Yorkshire Cottage, continued

A very kind lady from Quaker House sent me the following information, on children being excluded from WWII evacuation schemes, as mentioned in Yorkshire Cottage by Ella Pontefract and Marie Hartley (see earlier post):

I think this book has slightly mis-represented the situation at the time. Firstly, Quakers could only bring over children under the government scheme, so they would not have been able to bring over any refugee children who did not meet the criteria of the scheme. The criteria for rescuing refugees would have been about establishing whether the children were ‘in danger’ from the Nazi regime as opposed to their racial profile – although of course it was the Nazi’s racial profiling of citizens which led to them being in danger.

The Jewish relief agencies, and the non-Jewish relief agencies (Quaker, Catholic etc) in the UK, agreed amongst themselves to divide up the refugees into those who identified as Jewish, and those who did not identify as Jewish (but whom the Nazis decided to persecute as ‘non-Aryan’, usually as they had mixed parentage or a Jewish grandparent). So, Quakers tended to support refugees who were non-Jewish, or had mixed heritage, but not from any particular ethical stance, just as an effective way to organise the available resources and manage the caseload.

As far as I know, the government let the relief agencies on the ground assess who should qualify for the scheme – i.e. they let the relief agencies decide who was ‘deserving’, i.e. at risk of the Nazis. All the government was concerned with, was that financial support of a certain amount had been arranged for each child. You can read more about the Kindertransport here: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/kindertransport/

There are records for the Kindertransport children here: https://search.findmypast.co.uk/search-world-records/kindertransport

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has information here: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kindertransport-1938-40

I am not sure the child in question came over with the Kindertransport, as she was French and fled with her mother and brother. But it did make me feel better that  Ella Pontefract perhaps misunderstood the situation.