In the late summer of 1939, a 13-year-old Jewish boy named Manfred stepped on
to a train at a Berlin railway station, waved goodbye to the parents he
would never see again and headed for Britain.
Today he is an Englishman called John, one of the dwindling number who arrived
during one of the most remarkable rescue missions.
This weekend marks the 70th anniversary of Parliament’s decision to admit into
Britain 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Germany in an operation known as
the Kindertransport, or child-transport.
John Silbermann, now 82, was one of the last to join the exodus. Tomorrow he
will gather with other Kindertransport survivors at a ceremony to
mark an act of humanitarian heroism that probably saved his life and
certainly changed it utterly. As the immigration debate boils up in Britain
once more, few understand the issue better, or more painfully.
As he clambered on board the train, little Manfred clutched a small suitcase
containing a change of clothes, sandwiches for the journey to England and
his stamp album. He also carried a single silver Reichsmark, the equivalent
of one shilling, the maximum amount of money a Jew could take out of the
country.
The train guards looted the children’s suitcases on the way to the Dutch
border, but Manfred clung to his mark. This week, in his comfortable home in
North London, Mr Silbermann held the coin in his hand, his sole memento of
the journey.
“I said goodbye to my parents with just a kiss and a wave,” he says quietly.
“Of course, they had no idea it would be the last time. The plan was that we
would meet up again in the US. England was meant to be just a transit point
. . . we were blindly convinced that it wouldn’t take long to defeat the
Germans. Six months, and it would all be over.”
In the months before his departure, Manfred had seen his comfortable,
middle-class world torn apart by violence and racial hatred. He recalled the
teachers wearing Nazi uniforms, street fighting between storm troopers and
cloth-capped communists and the taunts and blows of his Aryan classmates.
“Children are natural bullies,” he says, without anger. “But when the
bullying is officially sanctioned, it is much, much worse.”
On the night of November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, Jews were murdered, shops
were looted, synagogues were destroyed and more than 25,000 Jewish men were
herded into concentration camps.
“After Kristallnacht, my parents knew we had to get out. Before, the attitude
was that Hitler couldn’t last for ever, that the good old days would come
back, fair play would return.”
Friedrich Wilhelm Silbermann, a well-to-do manufacturer of industrial
clothing, tried to get his family out to Argentina, Palestine and the US,
only to be told that, under a strict quota system, he and his wife Ella
would not be admitted to America before 1943.
Panic began to spread through the Jewish community. Mr Silbermann’s elderly
grandmother drowned herself in despair, believing that she was a
“hindrance”, preventing her family from escaping.
Then, late in 1938, a delegation of British Jewish leaders appealed to the
Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, to permit the temporary admission of
child refugees. After a debate on November 21, the British Government
agreed, provided a bond of £50 was posted for each child “to assure their
ultimate resettlement”. The money was paid predominantly by British Jewish
groups, but also by churches, trade unions and individuals.
The first Kindertransport left barely one month after Kristallnacht.
“It was a typically British response,” says Mr Silbermann. “To its eternal
credit the British Government was the only one in the entire world that
said, ‘Right we have got to something about this’.”
Mr Silbermann recalls the changed atmosphere on the train as soon as he left
German soil. At the Dutch border volunteers came aboard with chocolate and
fruit for the children. His first sight of Britain was gazing up through a
porthole on the ferry as it docked in Harwich to see a pair of large
wellington boots on the concrete jetty.
“I had never seen such boots before. For me, it was all very exciting. From
our viewpoint Britain was a great country – it had an empire, it had a king,
it had everything.”
In a field by the port, Jewish children of all ages played a game of football.
“It was free . . . no one was shouting at you. It was a different world.”
Manfred Silbermann was eventually lodged with a family in Bedford – “typical
salt-of-the-earth working-class English natives” in his description - and
then enrolled in the local school. “All I remember is a feeling of unlimited
kindness. As the weeks went on you had your leg pulled about speaking
German, but there was nothing nasty, it was always benign.”
A few weeks after his arrival, war was declared, and the Kindertransport
was stopped. More than 1.5 million Jewish children died in the ensuing
Holocaust.
Manfred continued to receive letters from his parents, written on Red Cross
forms to a formula to pass the German censor. “There was no real news, but
at least I knew they were all right.”
The German child was swiftly assimilated. “One day my woodwork teacher said to
me: ‘Manfred Silbermann. I just can’t get my tongue around that name.
Silbermann. Silverman. Long John Silver. John. Yes, John’. So I became
John.” He left school at 15 and got a job as an office boy.
The war news worsened. “After Dunkirk fell I got quite depressed: Norway had
gone, Denmark had gone, now France had gone. I thought, ‘The stormtroopers
will be here tomorrow’.” By now he was lodging with a Mrs Wriggly, who told
him: “Don’t be so worried – England never loses wars.”
Early in 1943 he received a final letter from his parents. He recognised his
mother’s handwriting, but not the name and address on the card. He wrote
back to the strange address. “Whether my reply got back I never knew.” Like
thousands of German Jews, Willy and Ella Silbermann had gone into hiding.
Years later Mr Silbermann would piece together their story. His parents paid
someone to smuggle them to the Swiss border, but they were betrayed and were
handed over to the Nazis. In June 1943 they were herded into railway cattle
cars and taken to Auschwitz. There they were killed and cremated.
Every single member of Mr Silbermann’s family, except an elder brother who had
escaped on an earlier Kindertransport, perished. “I have only one
second cousin, in Argentina,” he says.
Almost 50 years later John Silbermann visited Auschwitz, taking his two sons
and his wife, Susie, whose German-Jewish parents had emigrated to Britain
before the war. There, he found documents proving that both his parents had
reached the extermination camp in June 1943.
“After that, there were just blanks. We know they got there, but that is all
we know.”
The Kindertransport reunion tomorrow at the Jews’ Free School in
Kenton, northwest London, hosted by the Association of Jewish Refugees, will
be attended by the Prince of Wales and addressed by the historian Sir Martin
Gilbert. “I expect this will be the last reunion,” says Mr Silbermann.
With net immigration rising and the British National Party back in the news,
Mr Silbermann sees the boiling immigration debate from a special vantage
point. “What worries me is that at the moment we have an element of
immigrants who want to change the country: keep your religion by all means,
keep your identity, but don’t try to make the country conform to your
standards. We all accepted Britain as it was. We didn’t try to change it.
Our duty was to become British.”
Mr Silbermann took that duty to heart. Indeed, it would hard to imagine anyone
more quintessentially British than John Silbermann, OBE, former chairman of
the Road Haulage Association, founder of one of the largest haulage
companies in the country, and liveryman in the Worshipful Company of Carmen.
Only the slightest echo of a German accent, and the single coin clutched in
his hand, dated 1933, show that this Englishman was once a little Jewish
boy, escaping Nazi persecution.
