DIANE KENWOOD: Hello and welcome to the National Trust Podcast.

I'm Diane Kenwood, writer, blogger and broadcaster, and

today we're heading to the village of Waddesdon in the

Aylesbury Vale in Buckinghamshire. Our journey

begins on an ordinary high street which hides an

extraordinary story of survival, hope and philanthropy in one of

the darkest periods of our history.

Please be advised that this special episode explores events

around the Holocaust and features some emotive

descriptions.

HELGA STEINHARDT: We first came to Waddesdon on 16th March 1939,

and we were welcomed by a group of people from the village.

DIANE KENWOOD: Waddesdon in Buckinghamshire is best known as

the home of Waddesdon Manor owned by the Rothschild dynasty.

But our journey today starts somewhere very different. I'm

walking along the village high street, and I can see rows of

shops, a couple of pubs. Then we come to a cluster of really

unusual looking, almost gothic style houses.

In March 1939, a group of 23 children and their two adult

guardians stepped off a coach here, taking in their strange

new home in a strange new country for the first time. The

children were Jewish refugees. They'd escaped from Nazi Germany

where they'd been forced to leave behind their families,

friends and homes.

These children came to live in the village in a house with

cedar trees growing outside. They would become known as the

Cedar Boys and Girls, and we are here to find out more about

their remarkable story with the help of the people closest to

them.

Hello there. Hi, I'm Diane.

JACKIE STEINHARDT: I'm Jackie Steinhardt.

DIANE KENWOOD: Hi, Jackie.

JEREMY STEINHARDT: I'm Jeremy.

DIANE KENWOOD: Jeremy, explain to me... Jackie and Jeremy are

cousins. Their mothers Helga and Lore Steinhardt were sisters.

The sisters aged 14 and 11, their parents, Mr. And Mrs.

Steinhardt, and in total 31 children aged eight to 15 were

Holocaust refugees who arrived here in Waddesdon after fleeing

their home in Frankfurt.

Jeremy and Jackie, we've walked through the village, and we've

come to this quite sprawling, very attractive red brick house.

What's particularly special about this place?

JEREMY STEINHARDT: Well, this is the Cedars where the Cedar Boys

got their name from, and this was the house that they arrived

here in March 1939.

DIANE KENWOOD: How do you feel now looking at the house and

knowing that's where they came when they were so little?

JACKIE STEINHARDT: It gives me goosebumps. It's lovely to see

that the trees are still out at the front and that it really

hasn't changed very much, and it is extremely well maintained.

DIANE KENWOOD: It's interesting, isn't it, this generation of

people who came over during the war, process their experiences

because my mother-in-law came from Austria during the war when

she was a young child, and my father-in-law was Polish and he

escaped from Poland.

My mother-in-law did talk about it a lot, my father-in-law never

talked about it at all. How did you piece together the story of

your mother's history and what happened when they came from

Germany to live here?

JACKIE STEINHARDT: It was only really later on when we spent so

much time together that she talked. I used to go down there

every day.

JEREMY STEINHARDT: I used to have all the photograph albums

and I think they were the thing that clicked with me. Who are

these people in this photograph album? I better find out.

DIANE KENWOOD: Let's go back and paint a picture of your mothers'

lives. The two sisters, Helga and Lore.

JEREMY STEINHARDT: My mother was born in a little town called

Freiburg and Aunt Helga was born in Butzbach.

JACKIE STEINHARDT: They were quite a happy little family.

They lived in a very nice apartment.

JEREMY STEINHARDT: They mixed with the whole community.

JACKIE STEINHARDT: Yes.

JEREMY STEINHARDT: They didn't just mix with Jewish people.

JACKIE STEINHARDT: Yes, and that changed in 1933.

ALEX MAWS: It's so important to recognize that the Holocaust

didn't start with the flip of a switch. There was a slow build

up. My name is Alex Maws. I'm the Head of Education and

Heritage at the Association Of Jewish Refugees or the AJR.

