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Bob Mackenzie – Life During the War

Bob loses his German but becomes proficient in English.

BM:Once the war started we were only allowed to write twenty-five words per month through the Red Cross. When war broke out Janet joined the Land Army and Jessie looked after the house. So over the years one can say that Jessie virtually brought us up. Granny Mackenzie died and my sister and I moved into the big house and we were accepted as part of the family. Mr Mackenzie arranged for us to attend the local school. He asked the Headmaster if it would be possible to have two or three hours a week with the German class, so we could keep up our German language, but the Headmaster refused. So the German language faded away through lack of use.

When I moved to secondary school I decided to take German as a language and I’m sorry to say I ended up bottom of the class; mockery all round from the other members of the class. But the following year I got my own back by coming first in my class in English.

Bob Mackenzie – Settling In

Bob describes his new family, the Mackenzies, and their efforts to get his parents out of Germany.

BM: Mr Mackenzie’s house consisted of the main house and a small attached cottage. The Mackenzie family were made up of Granny Mackenzie, Mr Mackenzie (a widower) and three daughters; Agnes, Janet and Jessie. The family lived in the big house and my sister and I were accommodated in the cottage with either Janet or Jessie living in it to look after us. We settled in very quickly and were treated as part of the family. Agnes was a nurse in the hospital in Elgin and Janet and Jessie looked after the house. Though my sister and I did not speak English we managed, with the help of a dictionary, to understand the basics. On the other hand if we were told to do something which we did not want to do we were very adept at saying, “Me no speak English”.

As we settled in and began to learn more and more of the language we discovered this ploy did not work so well. We wrote letters to our parents and got letters back. My mother was using a dictionary to write to the Mackenzie family and we kept in touch until the war broke out. It was only years later, when we were older, that we discovered that correspondence had been passing between Mr Mackenzie, The Refugee Movement and The Home Office to try and get our parents out of Germany to join us. Unfortunately the formalities had not been completed by the time war broke out in September 1939. Many years later, when the correspondence between Mr Mackenzie, The Refugee Movement and The Home Office was passed to me for safekeeping, I discovered some nameless civil servant in The Home Office had kept the documentation on his desk for seven weeks before applying.

I often wonder if that seven weeks could have made the difference between my parents joining us over here and remaining in Germany all through the war.

Bob Mackenzie – Immigration

Bob mentions what he can remember of his journey to Britain and his arrival in Selkirk. He goes on to describe his first introduction to the Mackenzie family of Forres.

BM: I’m not sure where we joined the train and to this day I have never found out. Unfortunately there is a complete blank from the time we were put on the train until we arrived at The Priory in Selkirk. I’ve been told since, this is possibly the only way a child of eight years old could cope with the trauma of this upheaval. To suddenly be torn from a happy, comfortable family life with loving parents, put on a train to nowhere and end up in a country where no one spoke my language, except the other children travelling with me, must have been a severe shock to a young child.

I know we landed at Harwich on the 16th of March 1939 because that is the date stamped on my Kinderausweis, the travel permit used by the Burgermeister [Mayor} of Neukirchen on the 13th of March 1939. That same permit also described me as ‘staatenlos’ which means stateless. Germany got rid of me and didn’t want me back.

After some weeks at The Priory at Selkirk my sister and I packed our belongings and went on another train journey accompanied by two ladies from the ‘Refugee Movement’. We eventually arrived at the station at Forres, Morayshire. We didn’t know it but we were to be placed with the family Mackenzie. We found out many years later that the Mackenzie family had originally applied to take refugees from the Spanish Civil War and being told they had all been allocated families and there were child refugees from Germany looking for accommodation they agreed to take my sister and I, as my mother had asked, if possible, that we should be kept together.

On arrival at Forres two strange occurrences took place which have never been explained. On getting off the train I walked through all the people on the platform, straight over to Agnes Mackenzie, one of the daughters of the family. No one in the family had ever been to Selkirk, and yet I somehow knew that this was the person who had come to meet us. The second strange thing that happened was also puzzling… Mr Mackenzie had a car to take us to his home. On arriving the car stopped outside a small shop with a gate on either side leading into gardens. When I stepped out of the car I did not try to enter any of these two gates but walked approximately fifty or sixty yards up the road and entered the correct gate of Mr Mackenzie’s house. How I knew it was his gate to enter I still have no idea.

Bob Mackenzie – Life Before the War

I was born in the town of Chemnitz in South East Germany. I do not recollect my very early years but in 1933 my father lost his job in Chemnitz and we moved to a small town called Neukirchen, about five miles from Chemnitz. My parents bought a semi-detached house with a large piece of ground attached, probably about one and a half acres. As I remember my father took on any type of work available: driving, painting, road building etc and life for my sister and I was quite normal. Our household consisted of my paternal grandfather, my father, my mother, my sister and myself. On our piece of ground we kept a goat which supplied milk, we kept hens which supplied the eggs and while my father was working my mother and grandfather worked on our land. We grew our own vegetables and had an orchard with various fruit trees.

