Central European Refugees Research Articles

Fractured Childhoods, Identities in Transit: Humanitarian Aid for Central European Refugees from the United Kingdom

The aim of this study is to address the situation of one of the most vulnerable social collectives: Central European refugee children and youths who fled the territories occupied by the Third Reich, thanks to the help provided by large number of private or public organizations, which resulted in the reception of about ten thousand refugees in the United Kingdom at the beginning of World War II. To this end, diverse documents have been analysed from archives such as The National Archive and The British Library, in order to learn more about this human drama and its impact upon international politics, as well as the role played by the British Government.

A Sketch of My Scientific Autobiography

A Sketch of My Scientific Autobiography Robert R. Sokal1 I was born in 1926 in Vienna, Austria. I stem from a very typical bourgeois Jewish family, probably not all that different from non-Jewish middle-class families in Vienna. My father was a paint merchant. He owned a small chain of paint stores and a little manufactory, not big enough to be dignified by the name factory, for producing paint. As to my ancestors—most Jewish people when asked count at least one or two rabbis among their forebearers, just as emigré Russians like to sport a Grand Duke in their families— but I have not heard of a single rabbi among my ancestors. In fact, as far as I know, my paternal ancestors for three generations manufactured and sold paint in various places, mostly in what is now western Ukraine and at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. My maternal grandfather was the headmaster of a secular school for Jewish children in the same region. My own schooling started in Vienna where I went to an institution called a Gymnasium, which is a high school European style, in which I earned solid passing grades, but I was not in any way distinguished academically. Moreover, because this biography emphasizes my scientific development, I cannot recall any specific scientific interests. I did take a course in natural history, learned how to botanize and dissect flowers, and I recall being somewhat intrigued by the diversity of floral structure I uncovered. But I certainly had no special love or particular affinity for nature. In that respect, I am an uncharacteristic member of an ecology and evolution department. Many of our faculty were beetle or moth collectors in their youth, and those who had the good or bad fortune to grow up in a big city often developed that love of nature in a museum of natural history. Although there was and is a very distinguished natural history museum in Vienna, I cannot recall being there more than once during my childhood. I have gone back there as an adult, and have, in fact, worked there, but it had no influence on me then. My parents, like most bourgeois Jewish parents, expected me to become a doctor. And I had not given the matter much thought. I was only 13 when I left Vienna. The city furnished my cultural and intellectual roots, which are undoubtedly still visible—in many ways I still feel very European—but nevertheless, as far as science goes, my origins lie elsewhere. [End Page 489] In 1939 we moved to Shanghai. You may ask why? It is fairly obvious if you know your recent, actually no longer so recent, history. The Germans occupied Austria, or so the Austrians say. Anyway, the Germans came. My father was sent to the infamous Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps, and the only way to get him released was to present evidence that we were planning to leave the country. And the only place you could go without a visa was China. At that, we were very fortunate to be able to do that because it saved us from the Holocaust. So I arrived in Shanghai after an exciting three-week ocean voyage into a completely different culture, a very exotic one, for a 13-year-old Viennese boy. We were part of a community of some 20,000 Central European refugees who arrived in Shanghai between 1937 and 1941. I was put into a school with all the other refugee children. However, this school terminated students at age 14. I was within a year of that age, and the prospects ahead of me were that I would have to become an apprentice to someone like a carpenter or a plumber. That is what most of my friends and classmates were going to do. As anybody who knows me well will testify, I am absolutely hopeless at doing anything with my hands, and therefore I abhorred the thought of earning my living by manual labor. My mother was also very ambitious for me, and she somehow managed to get me into a school, called a public school, which was actually a...

Writing migrants back into NHS history: addressing a ‘collective amnesia’ and its policy implications

The National Health Service (NHS) has used migrant workers from its inception. As early as 1957, the Willink Committee on medical manpower found that 12% of doctors in a random sample taken from the Medical Directories of 1953 and 1955 were mainly overseas-trained.2 The majority of these doctors had entered Britain during or after World War II, suggesting that many of them would have been Jewish and Central European refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe. Later, migration from the Indian subcontinent became a key dimension of the recruitment of doctors in Britain. At the end of the 1970s, the Royal Commission on the NHS estimated that between 18,000–20,000 registered doctors in the UK were born outside the UK, with half of these being from India or Pakistan.3 In the 1950s and 1960s, large numbers of Irish and Caribbean nurses were essential to the expansion of NHS services, a pattern that was replicated in the early 2000s when nurses from Africa, India and the Philippines came to the UK.4 A 2005 report found that in 2003, 29.4% of NHS doctors were foreign-born and that 43.5% of nurses recruited to the NHS after 1999 were born outside the UK.5 In spite of this long history of substantial migration into the NHS, little effort has been made to understand the ways in which it has influenced the development of healthcare in the UK. The popular perception of the NHS as a ‘typically British’ institution (in a restrictive white sense rather than in an inclusive sense) tends to prevail in public perceptions of the organization and in its self-image. Of the 19 photos used by the BBC's online archive to illustrate the development of the NHS up to the 1970s, not one shows a black or Asian person.6 The ‘historical timeline’ on the NHS website makes no reference to immigration.7 Political and organizational histories of the NHS pay scant attention to migrants. A word search for ‘immigration’ in Rivett's online National Health Service History yields little more than the occasional passing reference to overseas doctors.8 Nor can much be found in Webster's two tomes on the health services since the war.9 Where there is a focus on migrant health professionals in the NHS, the themes most widely covered are the experiences of individual groups of migrants and discrimination. This includes the dearth of opportunities for overseas doctors,10 the lack of recognition of the skills and experience of migrant nurses,11 exploration of how Irish nurses construct identity,12 reflections on the experiences of Black and Minority Ethnic NHS employees in the North West of England13 and a vast literature on racism grounded in empirical evidence14 as well as theoretical analysis.15 These studies have generated a wealth of useful data but three fundamental issues require further examination. First, there is a basic need to document and recognize the scale of the dependency of the NHS on immigration. Second, to what extent were migrants facilitators of development and/or agents of change within the NHS? Third, can a better understanding of this history inform policy?

Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina (review)

Reviewed by: Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina Bryan Edward Stone (bio) Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina. By Leonard Rogoff. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. 432 pp. The past twenty years have seen the appearance of books describing the Jews of fifteen different states, an emerging American Guide Series of American Jewry. While some of these treat essential communities like California and Florida, most give us insight into Jewish populations off the beaten track—Michigan, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and Texas, for example—where Jewish life adheres, sometimes oddly, to local and regional customs while still displaying the outlines common to all American Jews. Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina by Leonard Rogoff, an historian at the Jewish Heritage Foundation of North Carolina, which cosponsored the book and a series of related documentary projects, is among the best of this growing genre. It is thorough, insightful, rich in detail, lavishly illustrated, and readable, and it provides a model of how to weave local history into the broader patterns of national and international Jewish experience. [End Page 385] North Carolina spent most of its history in the shadows of its larger and more prosperous neighbors, lacking the landed gentry, abundant cash crops, urban capitals, and extensive reliance on slavery that characterized Virginia and South Carolina. Long after the American Revolution, its colonial status persisted, as it remained an outpost of larger, better developed states. The same is true of its tiny Jewish community. Typical is Rogoff’s observation that “[t]he most significant Jew in North Carolina’s early history never resided there”; he was a Newport merchant who dispatched shipments of goods to the North Carolina coast (12). Early Jewish residents were often salesmen employed by commercial firms in cities elsewhere—Richmond, Charleston, Baltimore—and usually stayed only briefly, while most Jewish tradesmen passed straight through on their way to more active ports. With railroads, the reliance on distant cities only deepened. In 1850, some 80 percent of Wilmington’s Jewish merchants were “agents” of New York and Philadelphia distributors (53). Jews were essential to North Carolinian commerce, but that commerce was among the weakest in the country. Industrialization stirred North Carolina from the doldrums, and in the 1830s it began a rapid expansion that would eventually make it the South’s most industrialized state. Here, too, Jews were at the forefront. Mordecais and Lazaruses served as bank and railroad executives, and, after the Civil War, Jews provided both management and labor to the state’s burgeoning cotton, tobacco, and furniture mills. Gentile manufacturers, notably Durham’s cigarette magnate James Duke, tried to import immigrant workers from the North—the state’s first dose of eastern European Jewry—but most left when production was mechanized. Jewish capitalists held on to thrive, and North Carolina became a bastion of Jewish upward mobility. Not every business succeeded, however. The Nachamsons’ movie house in Dover was forced to close because the projector blew out the town’s lighting system. As the Jewish population grew and prospered, Jewish institutional life took hold, but slowly. The state lacked an active congregation until 1872. Religiously as economically, North Carolina Jews relied on regional networks, receiving visits from traveling rabbis and sending their dead out of state for burial. As industry flourished, however, bringing a constant influx of newcomers to the New South, so did Jewish life. By 1927, North Carolina had twenty-one Jewish congregations, up from one in 1876, though its Jews, like its gentiles, remained overwhelmingly rural. (For a book so well illustrated and with so many references to dozens of small towns, a map of the state is conspicuously absent and would have been a great help.) Central European refugees in the 1930s and postwar migrants from the North further swelled Jewish numbers [End Page 386] and set North Carolina on the path to the dynamic modern Sunbelt state it is today. Rogoff presents all of these transformations with nuance and understanding, but the book’s most welcome contribution is the final chapter, which describes the impact of Sunbelt migration and details the contemporary setting. Modern North Carolina, the high-tech research center, capital of higher...

Three Generations of Israeli Music

Most of Israel's cultural and political institutions were established by Central European refugees who transplanted their musical culture to British-mandate Palestine in the 1930s. The immigrant composers of the first generation (some of whom remain active) were a diverse group, but their era has come to be associated primarily with the self-conscious "Mediterranean" style (a hybrid of French impressionism and Middle Eastern musical sources) of Paul Ben-Haim and others determined to create a musical language suited to their unique time and place. The native-born sabras and their immigrant counterparts of the second generation were influenced both by their first-generation teachers and their own studies in the United States and Europe following World War II. The third generation, including for the first time composers born in the independent State of Israel, has been the most eclectic and international of all. Against an ever-changing social and historical backdrop, each generation of Israeli composers has created a body of literature as diverse as it is inextricably tied to its culture. This article is excerpted from the author's book Twenty Israeli Composers: Voices of a Culture (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997).

Persistent Memory: Central European Refugees in an Andean Land

Persistent Memory: Central European Refugees in an Andean Land

Lucie Varge: A Central European Refugee in the Circle of the French “Annales”, 1934–1941

Lucie Varge: A Central European Refugee in the Circle of the French “Annales”, 1934–1941

The reception of central European refugee physicists of the 1930s: U.S.S.R., U.K., U.S.A.

Summary This article considers the differential absorption and integration of refugee physicists into various countries during the 1930s, and the social and intellectual factors responsible for this, focusing particularly on the social functions of the British and American university at that period, as well as continuing ideological struggles in the Soviet Union. More generally, the issue of the relative absorption of refugee physicists is used to examine the nature of the physics communities and other institutions of the host societies.