The years of 1933, when the Nazis first came to power, all

the way through 1939, the outbreak of war, the situation

became increasingly dire for Jews living in Germany and

Nazi-occupied areas. Anti-Jewish laws included excluding Jews

from certain professions and education.

Businesses were eventually closed. Financially, Jews had to

pay a series of levies on their assets and eventually turn over

their property. There was a loss of personal freedom, there was a

loss of citizenship, critically. A requirement that Jews had to

carry ID that identified them as Jews.

DIANE KENWOOD: As with all Jewish citizens under Nazi rule,

life became more and more difficult for the Steinhardt

family.

JEREMY STEINHARDT: In 1933, my grandfather Hugo was told he

wasn't allowed to be a schoolteacher anymore, and then

I think their life became more peripatetic. They just tried to

find work.

DIANE KENWOOD: With limited options, the family considered

themselves lucky when Mr. Steinhardt eventually found a

job in Frankfurt. Hugo Steinhardt would be teaching at

a prestigious Jewish school, The Philanthropin. The role included

living and working at a nearby Jewish boys' home, The Flörsheim

Sicklesiftung.

The home had originally been an orphanage. However, increasingly

the children arriving there had been sent by their parents from

surrounding villages where anti-Semitism had become

especially severe. One of the boys arriving at the school and

home was Hans Spier, who later changed his name to Jack Spier.

MARGARET SPIER: Dad was always a happy child. He was very loved.

Even though he was an only child, he had a lot of uncles,

aunts, and cousins, as well as both sets of grandparents. He

had a normal life. I'm Margaret. I'm the daughter of Jack Spier.

Dad grew up in a small village of Treiser, northeast of

Frankfurt. Willie, dad's father, and had served as an officer in

the First World War and he was hopeful that things would

improve.

He didn't think that the Nazi's views would affect him and his

extended family until it was too late to do anything about. It

was usual at school for Hans to be picked upon because he was a

Jew. On dad's 10th birthday, the children stood up and said, "We

don't sing to Jews." After his 10th birthday, dad was expelled

from school purely because he was a Jew.

DIANE KENWOOD: The Steinhardts and parents of the boys staying

in the children's home in Frankfurt hoped for safety in

the more anonymous big city. But any relief would be short-lived.

On 9th November 1938, Kristallnacht, meaning the night

of broken glass, marked a violent turning point in the

persecution of Jews.

MARGARET SPIER: The ordinary people were authorized almost by

the state to attack Jewish synagogues, schools, homes, even

the children's home.

JEREMY STEINHARDT: One of the boys said that it was a really

cutting night. Most of the people that attacked the

children's home were their neighbours.

DIANE KENWOOD: Yes.

JEREMY STEINHARDT: He recognized them.

MARGARET SPIER: They were throwing bricks through the

windows. The children made their way to the back bedrooms and hid

under the beds. They got away with relatively little damage,

except that following that Hugo and the other teachers were

taken to Buchenwald concentration camp.

ALEX MAWS: There was really no denying after 9th November, the

situation and how untenable it was for Jews in Germany to stay

there. They really needed to find any place at all in the

world that would take them in as refugees. That wasn't really an

option for most Jews. Hardly any countries in the world offered

to increase their immigration quotas to help those Jews who

were in desperate need of a safe haven.

DIANE KENWOOD: For those of us in the Jewish faith,

philanthropy or Tzedakah is a cornerstone of our beliefs and

an ethical obligation. When the world looked on in horror at the

unfolding atrocities under the Nazis, Jewish campaigners, along

with other organizations and individuals urgently put a

rescue plan into place to help refugees.

Against the ticking clock of the outbreak of war, campaigners

appealed to the UK government to relax their immigration laws for

Jews before it was too late.

In a highly charged parliamentary debate on 21st

November 1938, the government under Prime Minister Neville

Chamberlain discussed the issue. The main focus of the debate was

to help unaccompanied children. There would be stipulations. The

children were not allowed to come with their parents, but the

government agreed to waive visa restrictions that would make it

easier for these refugee children to enter the UK.

Just weeks later, campaigners had mobilized a massive

evacuation plan.

