麻豆社

From Rabbi Julia Neuberger, Senior Rabbi at the West London Synagogue:

Last Thursday, we dedicated two memorial plaques in London. One was in memory of Eleanor Rathbone, the independent MP who did so much to help refugees fleeing Nazi atrocities in Germany and Austria. The other was for Robert Smallbones, British consul general in Frankfurt in Germany during the 1930s, and his deputy Arthur Dowden.

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After Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass in November 1938, when synagogues were burned, and Jewish businesses looted and smashed up, with hundreds of Jewish men being beaten up and sent to concentration camps, these men provided comfort and help to desperate Jews. They worked tirelessly to process as many entry visas as possible. Smallbones wrote, 'The longest stretch I remember was from early in the morning until midnight when I fell asleep for a few minutes on my desk. After two hours sleep my conscience pricked me. The feeling was horrible that there were people in a concentration camp whom I could get out and that I was comfortable in bed.'

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It鈥檚 estimated that by their actions in persuading the British government to accept people who had post-dated visas for other countries, as well as going to concentration camps to get people out, Smallbones and Dowden saved some 48,000 people! Yet their work is barely known. So on Thursday morning, before the ceremony, I searched amongst the many boxes I still have of my mother鈥檚 papers for my German refugee grandparents鈥� visas. I had a hunch! And, bizarrely, the first box I looked in contained my grandparents鈥� 1930s Nazi regime passports, hardly battered at all. Inside was that precious permission to stay in Britain for three months, signed by Arthur Dowden. Without him, they would not have survived.

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So on Thursday we were not only commemorating these people who helped so many Jews, left wingers and others, but I was marking a personal debt- without these men, my grandparents would not have survived. Without them, I might never have been born. 听I owe them so much, even my life, and their story deserves to be better known.