Oldal 142 [142]
140
Anna M. Rosner
told to help in the kitchen and clean up the house, she was also denied correspond¬
ence with her mother or contact with the man sent to check on her by the Jewish
Board of Refugees. In her testimony she recalls the teachers and her peers behav¬
iour after she turned up at school knowing almost no English at all: "We started
going to school (...) I was put at the back of the class as I couldnt speak English
very well, and the teacher gave me cards with drawings on and names at the bottom
of the card. Nobody took much notice of me. One day after school, a boy started
shouting and pointing his finger on me shouting ‘German Jew’. I didn’t know what
he meant. I didn’t know what a German Jew was” (Leverton & Lowensohn 2003:
19). Irene Liron, a girl who arrived to London in May 1939, recalled the feeling of
otherness and rejection in her memoirs. After bombings of London she was sent
to Devon, and attended a local village school: “This school consisted of one large
room with two teachers. I don’t know if] learned anything during that period, but
I tried very much to ‘belong’ and not be different from the other children. I wasn’t
very successful in that, as I was considered a German (they didn’t know what Jewish
was) and as England was at war with Germany, it made things even more difficult
for me. But what was the most difficult for me at this school was the weekly visits
to the village church for prayers. My parents were traditional but not religious Jews,
but all the same I felt that by going to church I was sinning. I pretended to pray,
with the rest, listened to the vicar’s sermon, but it was terrible ordeal for me. Of
course I know that if I had said one sentence, that I was Jewish and didn’t want to
go to church, nobody could have made me—which just goes to show how foolish
children are, because their one desire is not to be different” (Leverton & Lowen¬
sohn 2003: 198). Another example of a girl talking about otherness as well as ‘no
longer being different’ could be Lenore Davies, who arrived to England at the age
of thirteen. Soon after her arrival she was taken in by an Englishwoman (in her
memoirs she does not mention the woman's name). Years later she recalled differ¬
ences in hers and her foster mother’s habits: “(...) my table manners were different,
not wrong; my phraseology was poor, not impolite; my English general knowledge
was limited, not stupid” (Leverton & Lowensohn 2003: 65). Lenore spent three
weeks with the family and was then sent away to a hostel in South London where
she joined a school. She wrote: “When war broke out, I was evacuated with my
school. This time I was more experienced—I had seen it all before (...) Suddenly
I was no longer different, everybody needed to be looked after also” (Ibid.).
Many of the children changed locations multiple times. Being separated from
their parents and being forced to find their place in new environment played an
important role in the flexibility they shared in their adult lives. Frequently they
move and change places of residence, not only because it comes easily for them,
but also because they rarely feel at home and (due to past events) treat society as
something that might never fully accept them.
The cultural otherness played a more important role than the visual. It was the
language barrier, the accent and the attachment to German culture, things difficult