ALEX MAWS: The Kindertransport is the name that's given to the

rescue operation that began on 1st December 1938, led up to the

outbreak of war in 1939, during which nearly 10,000

unaccompanied Jewish children under the age of 17, mostly from

Germany and Austria, but also from Czechoslovakia and Poland

and other countries, were sent by their parents away from the

threat of Nazism to safety in Britain.

Those children were placed into foster homes, hostels, schools,

farms, any place that could take them in across the UK.

When many people talk about the Kindertransport today, they

often think of it as a program sponsored by the British

government. But it's important to know that it was average

ordinary people who actually organized this massive rescue

operation.

One of the stipulations of the new law that enabled the

Kindertransport to happen is that children were allowed to

come as unaccompanied minors, but there needed to be a

guarantee, a fee that was paid for each child of £50, which is

something like £2,000 in today's money.

It was 10,000 children who came to Britain but not their

parents, and so for every story that we hear of a

Kindertransport refugee, we have to remember that they left

behind their parents, their wider families, their siblings.

DIANE KENWOOD: Meanwhile, in Frankfurt, sisters Lore and

Helga Steinhardt were in a desperate situation. Their

father had been tortured in Buchenwald concentration camp,

but at the time, release was possible if he could prove he

was going to leave the country. The sisters aged just 14 and 10,

devised a plan to try and get their family and the boys in the

children's home out of Nazi Germany.

HELGA STEINHARDT: During that time, my sister and I wrote

letters to various VIPs to see if they could help us.

DIANE KENWOOD: This is the voice of Helga speaking in her old age

for an oral history project at Waddesdon Manor. She recalls how

she and her sister wrote to prominent Jewish figures around

the world appealing for their help.

HELGA STEINHARDT: I wrote to President Roosevelt, but he

wasn't really interested, and my sister wrote to Lord Rothschild.

That's Lord Rothschild, Victor.

She was very lucky because he managed to contact James and

there was a house available in Waddesdon, the Cedars, which was

vacant. James sent a representative to Germany, that

was Mr. Julian Layton. He negotiated with the boys'

parents and the officials to obtain all the requisite papers

to transfer the boys home to Waddesdon.

DIANE KENWOOD: Let's set the scene a bit in terms of the

journey that the whole group made from Germany to get here to

Waddesdon. How unbelievably difficult it must have been for

the parents of these children to agree to let them go, knowing

that that could be the last time they ever see them, but also

knowing that by doing that they're saving their lives.

MARGARET SPIER: I know that on the morning that they left

Frankfurt, my father's mother was present at the station. They

weren't allowed actually on the platform. I don't know about

Willie Spier because at that time he had been taken off for

slave labour. The children would've boarded the train.

During the train ride, the emotions were very tense. The

police boarded the train, that was terrifying. Some of the

children's luggage was searched.

JACKIE STEINHARDT: They were allowed to take a mug, food for

the journey, basically sandwiches and nothing extra.

MARGARET SPIER: But as soon as the SS got off the train and the

train went from Germany into Holland, the emotions on the

train lightened enormously. I recall dad saying that they said

hurrah and great fun. From the hook of Holland, they took the

night boat to Harwich.

I do have here dad's ticket for the SS Prague. Dad was issued

with a second class ticket on 15th March 1939. On the journey

across the channel, the sea was very rough and there was a very

sick smell down in the berth of the ship, so dad spent a lot of

his time on deck.

DIANE KENWOOD: After arriving on British soil, there was a final

train to Liverpool Street Station in London, the hub for

Kindertransport arrivals. But as the children took in this new

country for the first time, their initial impressions were

somewhat mixed.

JEREMY STEINHARDT: I've got one or two little quotes. Hans

Bodenheimer was one of the boys. "My first impression was,

so this is England. Look at the women and all the makeup they're

wearing and they smoked.".

JACKIE STEINHARDT: Liverpool Street Station was noisy and

chaotic and a lot of children being processed, and they were

lucky in the sense that they had a coach waiting for them there.

That then brought them to Waddesdon where they were met by

somebody called Mrs. Court at the Cedars.

