Leaving Germany
Someone recently asked me how my immigration to England came to be arranged and, having been told the story and without knowing what I had already written about our family history, suggested that it ought to be written down. I have written it for you.
After the so called Kristallnacht in November 1938 when so many Jews were taken to concentration camps, property owned by Jews was destroyed, shop windows smashed and shops looted, my parents tried to find a way to get my brother and me out of Germany. Like many other parents, were looking for a way that would give us a reasonable chance to have a decent life.
All countries had immigration regulations but England had a scheme under which it was possible to come as a child provided no payed employment was taken up and provided someone guaranteed to take care of all costs. Although no one from my immediate family had ever been to England, England was considered to be an ideal choice and I heard my father say that he thought that development of civilization in England was 50 years ahead of the rest of the world.
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These are the documents with which I came to England. The one in English is the so called "Permit" which I obtained when a place had been given to me at St. Mary's School, a special boarding school of which I am now a governor. After one year there, I was given a place at Bryanston boarding school. My emigration to England was arranged by a remarkable English lady, Mrs. Atkinson, who helped to get more than 50 refugees out Germany, working in conjunction with a German lady, Mrs. Landmann (neither of the 2 ladies was Jewish). Mrs. Landmann herself had to emigrate to England because of her part in this. She is commemorated by a tree in the 'Avenue of The Righteous' in Jerusalem - recently mentioned in the press because Schindler (of the film Schindler's List) is also commemorated there. I still have correspondence in which I confirmed that she well deserved such recognition.
Two remarkable women
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In the early 1930s we had moved to a larger Flat which could also accommodate my mother's parents, and we all lived there together. In 1932 my grandfather Alfred Pincus, who was in his 80s, was very ill - it was a problem with his heart, which he ultimately died of. Whilst he was ill we employed a nurse to help my grandmother and my mother to look after him.
In 1939 a German lady, Mrs. Landmann, whose mother had been English was taken ill. She was nursed by the same nurse who had looked after my grandfather. Mrs. Landmann was horrified by what was happening in Germany and she determined to use the connections she had with England to save as many people threatened by the Nazis as she could. Much of her story you can take from the appended articles that were published many years later in various Newspapers in St Petersburg, USA. However, these do not mention that for a large number of the people that she saved, she worked together with a Mrs. Atkinson, an English lady who lived in Cattistock near Dorchester in Dorset. I do not know what in particular prompted Mrs. Atkinson or how the two came to work together - outside the work they did they had very little contact and did not know much about each other. I do not even know if they ever actually met.
I must have impressed the nurse when I was a 6 year old, so that she told Mrs Landmann about me. Somehow my parents persuaded Mrs Landmann that I deserved very special treatment – I can only assume it was due to their personalities, my father's reputation and the fact that he had played a very major role in founding two schools when Jewish children were expelled from the state system.
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There was some money available for me as a result of a promise for an annual sum from a friend of my father who lived in Belgium. He was the translator (from the Hebrew) of the book "Fruit from the Tree of Life" that my father had edited. The sum would have been enough to pay for something like a quarter of my living expenses. He payed the money for the first year but in 1940 Belgium was invaded and of course no more money was sent. As far as I was able to discover he also did not survive the Nazi Era.
Mrs. Atkinson had two sons who had both been to Bryanston in Dorset, which was considered to be a very modem Public School. It pioneered new ideas and in a very splendid setting: it was reputed to be the fourth most expensive school in England. After the war, one of its former pupils became one of only four people in the world ever to win two Nobel Prizes. Mrs. Atkinson persuaded them to offer a place for one of 'her'
Refugees - me. However, Public Schools of this kind and at this time did not take boys until they were 14 or nearly 14-years old and Mrs. Atkinson therefore arranged for me to go first for a year to a boarding school called St.Mary's.
Mrs Atkinson clearly had a large circle of friends and acquaintances with whom she had relationships that allowed her to persuade them to help. In my case she made use of this on several occasions to find me places to stay when there were infections at either Bryanston or St Mary's, so that one or other was in quarantine, so that I could not go to St. Mary's for the holidays. She arranged for me to stay at different times with two retired headmistresses living in Paignton, a Vicar's family in a village near Bridport and an obviously very wealthy family living in a large house in Dorset where, in the middle of the war, they still had several servants.
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Although Mrs. Atkinson did not live very far away from where I was at school in Bryanston I met her personally only once; for morning coffee, in a small cafe in Dorchester. I had the impression that during the war years she was running the family farm - she mentioned in one of her letters that she had been ploughing. Mrs Atkinson died on 4th May 1953. They found so many names and of addresses of people with whom she had correspondence that the wife of one of her sons wrote to me 2 days later, apologising that her husband and his brothers simply could not write to them all alone. As far as I am aware the huge financial risk she had taken and the hard-work for the refugees that she had done never received any formal recognition.
Mrs. Landmann was awarded the German Order of Merit and the freedom of the city of St. Petersburg (where she had settled in America). In addition the Yad Vashem in Israel, which was set up to recognize people who had made great sacrifices to help Jews during the Nazi Era approached me (and others) and I provided them with the attached information. She was awarded the Medal for the Righteous Amongst the Gentiles
https://righteous.yadvashem.org/?searchType=righteous_only&language=en&itemId=4015999&ind=NaN
- the same award as the award that was given Schindler (of Schindler's List fame). I also provide some of the material for the entry about her in Pamphlet "British Rescuers" published by the Holocaust Centre UK.
During the war years and for some time afterwards Mrs Landmann lived in England, earning her living doing what work she could get (her qualification as a social worker was not recognized), and she then emigrated first to Canada and then the USA. From time to time she came back to Europe on visits and even tried to retire in Germany to be near her son, but this did not work.
After meeting her in Germany before I came to England, I met her once when she visited St. Mary's, and a few times after the war. Ann and I used to see her whenever she came Europe, and once in St. Petersburg. Eventually she became very confused and spent the last few weeks of her life in a home near her son in Germany. She died on 6th November 1984. She was 95 years old.