From “unwanted Jew” to “a brighter professional future”: Kinder girls and the nursing profession in wartime Britain *

Jane Brooks

doi:10.14324/111.444.jhs.2020v51.006

Abstract

From “unwanted Jew” to “a brighter professional future”: Kinder girls and the nursing profession in wartime Britain *

Highlights

Peer Review: This article has been peer reviewed through the journal’s standard double blind peer-review, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review
Susi Loeffler escaped Czechoslovakia in July 1939 on one of the last trains out of Prague; she was fifteen years old. She started nursing in 1940 at a cottage hospital near Tunbridge Wells, as she recalled: “I took a job as a cadet nurse at the Crowborough Cottage Hospital in Kent not far from Tunbridge Wells
In the introduction to I Came Alone, the anthology of narratives from Kinder published in 1990, the editor, Bertha Leverton, argues that the Kinder transport “was an act of mercy”.84. She writes that the decision to accept the Kinder was in part to make up for the closing of the Palestine border, it is the idea that the people of Britain did something altruistic that suffuses her stories

Summary

Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England

Article: From “unwanted Jew” to “a brighter professional future”: Kinder girls and the nursing profession in wartime Britain. John Stewart and others have been generally unsympathetic to the work of the Nursing and Midwifery Department and those with whom they worked, notably the hospital matrons, the Home Office and the Ministry of Health.[37] Susan McGann and colleagues’ history of the Royal College of Nursing identifies the reluctance of the College to give help to these young women.[38] as Stewart continues, the nursing profession was more amenable to Jewish refugees than their medical and dental colleagues.[39] In a reappraisal of the hostility of the British medical profession to Jewish refugee doctors, Paul Weindling points to the support of the reforming faction within the profession.[40] But these medical men were not in the majority.

From Kind to nurse

War nurse

Conclusion