Seminar 1 The House on Schellberg Street - Renate's story

You will find it easier to follow this is you have read the book The House on Schellberg Street  

Renate’s Story

Not being Jewish

Consider Renate’s childhood:

• Mixed with ordinary German children
• Went to a Lutheran school
• Had connections with the Waldorf School in Stuttgart

Try to work out what it must have been like for her at that age of eight to thirteen.

Write a short account of what she felt when she found out she was Jewish or discuss this with your group OR

Work in groups to feed back to the main class or group. What might Renate have thought when she found out she was Jewish?   

Further help:

http://www.thehouseonschellbergstreet.com/search/label/Wilhelm%20Lohe%20School

See 22 December 1938 in the book  

Being Jewish

The Blutschutz rules make her Jewish

These see Jewishness as a race issue rather than a religious one.

Consider this: Renate did not realise that she was Jewish until a few weeks before she came over to England on the Kindertransport.

The Kindertransport cost each child £50.00. This is the equivalent of about £3,000 today.

Why do you think Britain only offered help to the children? Why didn’t we invite whole families to come and stay?

Some facts about the Kindertransport:

• It was run mainly by the Quakers.
• The adults who accompanied the children had to return to Germany or the Kindertransport would be stopped.
• The children were allowed one small suitcase.
• Dutch women met them at the border, with hot chocolate, snacks, blankets and soft toys.   
• They arrived mainly at Liverpool Street station in London.      

Note:

• Some children were abused – usually by being used as cheap labour.
• Many children never saw the rest of their family again.
• A few were well cared for but never felt really at home. Why not, do you think?

Renate was fortunate in many ways:

• Her uncles were already in England.  
• They found her a really nice family.
• She went to a very welcoming school.
• Her mother came over to England a few months later.  

Even so it remained difficult for her:

• She didn’t speak English when she first arrived.
• Clothes were different.
• Houses were different.   

Imagine you are Renate. Write two letters to you grandmother - one about the journey of England and the other about your first few weeks in England.

OR

Work in groups to feed back to the main class or group. What were the problems Renate faced in the first few weeks in England?   

Further help:

http://www.thehouseonschellbergstreet.com/search/label/Blutschutzgesetz

http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/mischlinge.html

http://www.thehouseonschellbergstreet.com/search/label/Kindertransport

http://www.kindertransport.org/

http://wn.com/kindertransport

http://www.childrenwhocheatedthenazis.co.uk/

In the book see:

Renate, 28 January 1:00 p.m.

Renate, 29 January 1939

The Smith Family, 29 January 1939

Becoming English

What might have helped her to learn English?

She had two curious talents – she could run and she could play cricket? How might this have been helpful?

How might being close to animals help?

How did her friend and teacher Mrs Cohen help?   

She faced several obstacles:

·         Soon after she came to England, World War II started – England was at war with Germany.

·         Because of the war, she and her mother were classed as Enemy Aliens Class B.

·         Her mother was in England being bombed by the Germans. Her father was in Germany being bombed by the Allies.

Write an extract from Renate’s diary about the difficulties she faced when trying to become English. What helped her?

OR    

Work in groups to feed back to the main class or group. What helped and hindered her in becoming English?

       Further help:

http://www.ajr.org.uk/documents/cb_7_enemy_aliens.pdf

http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk/yealm/yealm17.htm

In the book see:

Renate, 9 April 1940

Käthe Edler, 10 May 1940

Renate, 5 July 1941

Renate 25, December 1941

Renate 6 June 1944  

    

Notes for teachers

The unconscious Jewess

Warning: this may cause a few spoilers if you haven’t already read the book.

 

Realisng she was Jewish

Renate really had no idea she was Jewish until just a few weeks before she came over to England on the Kindertranpsort. She mixed with ordinary German children. Her mother and father were both scientists and weren’t particularly religious. Her grandparents, although born as orthodox Jews, had converted to the Lutheran religion. They considered it more up to date than the Jewish religion.

Renate’s teachers had protected her from much of the Nazi indoctrination. Several of them got into a lot of trouble because of that.  Renate lived in Nuremberg and the Nuremberg rallies could not have been very pleasant. In fact the Blutschutzgesetz was also made in Nuremberg. 

