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ABSTRACT
Britain’s response to the recent refugee crisis is marked by its absence. Kushner's article explores how constructions of the past have been instrumentalized by defenders of government restrictionism and those demanding that more should be let in. His particular focus is on child refugees and the comparisons drawn (and rejected) to the Kindertransport. Through discussion in parliament, the media, cultural productions and among ordinary people, he shows the importance of ‘history’ and how references to the Second World War and the Holocaust have tended to help justify rather than query the exclusion of today’s refugees, thereby providing a very different example to Germany. He also explores the role of sentimentalism in positive responses to refugees and how this encourages empathy but can also limit effective entry policies and treatment of the forcibly displaced.
Notes
1 Inevitably, in terms of space, this requires a sampling of sources but these have been carefully chosen with regards to breadth and typicality.
2 Chris McCooey (ed.), Dispatches from the Home Front: The War Diaries of Joan Strange 1939–1945 [1989] (Tunbridge Wells: JAK Books 1994), 112. Strange’s papers are held at West Sussex Record Office but do not include her war diaries which are still held by the family.
3 ‘Let My People Go’ was published by Gollancz’s own company; it first appeared in January 1943 with a print run of 100,000 increased by a further 50,000 that month alone.
4 Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State [1944] (London: Penguin 2012).
5 Gollancz, ‘Let My People Go’, 1; also, more generally, see Ruth Dudley Edwards, Victor Gollancz: A Biography (London: Gollancz 1987), 375.
6 Gollancz, ‘Let My People Go’, 1.
7 Eleanor Rathbone, Rescue the Perishing (London: National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror 1943).
8 See Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell 1994).
9 Gollancz, ‘Let My People Go’, 1.
10 Ibid., 2.
11 Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination.
12 Colin Richmond, Campaigner against Anti-semitism: The Reverend James Parkes (1896–1981) (London: Vallentine Mitchell 2005).
13 Parkes Papers: University of Southampton, MS 60/9/5/1.
14 Merkel, quoted in ‘Refugee Special’, section on Germany by Luke Harding, Observer, 13 September 2015.
15 Just a few months earlier, Merkel had told a young Palestinian girl faced with deportation that, while she was very nice, ‘Sometimes politics are hard’ (quoted in Kate Connolly, ‘Angela Merkel comforts sobbing refugee but says Germany can’t help everyone’, Guardian, 16 July 2015).
16 Mario Falsetto (ed.), Anthony Minghella: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi 2013), 17. Thatcher resigned a year earlier as prime minister, but her legacy ran on.
17 See Ronald Bergan’s obituary of Minghella in the Guardian, 18 March 2008. Minghella said of himself: ‘The fact of the matter is that I’m a Catholic, Italian immigrant with a very prescriptive view of the world’ (quoted in Falsetto (ed.), Anthony Minghella, 17).
18 Rickman’s final project was working with Oxford University students on a short film to raise money for the refugee crisis. See Heather Saul, ‘Alan Rickman was helping students raise money for refugees just weeks before his death’, Independent, 14 January 2016.
19 Maura, a Chilean refugee, in Truly, Madly, Deeply.
20 Falsetto (ed.), Anthony Minghella, 17.
21 Dirty Pretty Things, dir. Stephen Frear, BBC Films, 2002.
22 Stephen Frears interviewed by Catherine Shoard, Daily Telegraph, 3 December 2002.
23 Dirty Pretty Things. While there is little depth to the main characters, they do exert their own agency, forms of revenge and eventually escape their status.
24 Quoted in Kate Kellaway, ‘Black lives made visible’, Observer, 24 September 2017.
25 Hugo Gryn, An Index of Our Spiritual and Moral Civilisation (London: Refugee Council 1996).
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid. See also Hugo Gryn with Naomi Gryn, Chasing Shadows (London: Penguin Books 2001).
28 See, for example, Peter Gatrell’s outstanding The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013) which is a worthy successor with wider chronological and geographical scope to Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1985).