DIANE KENWOOD: For the next part of our story, we'll find out

what happened when the Cedar children and their guardians,

Mr. and Mrs. Steinhardt, arrived in England as Holocaust refugees

in 1939. Our next stop is a short distance from Waddesdon

village through the scenic Aylesbury Vale to Waddesdon

Manor, former home of the couple who made the children's escape

possible, James and Dorothy de Rothschild.

We've driven up the winding road to get to the manor, and here it

is. Oh my goodness me! It's like coming across a French chateau

in the middle of the English countryside. It's a big honey

coloured building with probably the most bonkers selection of

rooftop turrets, spires, chimneys that I can possibly

imagine.

Hello, Colette. Nice to meet you.

COLETTE: Very nice to meet you too.

DIANE KENWOOD: Tell us what you do here.

COLETTE: I'm senior collection manager.

DIANE KENWOOD: Can we have a look inside the amazing

building, please?

COLETTE: Yes, yes.

DIANE KENWOOD: Good heavens, look at this dining room. It's

an astoundingly ornate room with marble on the walls and huge

tapestries inset into the marble and an enormous oval table in

the middle with two giant chandeliers.

COLETTE: The interesting thing to try and imagine is that at

about the same time that the Cedar children were coming from

Germany, James and Dorothy, like many owners of large country

houses, had packed away their collections and hosted groups of

evacuees from London, and these were set up as nurseries with

little beds.

DIANE KENWOOD: James and Dorothy were extraordinarily generous,

not just with their home, but also with their care for all

these children.

COLETTE: Yes, yes. But the very, very special thing about James

and Dorothy is they're setting up mechanisms to be able to

bring children from Germany. The Cedars, the house in the village

had been built as a maternity home. It was an opportunity to

repurpose it as a home for a group of people. I am now going

to take you into the panelled room and we have some papers and

material to look at and talk about.

DIANE KENWOOD: Fantastic. Hi Catherine. Nice to meet you.

CATHERINE TAYLOR: Hello.

DIANE KENWOOD: Your job here at Waddesdon is...

CATHERINE TAYLOR: I'm the head of archives and records.

DIANE KENWOOD: I know you've got some to share with us. First of

all, I want to say hello to Margaret. Nice to meet you,

Margaret. Now you are the daughter of one of the Cedar

Boys.

MARGARET SPIER: I'm the daughter of Jack Spier, who was known as

Hans Johann Spier.

DIANE KENWOOD: Fantastic. Well, it's... Up on the top floor,

head archivist Catherine Taylor has delved into Waddesdon

Manor's extensive records. Helped by descendants, Jackie,

Jeremy, and Margaret, we can piece together a vivid picture

of life for the Cedar children refugees after they arrived in

the UK.

Let's get stuck into these fantastic archive pieces.

CATHERINE TAYLOR: The first thing I have here, it's called a

diet sheet. What they were fed for the first two weeks, they

were in Waddesdon. I imagine that it must be very different

to what they were used to eating in Frankfurt.

DIANE KENWOOD: Jeremy, could you read out a few examples of what

they did have?

JEREMY STEINHARDT: Irish stew for dinner, potatoes, leeks, and

treacle tart, beef sausages, Savoy’s, rice, and prunes. It's

a little bit like school dinners, isn't it?

DIANE KENWOOD: It is.

JEREMY STEINHARDT: What we had.

CATHERINE TAYLOR: When you look at it, you really can see that

feeding this many extra mouths was a challenge initially. It's

not a very varied diet.

DIANE KENWOOD: Hundreds of miles away from home, the strange food

wasn't the only new thing the children had to quickly get used

to in order to assimilate into their new country. They weren't

allowed to speak their mother tongue German and had to quickly

learn English, and then there was their new shared

accommodation to adjust to.

Among the Cedar Boys was Uri Sella, who later wrote about his

first impressions of the home in Waddesdon village as an

eight-year-old boy. Jackie, I think you have a record of what

the first impressions of that house were.

