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.