So it came as a complete shock to her to find out that she was partly Jewish. This may seem unbelievable – and this included fact almost stopped the book being published. Fortunately Crooked Cat were convinced.

In retrospect she realised that this was an explanation for her mother’s strange behaviour. Her mother had given up going to the opera, was often found weeping and made a real fuss about not allowing Renate to go on a school trip just because she had the remains of a cold. She was probably too scared to let her daughter out of her sight.

Some of the Nazi indoctrination had worked – Renate at least realised that Jews were regarded as a disgrace.

 

The Blutschutzgesetz  

The Blutschutzgesetz – literally the blood protection law – sees Jewishness as a race rather than a religion. As Renate had two Jewish grandparents, she was a Mischling of the first degree. 

The Kindertransport

Renate’s parents decided to send her to England on the Kindertransport. The £50 that had to be guaranteed was not a problem for them. They were relatively wealthy. Renate’s papers were in order also as because her father had had a run-in with officialdom she had her own adult passport even though she was still a child. Again, this seemed improbable and almost stopped the book being published. However, this story is also true.

It may seem cruel, taking the children away from their parents. The British didn’t however want to have whole Jewish communities coming to England. It may have led to anti-Semitism in a country that had just gone through a major depression. The authorities didn’t want to give the working people the opportunity to resent the Jews and accuse them of stealing their jobs.   

We scratched at the surface: we saved just under 10,000 children. 

The Quakers did a lot of work on the Kindertransport. The Germans who accompanied the children as far as England were expected to return to Germanys straight away. If they did not, the Kindertranpsort would be stopped.

At the Dutch boarder, Dutch women provided drinking chocolate, snacks, blankets and soft toys for the children.

For Renate the whole of the journey would have been odd. She was probably travelling with orthodox Jews and knew very little about them. She considered herself to be German.

Most of the children arrived at Liverpool Street station in London.  Here they were either picked up by families who were going to look after them or taken to a centre where they lived together for a while before places could be found for them.

Many of the children never saw their families again.

Here again Renate was different.  Her two uncles met her in England. Her mother came over a few months later. They had found a very nice family for her. She was even reconciled with her father after the war. She attended a Steiner school where staff and students would have been very open-minded. 

Many of the Kindertransport children never saw their families again. Some were abused.  Quite a few were used as free slave labour.  

Becoming English

What made life easier  

• She had a lot of support from the family with whom she lived.
• She was immersed in English.
• Her friend and teacher, Mrs Cohen, understood her confusion.
• She befriended a cat. Many children who had to leave their families – including our own British evacuees - found it easier to relate to animals than to people.
• She could run well

What made life more difficult  

• The school seemed supportive but the other students still found her strange at first.   
• It became worse when the Second World War started. As you know if you’ve read the book, the fact that her mother was in London being bombed by the Germans and her father in Nuremberg being bombed by the Allies, lead to her having a nervous breakdown. 
• She and her mother became Enemy Aliens Class B. This meant:
• They could not go near to the sea without permission. Renate’s school was by the sea.
• They had to report to the Police station.
• They couldn’t go near munitions factories. Not that either of them wanted to,
• They mustn’t go more than ten miles away from their home.  However, Renate’s home was more than ten miles from the Police station.
• They mustn’t be out after 10.0 p.m. ( Fortunately for Renate the local policeman was very friendly and sensible.)

·         Although she became very fluent in English and was an extremely able and intelligent girl, she was not allowed to go to a British university. The 1944 Education Act made it a lot easier for people of her generation and those that came afterwards. Her lack of official Britishness did not. She later took on British nationality but it was still not easy.    

Would you like this as a handy PDF?  Download it here.  

               

       

 

      

Maurice Rossel

Maurice Rossel worked for the Red Cross. It was in his remit to inspect prisoner of war, labour and concentration camps. He was relatively inexperienced at the time. The Nazi officers who supervised the camps were also very clever and managed to make things look fine. Probably also it would have been very difficult to believe what was actually happening.