JACKIE STEINHARDT: Uri says, " With our small suitcases in

hand, we followed Hugo and Lilly through the wrought iron gates

and up the path. Waiting at the front door to greet us warmly,

was Mrs. Court, the wife of the gamekeeper. She took us to our

rooms where everything had been readied.

There were seven bedrooms upstairs. My room, which I was

to share with five other boys, was a large bay window room that

had been neatly laid out with six beds and a row of six small

wash basins. We went downstairs with our shoes clattering loudly

on the uncarpeted floors.

Our sitting room had a table big enough for everyone, and there

were lockers that had been prepared. High up on a shelf was

a Bakelite radio that in the months and years ahead would be

our central source of news.

The kitchen consisted of three rooms, the first room where all

the food was prepared, and a second room, the scullery with a

stone floor and a large Belfast sink. We soon got to know this

room very well because a rota was drawn up for us to wash the

dishes and dry them. There were mountains of pots and pans. ".

DIANE KENWOOD: In September 1939, World War II began, and in

the midst of these extraordinary circumstances, the Cedar

children were growing up. They were helped by the close

friendships they formed and making the most of the freedom

of playtime in the countryside.

What have we got to look at now, Catherine?

CATHERINE TAYLOR: I've got photos of two of the boys

holding chickens in 1940, which perhaps shows part of what

day-to-day life was like.

MARGARET SPIER: Can I tell you a few things that happened just

every day? The chickens were kept in the orchard, and every

morning and evening before and after school, the boys would

collect the eggs. At the end of the garden, there was a field in

which a horse was kept and the boys would climb over the fence

and try to ride the horse bareback before being found out.

Then on another occasion, they started to dig a very large hole

in the back garden, and when they were asked what they were

doing, they replied that they were trying to dig to Australia.

DIANE KENWOOD: Outside of their home, the group integrated into

the local community. The children did well at school, and

for the first time in years, they could play with non-Jewish

children.

MARGARET SPIER: On the first day of the boys being at the Cedars,

the boys were kicking a football around on the front lawn. The

local boys came to see what was going on in their little

village. When it was time for dinner, the local boys said, "

See you tomorrow." The Cedar Boys were ecstatic. They were so

excited that someone who was not Jewish wanted to see them

tomorrow.

DIANE KENWOOD: The community even stepped forward to offer

their homes to the children. A rota to stay with foster

families in the village was very popular as it offered the boys

respite from the more institutional children's home

into the warm family environment they desperately missed.

JACKIE STEINHARDT: Uri stayed with Nurse Edwards who he

really, really loved, and they treated him like a son. She also

took them on holiday to Llandudno, a little group of

them, so they were very, very good to the boys.

DIANE KENWOOD: The group of refugee children had made

remarkable progress adjusting to their new life in England. But

the shadow that constantly hung over all of them was what was

happening to their families as the atrocities of the Holocaust

worsened in Europe.

Even for Helga and Lore who'd managed to escape with their

parents, tragedy struck the family.

HELGA STEINHARDT: My father died in 1942 as a result of his being

tortured in the concentration camp, and after that period, my

mother had to carry on her own.

DIANE KENWOOD: After World War II began, communication with

home became increasingly sparse, and for some children it stopped

altogether. For many of the Cedar children, they wouldn't

find out what had happened to their families until towards the

end of the war.

Your father's family were all left behind in Germany,

Margaret.

MARGARET SPIER: They all perished, yes. Whilst dad was

here in the village, he did have communication with his parents,

and later on, he received what was to be his last

communications from the German Red Cross and it was received in

May 1942. It had taken about a month for the telegram to arrive

in England and it was usual to write on the back of the

telegram to reply to the sender.

But my father knew that his parents were going away and my

father knew what going away meant. My father kept hold of

this telegram throughout his life and kept it very close to

him, and here it is. "Beloved Hans, letter received today. We

approve of your choice of being baker and confectioner.

Beautiful. Be well-behaved and faithful to your employer and

all people. Work hard and be supportive to all. Heartfelt

greetings.".

DIANE KENWOOD: The thing about them all is having suffered this

extraordinarily traumatic and difficult experience, they did

manage to go on and lead fulfilled and fulfilling lives,

and that's in itself a truly remarkable thing.

