Refugees at the Margins: Jewish Domestics in Britain 1938–1945

Abstract

From shortly after the Anschluss until the beginning of the Second World War, about twenty thousand Jewish refugees were admitted to Britain as live-in domestic servants in British homes. These women (and a few men) comprised about one-third of all Jewish refugees admitted into Britain in the 1930s, but unlike prominent scientists and intellectuals or the Kindertransportees, they have remained at the margins of British public memory of the 1930s. However, hundreds of these former refugee domestics have left testimonies and memoirs that narrate their experiences before, during, and after the war including their reception by Anglo-Jews and non-Jews, and their experiences of alienation, belonging, adjustment, and loss. This paper examines these testimonies to find commonalities in Jewish refugee domestics' pre-emigration and refugee lives and argues that the very terms under which they were allowed to come to the United Kingdom as well as the limits of testimony-giving have perpetuated their marginalization and absence from Jewish refugee and wartime social histories.