29 Peter Gatrell, ‘Refugees—what’s wrong with history?’, Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, 2017, 170–89 (175).
30 Matthew Taylor, ‘History will judge us on refugee crisis, says Stevenson’, Guardian, 19 October 2015.
31 Quoted in ibid.
32 Mazower interviewed by Donna Ferguson in Guardian, 30 September 2017, ‘Family’ section; Mark Mazower, What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home (London: Allen Lane 2017).
33 David Cesarani, ‘Anti-alienism in England after the First World War’, Immigrants and Minorities, vol. 6, no. 1, 1997, 5–29.
34 Mazower interviewed by Donna Ferguson.
35 James Parkes interviewed by George Watson, ATV, ‘Directions’, June 1974, copy available in Parkes Papers: University of Southampton.
36 Gatrell, ‘Refugees—what’s wrong with history?’, 171, citing Iain Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2008), 39, 146.
37 Gatrell, ‘Refugees—what’s wrong with history?’, 172.
38 See our respective contributions to Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch (eds), Refugees in Twentieth Century Europe: The Forty Years’ Crisis (London: Bloomsbury 2017).
39 Quoted in Dan Roberts, ‘Clinton to Jewish leaders: beware Trump’, Guardian, 22 March 2016.
40 Gryn, An Index of Our Spiritual and Moral Civilisation. Gryn assumed that all those returned to the continent, with the exception of those who went to Britain, were murdered. Detailed research of the passengers has shown that roughly half survived. See Sarah Ogilvie and Scott Miller, Refuge Denied: The St Louis Passengers and the Holocaust (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press 2006).
41 Daniel Victor, ‘Comparing Jewish refugees of the 1930s with Syrians today’, New York Times, 19 November 2015; Laura Tavares, ‘Text to text: comparing Jewish refugees of the 1930s with Syrian refugees today’, New York Times, 4 January 2017.
42 Sam Jones, ‘Refugee crisis echoes rebuff of Jews in 1938—UN official’, Guardian, 15 October 2015.
43 Cameron on ITV News, 30 July 2015. For favourable comment, see the wide coverage in the Daily Mail, 31 July 2015.
44 Jones, ‘Refugee crisis echoes rebuff of Jews in 1938’.
45 Ibid.
46 Quoted in Mathew Taylor and Josh Halliday, ‘It’s easier if you say we’re bad, not human’, Guardian, 31 July 2015.
47 On BBC Breakfast News, 12 November 2015.
48 On the context and impact of Evian, see Tommie Sjoberg, The Powers and the Persecuted: The Refugee Problem and the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (Lund: Lund University Press 1991).
49 Quoted in Laura Pate, ‘Livingstone salutes Kindertransport journey of hope’, Jewish Chronicle, 1 February 2002.
50 Tony Kushner, Remembering Refugees: Then and Now (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2006).
51 Cabinet Office, Britain’s Promise to Remember: The Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission Report (London: Cabinet Office 2015), 9. On the evolution of Kindertransport memory, see Kushner, Remembering Refugees, ch. 4; and the special edition of Prism: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators, vol. 5 (2013).
52 The forthcoming study by Jennifer Craig-Norton to be published by Indiana University Press will provide a much-needed corrective.
53 See Hansard, House of Commons Debates (hereafter HC), 21 November 1938, vol. 341.
54 Debate about ‘Syria: refugees and counter-terrorism’, Hansard (HC), 7 September 2015, vol. 599, cols 23–7.
55 Ibid., col. 27.
56 Ibid., col. 33.
57 Ibid., col. 34.
58 Hansard (HC), 27 January 2016, vol. 605, cols. 172–3.
59 Dubs, quoted in Rowena Mason and Heather Stewart, ‘Government accused of “shabby tactics” over child refugees amendment’, Guardian (online), 25 April 2016, available at www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/25/government-accused-of-shabby-tactics-in-trying-to-block-help-for-refugee-children (viewed 16 March 2018).
60 ‘A humane response to child refugee crisis’, Daily Mail, 5 May 2016.
