Abstract
“We had the most marvellous time”: Jewish refugee domestics’ narratives of internment in Britain during the Second World War
Highlights
Article: “We had the most marvellous time”: Jewish refugee domestics’ narratives of internment in Britain during the Second World War
We were together with all our friends in one boarding house – German friends we met in Yorkshire – all highly educated people who were domestic[s] and we were all together interned and we had the most marvellous time.”[1]. This striking recollection is from the testimony of Ann Callmann, a German-Jewish businesswoman who was working as a live-in cook-housekeeper in Yorkshire when she was taken into custody in May 1940, one of about four thousand foreign women who were interned by the British as enemy aliens during the Second World War
Both Ann and her twin sister Lilo Callmann were among the twenty thousand Jewish women aged eighteen to forty-five who had come to Britain in the late 1930s on domestic service visas, agreeing to take jobs as residential servants in the UK as a condition of their escape from Nazi persecution
Summary
Article: “We had the most marvellous time”: Jewish refugee domestics’ narratives of internment in Britain during the Second World War. “We had the most marvellous time”: Jewish refugee domestics’ narratives of internment in Britain during the Second World War jennifer craig-norton “We were interned in May of 1940 and to be quite honest, we had the best time of our lives because we went to the Isle of Man and the British government paid for everything. Who knew what it was all about”, was later interned because, she claimed, “all the people in Cheltenham were interned” regardless of classification.[24] Faced with increasing pressure from refugee organizations and the Parliamentary Committee on Refugees led by Eleanor Rathbone, the government agreed that B cases ought to be reviewed, ideally by tribunals overseen by a different set of judges.[25] Undoubtedly, many refugee women would have had their B classifications re-evaluated under this plan, but the reviews had barely got under way when Germany attacked France and the Low Countries in the spring of 1940, sparking fears of invasion that unleashed a wave of antialien sentiment, and culminated in the mass internment of thousands of Jewish refugees
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