Barry talks about the Norwich Refugee Committee formed by the Norwich Hebrew Congregation and the Norwich Quakers during World War II. It rescued and housed Jewish children from Vienna between 1938 and 1939. His parents were the secretaries and helped run the organisation. He also talks about his childhood, including his experience with the Norwich Blitz.
I was born in 1935 in Norwich. My father ran a fine art business in the city, he was the second generation of the business. My mother trained as a professional secretary at Pitman’s training school in London and won all the medals of the year intake she did. She went on to be personal secretary of Lord Melchett (Chairman of ICI) until he died.
We lived in Grove Avenue, which is near the old Norfolk and Norwich Hospital just off Ipswich Road. My parents bought the house in 1932 when they got married. It was the family home for around 60 years until it was sold after my parents’ death.
I went to the kindergarten at Notre Dame school, which was just over a quarter of a mile walk from our house. My sister, who was two years older than me, also went there. I have little memory of school from that time.
Norwich Refugee Committee
Everyone’s life began to change because Nazi Germany had reared its ugly head and it was trying to dominate Europe. From 1933 onwards they started to restrict the activities of Jews within Germany. Ultimately, many Jews wanted out of the country. As war became a clearer possibility various organisations were trying to help the families exit Germany.
In 1938, the Norwich Hebrew Congregation and the Quakers of Norwich formed a joint refugee committee. It was chaired by Lady Mayhew, who was a Quaker, and the secretaries were my parents, Cyril and Kitty. The three of them ran the committee, which concentrated on getting children out of Vienna. The Kindertransport system was used for the actual transportation of children to England, but the committee was not tied tightly to Kindertransport. From late 1938 until August 1939, they were able to sponsor 41 children out of Vienna.
It’s all part and parcel of the rescue of Jewish children and Jewish adults from Nazi Germany. I think there was a reluctance in this country to give permission for as many adults as there should have been, but that’s only in hindsight. I think around 10,000 children came on Kindertransport. The Government regulation was that every child had to have a £50 guarantee payment given to the Government. This was said to be for repatriation after the end of the war; obviously that didn’t happen so I have no idea what happened to the £50.
Families had to be generous. They were accepting a child into their household and there was no financial support so they had to fund everything themselves. And a lot of families were. In Norfolk, there were about 10 or 12 children hosted within the Jewish community, and the rest were hosted in non-Jewish families.
Amongst the children brought over there were some non-Jewish children. Christians whose parents disagreed with the ethos of Nazi Germany and children of other organisations considered unacceptable by Nazi Germany, thereby making them as vulnerable as Jewish children. I’m not sure how many non-Jewish children there were in the overall refugee count, but in the group brought over by the Norwich Refugee Committee there were at least five or six.
May 1939
There was one memorable occasion in May 1939, when I was around three and a half. I have vivid memories of the day, though obviously some of it may have got mixed by talking amongst the family afterwards. The committee went off to Harwich to collect a group of children who had been accommodated into Norwich and its area. My parents left about 5am and my sister and I were left with the maid who lived with our family.
I remember sitting on the stairs listening to children speaking in a language I didn’t understand on the ground floor of the house. At three and a half, you’re obviously a bit frightened by a group of strangers. And then I remember going round the front of the house and looking in the lounge window and seeing the children. It was a nice early May sunny day, and I distinctly remember doing that. Some other experiences obviously get clouded or enhanced by family discussion.
Helga
In 1939, we adopted into the house a 12 year old girl called Helga. She became my big sister. And her sister was adopted by my maternal aunt.
Every family had an identification tag, which we wore all the time. They hung around our necks on a piece of ribbon. We didn’t take it off ever, not even when we had a bath. The tag was government issued so that in the event of families getting separated due to enemy action, you could be relocated back again. This was particularly for children, in case they got lost during a bombing situation or their parents were killed.
Our family number was TNT34. Each member of the family had an additional number. My father was one, my mother two, my sister three, and myself four. So when Helga joined our family, she received her own identification number, TNT34-5. Helga attended Notre Dame school with me and my sister.