Rossel describes himself at the time he inspected the camps. “Yes, I was 25 years old, thus I was still quite naive, if I say so myself, however a real naive, a real know-nothing who had come from his village and studied in Geneva, who knew nothing of anything but that apprenticeship in the field, that was all.” 

Read more here.  

To start with he dealt mainly with the prisoners of war camps.  These were overseen by the German Red Cross. Rossel claimed that the people who worked for this organisation were of the old order and not Nazis at all. Red Cross parcels were sent to these people and Rossel and his colleague found that only 5-8% of the goods went missing.

It was quite risky travelling from camp to camp as they were crossing a war zone. They were put up in some luxurious houses, however. Was this an attempt by the Nazis to soften them up?

Rossel in an interview conducted in 2009 claimed that he and his colleagues were ignorant about the extermination camps in 1942-1943. As they met inmates, and he remembers French prisoners of war in particular, they made promises that they would get them out.

He made a surprise visit to Ausschwitz. He had no authorisation to go there. He was received by the camp commander and was offered coffee. They talked about bob-sledding. He was no allowed to meet any of the internees but he was shown the infirmary. He saw nothing of the camp itself though he saw the barracks in the distance.  He saw nothing of Birkenau which was just one kilometre form the main camp. He was given the impression that the camp was doing something useful. He noticed some people and it did register that they were rather thin.

He is perhaps most well-known for his visit to Theresienstadt. The whole camp was sanitised somewhat so that it seemed almost like a holiday camp. It had parks, cafés a synagogue and what looked like reasonable living quarters. In the main square they had constructed a pavilion on which an orchestra played. He saw one single watch tower. He saw two-tier bunk beds, not the more normal four tiers. The really thin people were hidden form him.
Some of the Jews had to act quite cleverly and look as if they were having an easy time. .   

He visited three times altogether, the last time being 23 June 1944. Rossel could see that wealthier Jews had been accommodated there. They were often elderly and had often fought in World War I. His visits there lasted two to three hours.     

Rossel was told that the inmates received 2400 calories per day. In fact, they were only given 1200.    

Later, Rossel realised that he had been fooled.             

     

Käthe Edler

Käthe Edler, nee Lehrs, was born on 21 November 1896. She was the middle of three siblings. Older brother Leopold Edgar, who later took on the name Ernst, was born in 1894 and her younger brother Rudolph was born in 1901.

The Lehrs family converted to the German Lutheran religion when the children were very small. It was already clear that it was not prudent to hold on to their Jews nationality.  

Katharina’s father died in 1918, partly because of wounds he had sustained in World War 1.

Käthe enjoyed quite a comfortable middle-class life until the Nuremberg race laws were created in 1935 and the general difficulties that faced Jews during the 1930s in Germany. 

Unusually for a woman, she went to university and even more unusually she studied science. She actually received lectures form Albert Einstein and Max Planck was Dean of the University of Berlin at the time. He still lectured in physics. Unfortunately she was not able to complete her degree. She fell in love with one of the young lecturers, Hans Edler, who was only two years older than her.  This type of relationship between a lecturer and a student would not be tolerated then so she left the course. She and Hans married on 19 May 1923 at the Berlin Wilmersdorf registry office. Their only daughter Klara Renate Edler was born on 5 July 1925.

The marriage was reasonably happy to start with. Käthe carried on showing a pioneering streak. She was the first woman in Munich to obtain her driving license. She astounded her husband by driving to meet him from the airport in the dark. She astounded the taxi-drivers at the airport even more by opening the bonnet and cleaning the sparking plugs. “Well,” she said, “the engine was misfiring and I knew the sparkling-plugs must have been vey unsparkling.”

Her husband had a cousin who worked for the government. He warned the couple that life was about to become dangerous for Käthe and Renate. Whilst she was at the county hall in Nuremberg obtaining some papers that later made her emigration to England easier, she was asked to wait in a small room. Another door was opened and she had a full view of Adolf Hitler, just a few feet from her. Later, she remembered that she had a small pistol in her handbag and it would have been easy to shoot him.

She came to England in March 1939. Her brothers Ernst and Rudolf were already in England and had found her daughter Renate a foster home with a certain Smith family. The same family offered Käthe a job as housekeeper.

