authoritative academic work accepted by the historical archive in the museum.
He started this work in 2002 and he called his second attempted thesis, The Missing Chapter. Yad Vashem said they liked it, but they required it to by signed by a historian, a view with which Peter completely agreed. Peter says, ‘I had it signed by nine prominent historians. No historian turned me down. Each one added a paragraph and The Missing Chapter is now in the name of one of them – Jennifer Taylor. The Missing Chapter was accepted by the Holocaust Museum of Jerusalem on 2 January 2011.’
The Kurer Anchor System
Peter Kurer has had a distinguished career in the profession of his father, dentistry, and is world famous for inventing ‘The Kurer Anchor System’ – an invention based on something his woodwork master, Freddie Bell, taught him at Friends’ School Wigton. His book on the system has been translated into German and Japanese. It is dedicated to the school, and its motto: ‘We seek the truth.’
Peter has lectured on his invention for over thirty years, three times a year in the USA. He has also gone, three times a year, for over twenty-three years, to Japan.
‘I owe so much to the Quakers,’ he says. ‘I think the first Quaker was Moses. When he was taking the children of Israel out of Egypt, he got a bit fed up. He went up onto the mountain for forty days and forty nights. He came down with, arguably, the most widely accepted laws ever, the Ten Commandments. From where did Moses get them? He had no mobile phone nor a laptop computer nor was there a library up there’ There is a pause.
Then he says quietly: ‘He had only the silence. He sat in the silence and discerned the will of God.’