Below our house was a deep cellar and I can remember my mother storing the apples and pears in the cellar for winter use. Although my grandfather was Jewish I cannot remember him attending any Jewish religious service. My father was also Jewish but my mother was of the Lutheran faith and my sister and I were brought up also in the Lutheran faith. We were regular attendees at the church every Sunday but unfortunately because of my father’s Jewish background the whole family was classified as Jewish by the Nazi regime, even though my mother had never embraced the Jewish religion. At five years old I went to the local school. I never experienced any feeling of being an outsider. I played with the lads of my own age; they came to my house to play and I went to theirs. I may be wrong but I think we were the only Jewish family in the town and no one appeared to bother.

One day we came home from school to find my father gone. My mother didn’t say where he had gone to and about two or three months later he appeared again, only then did my sister and I find out that he had been away to Buchenwald Concentration Camp. Why, we did not know… On reflection and on information gathered during research for this talk it seems possible that my father was one of the many Jews who had been rounded up during Kristallnacht. Not long after my father returned, my sister and I were told we would be going on a journey. My mother packed a suitcase for each of us and we were taken to the railway station to be put on a train.

Bob Mackenzie – Background

BM: This is the 18th of March 2014.

Bob explains the origin of the Kindertransport Movement

The British Parliament was approached by the ‘Movement for the Care of Children of Germany’ to hasten the travel permits. The movement promised to fund the whole of the operation and stated that they would not be a drain on the public purse. The funds were to be found to guarantee £50.00 (roughly £1000.00 in today’s money) for every child brought to this country by Kindertransport. By the time the war started in September ’39 it is estimated that 10,000 children were brought to safety in this country. Therefore a very generous British public donated the sum of £500,000.00, equivalent to approximately £10, 000 000.00 in today’s money. Considering that the average wage at that time was under £3.00 per week, this was a truly momentous fundraising exercise.

Now you can understand why I title this talk – ‘Kinder – Britain’s Generosity’. Many of the children who came over on the Kindertransport have a story to tell and I tell the story of one such child, me. It’s the story I know best.

Bob Kutner – Reflection On Life

Bob talks of his own family in Glasgow and the importance of the wider Jewish community there

INT1: One last question really about your time in Scotland. What were the high and lows for you? Obviously you got married, you had children

BK: Yes. Well, obviously getting married was a high

INT1: Mm

BK: Um, 1953. Um, we had children… our children came I suppose 2 or 4, 2 and 4 years after we married, something like that. If, if Barbara was here, she’d tell me I got it wrong

INT1: Mm

BK: Well, 2 or 4 near enough

INT1: Mm

BK: Yeah, and one boy and one girl. A reverse order, one girl and one boy. Yeah.

INT1: And did you get involved with working with the Jewish community? In a voluntary way? I I know you do now, but did you always do that…

BK: In those days no. I had I had no understanding of that even. I suppose like a lot of immigrants, we were concerned looking after ourselves and getting ourselves established.

And I wasn’t even… re… remotely concerned with Jewish problems, except I tried to find a synagogue fairly soon. Make, let, make it clear I’m not very religious, but you have to have a synagogue. And partly though that I met some people as well of course

INT1: But, later didn’t, you were very involved with drama?

BK: Very involved. An amateur theatre club, which was very very high standing and standard…

INT2: Avrom Greenberg Players

BK: Avrom Greenbaum Players, where my wife was one of the leading ladies. But because I have no talent I went on the management side. I was the chairman quite a while in it. That was a fantastic time. For Glasgow, young people all together, I think the Avrom Greenbaum Players did wonders to drawing the community together both in terms of spectators and workers. It really was, you are all too young to know about it. But it was quite fantastic

INT1: It is, It’s a shame that the community is not big enough really now I think to sustain that is it?

BK: It wasn’t big enough and television became… a serious competitor.

And kids didn’t want to go out in dark in the winter to rehearse when they could sit at home watching the old fashioned television box

INT: Mm

INT1: Would you say that that Judaism has been significant in your life?

BK: Totally. Totally. Um, now anyways, to me it’s all about being Jewish, but it’s always been… the persecution, the running away, the persecution, the running away, and then coming to this lovely Jewish community. Which was and is a lovely Jewish community. And very supportive of me. Not in the sense of charity, but in the sense of being supportive and kind and helpful, yes

INT1: Remind me what your books called Bob, because I’m sure…

INT2: Over My Shoulder

BK and INT1: Over My Shoulder

INT1: And why is it called Over My Shoulder?

BK: Looking back…

BK: … what I’m doing with you just now

bob

Bob explains the origin of the Kindertransport Movement

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