“Whose text is it anyway?” Influences on a Refugee Memoir

Summary

From The 1930s Onwards German-speaking refugee writers who fled from National Socialist Central Europe to the UK had to make a stark choice regarding the language of their literary production: some continued to write in German, and if they were well-known or lucky, their works were translated into English (Anna Gmeyner, Stefan Zweig) as publication opportunities in German were very limited. Others tried to switch to English as soon as possible (Robert Neumann, Hilde Spiel). A small group of writers continued to write in German and ceased to publish until after the war (Max Herrmann-Neiße, Martina Wied). But all of these writers were adults when they came to the UK, mostly educated in Germany and Austria. What about the young refugees who came to the UK as children, who were not able to finish or, in some cases, even start their education in their country of origin?

A Kindertransport Memoir

There have been a growing number of autobiographical works written by refugees from National Socialism over the last twenty years. In the UK many of the authors were former child refugees who arrived on a Kindertransport. The term Kindertransport is usually applied to the rescue of nearly 10,000 unaccompanied minors mainly from Jewish family backgrounds from Germany and Austria to Britain between December 1938 and the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939. With the increasing interest since the end of the twentieth century in the Kindertransport as a British refugee movement, more and more autobiographical narratives have been written and published in English. However, this public interest in the UK is a relatively recent phenomenon. Ruth David is an example of a Jewish girl from Germany who fled to the UK on a Kindertransport aged ten. She was born Ruth Oppenheimer in Fränkisch-Crumbach in the Odenwald region of Hesse in Germany in 1929. Her mother Margarethe was the second wife of Moritz Oppenheimer, the owner of a cigar manufacturing business; both parents came from prominent Jewish families; Ruth had five siblings. In “Child of Our Time” she describes how her formerly well-respected family was affected by National Socialist persecution and became ostracised in the village community.