James Pastouna

Ruth Barnett

The Journey

I came to England on the Kindertransport with my brother. I was only 4 he was 7. So I don’t know how it came to be arranged. But after Kristallnacht everybody knew that it was not going to blow over or get any better. It would get worse. And I don’t know how our parents got a place for us on the Kindertransport.

But I do remember the journey very well. We started off at Zoo station in Berlin which I recognised because my Aunt used to take me the zoo and I threw a tantrum because I wanted to go to the zoo and not to England. I did not know where England was. I think the last words that my father said as he said goodbye to us was ‘don’t cry’ because ‘Thou shall not cry’ is built into my mind and I have never been able to cry when anybody else is there and my daughter does the crying for me as the second generation. I think she picked something up.

It was an endless journey. I remember asking if we are in England yet. Then I must have gone to sleep. I remember been almost dragged out of the train to go on the boat. I remember been frightened by this huge boat in the Hook of Holland. So many people were piling on with huge suitcases and I was afraid the boat was going to sink. I remember my brother saying “Don’t be so stupid, boats don’t sink.” I remembers been horribly sick in the night. Then I remember being on another train and being told we were now in England and looking out the window and wondering what there was that was different to Germany.

Then I remember coming to London and been shocked at the red Double Decker busses and asking my brother “Why do they paint them the colour of blood?” My brother said “you will have to get used to this. We are in England now and everyone in England is mad.” And he said it so calmly that it calmed me down. He always did that.

What was the family like you stayed with?

Well, the first family was a vicar and his wife. The vicar was lovely but his wife had no children. And obviously did not want to look after children and was very cruel to us. We were very unhappy there till the Quakers who sponsored us put us in a Quaker boarding school which was wonderful.

What happened to your parents?

My father escaped at the last moment to Shanghai. He left it to the last moment because his mother, my grandmother was in hospital dying.. I remember visiting her just before we left for England. That is why he left it so late. He didn’t get out until a month or so before the war broke out.

He was a judge in Berlin until 1933 when the Nazi’s sacked all the professionals. After that he did menial jobs like packing light bulbs in a factory…

After the war my father came back to Germany. He wanted to come back to Germany his home and contribute to building up a democratic Germany. It took him a good 2 years to get back to Europe and when he came back he could not get the job he wanted as a judge. He got a job in the denazification court as a junior lawyer.

What happened to you after the end of the war?

Well, the war ended. Soon after, we came to our third foster family which was a farm. And four years went by after the ends of the war and nothing happened. Life went on just as usual. And I decided I would leave school at 14 which you could then and I was going to be a farmer and raise animals. That would be my life. And I was very happy about that till suddenly my mother appeared out of nowhere. Grown ups had made all the arrangements and then they told you. And I was told this is your mother, I didn’t recognise her. She didn’t speak English, I didn’t speak German. I was frightened because in my mind my mother was dead otherwise she would be with me. That is what small children do with the experience, so I was not sure if this was a real person or a ghost. And then when I was told that she was going to take me back to Germany with her this was the last straw. I had been thoroughly brainwashed for 10 years with British propaganda about how awful Germany was and the nasty Nazi’s in the comics I read. All that. And no way, was I going to Germany. I just went berserk. And my foster parents said ‘you are one of the family, you can stay with us’ And my mother went back to Germany all on her own. It must have been terrible for her.

Well, when my mother came back to Germany without me my father by then had got a job as a judge in the court of Mainz. And he served a court order on my foster family. And my foster mother who said ‘you are part of the family’ had to take me to Germany and leave me there. And that was really worse than the original Kindertransport experience. A second time.

It felt as if the whole world had gone mad. Everything, I was familiar with vanished overnight and I was not a sweet four-year-old desperate to please. I became a very angry uncooperative disorientated teenager and it just couldn’t work.

My parents were nice people. They wanted their little 4 year old back and they really did not know what to do with an aggressive uncooperative teenager. But they realised that it was a mistake so they let me go back to England on the understanding that I would go out on school holidays.

But it was not easy to get back to England. It took almost a year because I did not have a nationality and I did not have a passport. In order to travel to Germany, I could not be entered in my foster mother’s passport because I was not her legal child. I had to have a piece of paper, a document with ‘Person of No Nationality across the top.’ And that was so unique. Nobody knew what to do with it. It was very difficult to get the necessary visas to get back to England. And I had to travel with that horrible document which was so humiliating for 4 years until I was 18 till I could get British nationally. And that is why I call my book “Person of no nationality.”

Do you have contact with other ‘Kinder’?

Yes, but not till 1989, when the first reunion was organised. A friend told me about it. That is how I came to go and I was amazed there were 10,000 of us. I really thought till that day that only my brother and I had come over from Germany.

It is amazing what memories you can get back with if you try hard enough. And I trained as a psychotherapist so I had personal analysis. But I never got back in touch with my mother saying goodbye to me. She actually came on the train and bought us to our first foster family. And both my brother who was 7 and I have absolutely no recall of saying good bye.

Yes, a lot of them do have some blocked memories. Saying ‘goodbye’ though is something that many of the Kinder have a vivid memory burnt into their mind of the last sight of their parents.

My mother was Protestant, my father was Jewish. It was relatively safe in that Christian family. Well, my parents let me stay with my grandmother because of the dangers of the Gestapo. But they even came to my Christian grandmother’s home. I remember once, when I was there they were looking for my father and he was there in hiding. I don’t remember a lot of it except it was very frightening…My father converted to Christianity. I think he thought that would save the family but it made no difference. There were some privileges for mixed marriages but most of them in the end the Jewish partner and the half were Jewish children were deported and gassed.

Well, I had to work very hard to accept Germany. I have huge admiration for the post war born Germans particularly those who work so hard to face the past with projects like the Stolperstein, which they put on paving stones in front of all buildings, were people were deported from. Engraved on the paving stones are the families who were deported. Often found in front of the home they lived in. I have a lot of friends and contacts in Germany. Although my brother is dead his 3 children are in Germany and I like to visit them.

And I like to talk to school children, when in Germany, when I get the chance. I also give seminars in Germany.

My father’s mother, I did not see much of. She was elderly and ill. But my mother’s, mother, I spent a lot of time there.