The UK’s response to refugee children in 1945 and now

In her review of the film The Windermere Children on BBC Two (G2, 28 January) Amelia Gentleman suggests that bringing to England young survivors of the Holocaust in 1945, alongside the earlier Kindertransport, shames our current response to child refugees.

The Johnson government’s failure to guarantee the Dubs amendment and to bring to the UK a few thousand vulnerable children from the continent for family reunification is indeed appalling. But sadly there is more continuity than change in government policy. The children brought to Britain were on temporary entry permits and this was even more the case with those who came in 1945 – they were here initially on the understanding that after they had recuperated they would move on elsewhere.

The organisers of the 1945 scheme had hoped to bring 1,000 children to the UK. That the eventual figure was roughly three-quarters of that small total was because the Home Office insisted on strident conditions which showed a failure to understand the full scope of what we now call the Holocaust. Later it reflected that the refugee organisations ran out of funds. This was, like the Kindertransport, a private scheme without government funding.

Finally, in both the 1930s and then after the war, the Home Office ensured that the number of Jewish adults – refugees and then survivors – was kept low. Jews during the Nazi era and immediately after were largely regarded as undesirable by the British government. Amelia Gentleman’s brilliant journalism on the Windrush scandal has shown how this state racism continues into the new millennium. It is an indication of the challenge ahead that the 20th century in this country offers little solace if we turn to history for encouragement and a usable past with regard to refugee entry.
Prof Tony Kushner
Parkes Institute, University of Southampton

• I share Amelia Gentleman’s discomfort about the contemporary resonances of The Windermere Children. All the more so in the light of the statement in the Radio Times that the film was to be broadcast simultaneously on German television. The programme rightly contrasted the hospitable and kind reception given to the children in England with the appalling treatment they had been subjected to in Nazi Germany. But in 2015 Angela Merkel’s generous and humane statement that refugees were welcome in Germany, designed to provide leadership to the rest of Europe, was rejected and widely derided here. And in 2016 latent xenophobia was cynically exploited by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove to win the Brexit referendum. We were entitled to feel moral superiority over Germany in 1945. We certainly aren’t now.
Tony Watts
Cambridge

• Boarding schools taking refugee children has happened a lot more recently than the 1552 case cited by Bob Finch (Letters, 27 January). In 1939, Rydal school in north Wales took two Jewish refugees – my father Lewis and his brother Geoffrey (in adulthood, the historian GR Elton) – who were thus able to come to Britain. Boarding schools should undertake to educate and support 1,000 of today’s refugee children as part of their charitable commitment, and lobby the government, especially their own alumni, to allow the children in.
Bridget Elton
London

• The Boarding Schools’ Association (BSA) and our member schools wholeheartedly support the idea of helping refugee children, and in 2015 campaigned tirelessly to do just this. We wrote to the then prime minister, David Cameron, numerous government departments, organisations, local authorities and refugee associations, but received no support for the scheme. Over 80 schools offered places worth about £1.5m in fees, but the government sent only two refugee children to take them up, with a further two refugees having approached one of the schools directly off the back of press coverage of the scheme. Should the government wish to take us up on our offer, we are still willing, five years on.
Robin Fletcher
Chief executive, BSA

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