Helga’s mother was a widow and she was sponsored to come to England by the Quakers. She lived in Norwich working as a domestic housekeeper. Then in 1940 the government passed a directive that anyone without British Nationality had to live on the West side of England. Those of German origin had to go to live up in Liverpool, and many were transferred to the Isle of Man. I don’t know for sure why they were sent to that part of the country, but the East Coast was vulnerable to invasion from Germany. I think they were worried about intelligence leaks. It’s very hard to assess initially who was honest and who had come across in the wave of immigration to spy.
Helga’s mother was sent to Liverpool to live. She worked there as a housekeeper. We kept in touch by telephone or post with her. Helga continued to live with us, and Helga’s sister remained in Birmingham with my aunt. Helga was able to talk to her sister on the phone because my mother and my aunt were very close.
In 1942, Helga’s mother accepted a job with a small insignificant family called the Cadbury’s in Bourneville! She became their housekeeper, and with that job came a flat, so Helga and her sister went to live with their mother in Birmingham in 1942.
Bombing in Norwich
Norwich had 44 air raids from July 1940 to November 1943. Norwich had quite a lot of damage during that period and was subject to long air raids. The bombing of the East Midlands and West Midlands meant that the aircraft came in from Germany over East Anglia. A raid would last something like four to six hours at night.
My parents built an air raid shelter attached to the house. It was a brick and concrete building similar in design to the street air raid shelters. You weren’t safe from a direct hit, but there was nothing made strong enough to withstand a direct hit. It was on the street side of the house so there was an emergency exit onto the street, but we never had to use that because the shelter was never that badly damaged.
We’d sleep in the shelter. It had four bunks and one double bed for my parents. The air raids were frightening in a sense, but as a child it was exciting. I don’t think we were always aware of the danger we were in.
The main raids took place in the summer of 1942, where the most damage was done. One night five high explosive bombs were dropped within a short distance of our house. We lost all the windows, the glass veranda was broken, doors were blown off, ceilings were down, and it was very messy. It took a little while to have everything mended and put right. Later that year we had a fire bomb raid and five houses in our street were bombed. My parents’ house also had an incendiary bomb in the loft, so my parents went into the loft to put out the fire. While they were doing that, I got my dressing gown and slippers on and slipped out the back of the house to look at the burning houses. I got into trouble for that because I shouldn’t have gone out. Never mind, it was exciting.
I’ve got vivid memories of going down to the city and discovering the toy shop Pilch had been bombed and the acrid smell of fire bombing was all over the place. Anti-aircraft guns were stationed around Norwich in places like Eaton Park. This meant you’d have the noise of the bombing and also the booming of your own anti-aircraft guns. So, it was very loud.
If they weren’t bombing Norwich, they were bombing Coventry and Birmingham. Then they’d come over Norwich around 10pm and around 4am or 5am they’d return, various waves of bombers coming over.
Bombing of the Synagogue
The Synagogue in Norwich was originally on Synagogue Street off Mountergate. In 1942, it was bombed and destroyed by a fire and we lost our home in a sense. We were offered various premises for temporary worship. We settled for the basement of the Spiritualist Church on Chapelfield North. We used their basement hall as our Synagogue until 1948 when we built a prefabricated Synagogue on Earlham Road. In 1968 that was replaced by a lovely modern Synagogue.
Social Club at Norwich Synagogue
Norwich Synagogue set up a social club on their premises for Jewish servicemen. There was a drop-in session so the servicemen could come and have tea and meet other Jewish people. British Soldiers, American Air Force, and British Air Force were the main three that came. Norwich had no Navy, but it had all the RAF bases in Norfolk, which were substantial. There were also a large number of American Air Force bases. St Faith was a bomber airfield that is now Norwich airport, and there was a big airfield out at Coltishall, and there were smaller airfields all over the place. The remnants of them are still identifiable.
For Jewish Passover, the Synagogue would give a Seder night for the servicemen. After the American Air Force arrived in East Anglia, in 1943 there was a Seder service for approximately 2,500 servicemen in Norwich. There’s a book in the archives with signatures of many of those who attended, which is a quite remarkable and unique memory of that event. The actor James Stewart signed the visitors’ book.
After I got engaged to Maureen, my wife, we discovered her uncle had been stationed in Norwich during the war as an army officer. I realised that my family had known his family.
Life during the War
Life went on as normal-ish. My father was too old for military service, but he was either conscripted or instructed to join the Royal Observer Corps. He was a full-time member. The house they’d taken over for operations was in Lime Tree Road, so it was not far from our house. He was on shift work, so it meant when he wasn’t on duty he could come and go.