On 27 January 1942 Hans Edler petitioned for divorce. It was all done in the name of the German folk and it was probably an enforced divorce. On the petition she is named Katharina Sarah Lehrs. Her second name was really Theresa. All Jews were assigned the name Sarah or Israel if their names were not particularly Jewish.

Käthe and Hans were never reconciled and Hans remarried.

Käthe took on British nationality of 21 September 1948. She lived in London until she died in 1977. She made many English and Jewish friends and in her spare time gave English lessons to other refugees. She understood only too well the difficulties faced by people suddenly thrown into a new culture in a country where they didn’t speak the language. She worked at Saatchi and Saatchi until two weeks before she died. For several years she shared her home with her friend, Eva Kaiser, also a German Jewess. 

Karl Schubert

Karl Schubert was born in Vienna in 1889. His mother was Jewish but had converted to Catholicism. He spoke six foreign languages, the last one he learnt being Russian when he was a prisoner of war during World War I.

In 1903 he became interested in theosophy, becoming a member of the Theosophy Society in 1907. This was a stepping stone towards anthroposophy. 

In that same year he took his Abitur and went on to study Law and Languages. In 1908 he met Rudolph Steiner for the first time. He continued his studies: summer 1909 Sorbonne, winter 1909 /10 London, Kings College, 1911 back to the Sorbonne.     

From 1915, he was involved in World War I

On 20 May 1916 he married Helene Nierl in Vienna. Later that year he was made a prisoner of war by the Russians.

He returned at the end of the war and worked as a teacher in a private commercial school. He got to know Steiner better. His son was born on 21 February 1919.   

He became a teacher at the Stuttgart Waldorf School in 1920. At first he taught English, French, Latin and Greek.  

In 1921 he took charge of the “Hilfsklasse” – the Special Class for children with learning difficulties. The children were integrated into some normal lessons. From then onwards, Schubert dedicated his life to teaching disabled children and children with learning difficulties. After he was dismissed from the Waldorf School for being a non-Aryan he asked if he could carry on with the class as a private arrangement.  Surprisingly, he was given permission to do this. However, he although he could raise money to support the class he could not earn enough to look after his family so they only survived through the help of friends.

He then used this as argument for the class carrying on when the Waldorf School was closed in 1938. This time he was not so fortunate.  At this point, Clara Lehrs stepped in and offered her home to the class. There were 30-40 students in the class at this time including many Downs Syndrome children.   

The class carried on at Haus Lehrs on 20 Schellberg Street throughout and after the war. On just a few days, lessons were interrupted because of bombing. Only in 1944 did a member of the Gestapo come to fetch Schubert to take him to a labour camp. A family friend, a certain Frau Geraths, spoke up on his behalf and he wasn’t taken, according to one account. In another, he was taken away but friends intervened and got him back. http://www.wegmaninstitut.ch/schubert-archiv.html. The novel favours the latter. In the novel he does go away for a few weeks.

It was always a mystery that the children survived.  It is slightly ironic that during the Nazi regime, two people who according to the Blutschutzgesetz were Jewish managed to shelter and nurture a group of physically disabled children with severe learning difficulties.  

The Special School carried on at 20 Schellberg Street until 1969 when it moved into a new building in nearby Degerloch. It was never reintegrated into the Waldorf School and Schubert had to support himself and the school by applying for grants.

Schubert died in 1949. Since his death, the school has been named after him.

Hans Edler

Hans Edler was born on 16 September 1893 in Göttingen. His father was Wilhelm Edler and was a professor at the university.

He obtained his Abitur in 1912 in Jena and then went to the Technische Hochschule in Breslau and Danzig where he studied engineering and electronics.

From 1919 to 1922 he was an assistant at the Institute of technical Physics at Jena University. He worked mainly in electronics but also supervised the work of his students.

Shortly after this he spent some time in Berlin at the university where he met Käthe Lehrs. She had to give up her degree to marry him on 19 May 1923 at the Berlin Wilmersdorf registry office. Their only daughter Klara Renate Edler was born on 5 July 1925.