The next artifact moves us on quite a long way, doesn't it,

Catherine?

CATHERINE TAYLOR: Yes, it takes us nearly 40 years from the end

of the war. It's the article in the New York Times from July

28th, 1983. The headline is, "15 who fled Nazis as boys hold a

reunion" and it talks about the reunion they had here, and

there's a picture here of Dorothy and members of the Cedar

Boys and Girls outside the Cedars in 1983.

DIANE KENWOOD: Jackie, what did your mum go on to do?

JACKIE STEINHARDT: My mother became a teacher. She went to

teacher training college and met my father. He was very

persistent in cycling all the way from Leicester to

Manchester. She worked hard. She had six children. When she was

older, she began to translate for the Association Of Jewish

Refugees up to the age of about 90.

DIANE KENWOOD: What about your mum, Jeremy?

JEREMY STEINHARDT: My mum did various things. She worked in an

ammunition factory during the war, in a laboratory. That's

where she met my dad in Manchester. She became very

interested in art. She spent a lot of time making pots. She

trained to be a teacher. She was a bit of a mover around, my mum,

she didn't settle to things very well.

When she was a bit older, she was quite active in supporting

the Vietnamese boat people, the refugees that came over.

DIANE KENWOOD: Your father was a baker, wasn't he, Margaret?

MARGARET SPIER: Yes, he was master baker. My father finally

left the Cedars on 8th September 1943 at the age of 15 and eight

months. His first job was as an apprentice at WD South Bakers

and Confectioners in Aylesbury. He went on to own his own

business and expand the group into three bakery shops. Growing

up, I remember the warmth at home, a place filled with love,

smiles, food, and my father's great sense of humour.

CATHERINE TAYLOR: I have the speech here that Dorothy gave on

the occasion of the reunion, and Dorothy said, "How delighted my

husband would've been that so many of you have made your way

in the world so very well.

It must have taken courage as well as resolution. "But my

favourite thing in this speech is her first line, which says,"

I'm afraid you very grown up men will always remain Cedar Boys to

me. "I think the best place to finish this morning is to go and

look at the plaque that the boys unveiled. If you just head out

to the parterre and find red line step.

DIANE KENWOOD: We've come past beautiful, vast, planted formal

gardens to a quiet little corner, and there's something

very special here. Margaret, read us what it says on this

plaque. "

MARGARET SPIER: The plaque is dedicated to the revered memory

of Mr. and Mrs. James de Rothschild by the Cedar Boys and

Girls in gratitude for the sanctuary at the time of

conflict, 1939.".

DIANE KENWOOD: I have one last question for each of you. Why do

you feel that it's important that the story of the Cedar Boys

and Girls is preserved and told?

JEREMY STEINHARDT: Well, I think it's essentially a lesson from

history and I know there are lots of lessons, but you can't

afford for any of them to disappear, so we've got to keep

that alive.

DIANE KENWOOD: Jackie.

JACKIE STEINHARDT: This is their story. But there are so many

other refugees in the world who deserve tremendous respect and

hopefully we treat them in the same way.

DIANE KENWOOD: What about you, Margaret?

MARGARET SPIER: My father would have been very happy to share

his experiences. He was always very grateful to England being

his sanctuary, and he was very thankful for surviving the war

and not being one of the six million Jews who died in the

Holocaust.

I mean, each time I go back to Germany with my sisters, we

always ask to meet up with the school children over there so

that we can tell our story. They often say to us afterwards that

they didn't realize that they were walking on pavements

containing such history.

DIANE KENWOOD: Thank you for listening to this episode of the

National Trust Podcast and a very special thank you to the

families of the Cedar Boys and Girls for sharing their stories.

If you'd like to find out more about the Kindertransport, you

could visit the Association Of Jewish Refugees website.

If you'd like to find out more about Waddesdon Manor and other

places with Jewish heritage connections, please do look up

the Jewish Country Houses Research Project online or go to

our episode show notes where you'll find more information and

resource links. From me, Diane Kenwood. Goodbye.