Mother ran the family fine art business on her own, with Father sort of supervising in his free time. One of the former members of staff had joined the police force on shift work. We were lucky enough that he’d pop in and do some workshop work for us in his free time as well. We had a licence to manufacture and it was quite useful. Friends and customers would come in from the country and offer us extra eggs or chickens and things like that as a social addition to our rations. So, the business kept going.
I don’t remember it being difficult, but of course we were kids, we didn’t have to worry. We didn’t know it was rationing or anything like that. We just enjoyed things. Everything went on as normal in a sense. The Synagogue settled down to a routine, services were held throughout the war time in the basement of the Spiritualist Hall.
There were no outings. There was no transport, either. People didn’t have family cars, you’d use the bus. If you had a car for commercial reasons, you had to have a petrol ration. We had a car, but we were a middle-class family, there weren’t a lot of cars around in those days. In January 1940 we put our car in our house garage on bricks so the tyres didn’t get damaged. It didn’t get taken out for at least four years.
Boarding School
I think I really remember school from when I went to boarding school. In Autumn 1942, when I was seven, Ruth and I were both sent to a country co-educational school. It was in a large Georgian house at Burgh-next-Aylsham. It was partly boarders and partly day school. It was small, but it was a preparatory school for going on to grammar school. We’d return to Norwich for school holidays.
Return to Norwich and life after the war
Rebuilding of Norwich started after the war. In 1946 I came back from boarding school to go to the Norwich School. After five years there, I went to the City College. At the age of 17 I joined the family business as an apprentice and worked in Bristol to gain physical experience away from a family environment. I wanted to grow up and join the business as a man rather than as the boy. I followed that with National Service.
I joined the family business proper in 1955. My mother, father and I all ran it. I didn’t take over the business until my father was in his 70s. He was seriously ill in hospital and we began to realise that he couldn’t be left with the responsibility because he wasn’t well. He was reluctant to hand it over to me, but then realised he couldn’t cope. So from the mid 1970s or thereabouts I took over running the business. My mother and father stayed working in the business until their mid 80s, when they retired fully.
Reconnecting with Helga
My parents had kept in touch with Helga after she left in 1942, but I hadn’t. She stayed in Birmingham and ultimately got married in 1944 or 1945. It was quite a young marriage, but it was very successful and lasted well over 60 years. I reconnected with Helga when I got married and we became good friends again. We stayed friends for the rest of her life. We would see her regularly every time we went to Birmingham to see family. She was on my list of people to meet.
About 20 years ago, Notre Dame School phoned me to say they’d found a bracelet with Helga’s full name and identification number on it. It had been found in the grass in the school area, so she must have lost it there sometime before 1942. I was very pleased they had records of pupils and who their families belonged to, and were able to contact me. We claimed back the bracelet and framed it for her as a souvenir of her life. It was very lucky it was actually found.
She died at the age of 93 in Birmingham, just before 2020 I think it was.
Destruction of records
After the war, there was a period where the records of the Norwich Refugee Committee were reduced or if not totally destroyed. This was because it felt politically vulnerable to leave those documents lying around when there were people who were against the migration of Jewish children to England. There was definitely a lot of paperwork destroyed, particularly by my parents. As a 14 or 15 year old I didn’t think it was right, but I couldn’t do anything about it.
A pretty marginal number of documents survived which I still hold on to. Ultimately, I will finish reading them and hand them over to the Synagogue. But it is a much smaller amount compared to what was available after the war.
Looking back
I hope that these reminiscences will be useful to historians in the future to put together a better picture of what happened.
Looking back on coming to Norwich School at age 11 in 1946, I found that my peer group was enthusiastic about what happened during the war but had no idea why the war took place. They didn’t know about the suffering of those in Europe, about the holocaust and the criminal annihilation of Jewish people and non-Jewish people within the German destruction of Europe. They revelled in the glory of the defeat of Germany but didn’t understand. I, as a Jewish boy brought up with a family involved with refugees, understood a great deal more about what Germany did. Now, we are trying to teach our children about the Holocaust.
Barry Leveton (b.1935) talking to WISEArchive in Costessey on 13th February 2024.
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