61 Tony Kushner, Journeys from the Abyss: The Holocaust and Forced Migration from the 1880s to the Present (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2017), ch. 3.
62 Jack Royston and James Mills, ‘Tell us the tooth’, Sun, 19 October 2016.
63 Diane Taylor, ‘Grief for a refugee boy robbed of his UK dream’, Guardian, 20 January 2017.
64 It has forced those demanding more help for child refugees to incorporate this symbol of childhood. See the photograph of actress Carey Mulligan ‘clutching a toy bear to represent the suffering of Syrian children’ in the Observer, 23 October 2016.
65 ‘They’re kidding’, Sun, 19 October 2016.
66 James Slack and Gerri Peev, ‘Victory for compassion’, Daily Mail, 5 May 2016.
67 Here I have borrowed the title of Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 docu-drama In This World which recreates the horrendous journey of two young Afghan asylum-seekers from the refugee camps of Pakistan across Europe. Only one makes it and gets to Britain ‘illegally’.
68 Melanie Phillips, ‘This is blinkered emoting’, Jewish Chronicle, 11 September 2015.
69 Hansard (HC), 27 April 2016, vol. 608, col. 1430.
70 Hansard (HC), 4 May 2016, vol. 609, col. 166.
71 Quoted in ibid., col. 165.
72 Channel 4 News, 4 May 2016, feature presented by its Home Affairs correspondent, Simon Israel.
73 ‘The Refugee Crisis’, autumn 2015 directive: Mass-Observation Archive, The Keep, University of Sussex (hereafter M-O A), DR C3515. The writer describes herself as a fifty-six-year-old housewife from Essex.
74 M-O A, DR C3210.
75 Ibid.
76 M-O A, DR B42.
77 M-O A, DR B2969.
78 M-O A, DR B3227.
79 M-O A, DR B5342.
80 See the general coverage in the Guardian, 23 September 2017.
81 Nina is introducing herself to what will become her new partner, starting with her politics and then moving on to her personal biography.
82 Falsetto (ed.), Anthony Minghella, 17.
83 Nina is here trying to summarize the essence of herself to her new love.
84 M-O A, DR A4820.
85 This is not to argue that refugee children do not have specific needs and in this respect the work of Juliet Stevenson in providing cultural facilities for the children of the ‘Jungle’ was exemplary.
86 M-O A, DR A4820.
87 Mark Townsend, ‘At last, first child refugee from Greek camps is coming to UK’, Observer, 19 November 2017. A month earlier, it was reported that ‘Not a single child refugee has arrived in the UK under [the scheme]’, yet 280 places had been offered by local councils. See Jessica Elgot, ‘Dubs amendment: child refugee places left unfilled’, Guardian, 24 October 2017.
88 As of January 2018 it reported that only 220 of these 480 children had been transferred; see Amelia Gentleman, ‘Hundreds of unaccompanied child refugee may be able to enter UK under new deal’, Guardian, 27 January 2018. All sources emphasize how total number of unaccompanied children in Europe and beyond are hard to calculate and tend to be underestimates. In her article Gentleman gives the figure of 90,000 unaccompanied migrant children in Europe whereas the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, Unaccompanied Child Migrants, Thirteenth Report of Session 2016–17, HC 1026, 6 March 2017, 3 suggests at least 95,000. UNICEF states that there were at least an additional 17,500 unaccompanied child migrants in 2017 travelling through the Mediterranean route to Europe which would indicate that the total European number is now well in excess of 100,000.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Tony Kushner
Tony Kushner is Professor in the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations and History Department at the University of Southampton. His most recent books are The Battle of Britishness: Migrant Journeys since 1685 (Manchester University Press 2012) and Journeys from the Abyss: The Holocaust and Forced Migration from the 1880s to the Present (Liverpool University Press 2017). He is currently working on a study of a Jewish triple murderer and, with Dr Aimee Bunting, Co-presents to the Holocaust. He is co-editor of the journal Patterns of Prejudice and deputy editor of Jewish Culture and History. Email: [email protected]