The Jews have had a long-standing connection with Cornwall. Many came in the 18th century arriving in ports like Fowey and Falmouth. In Cornwall they found a place of safety where they could flourish in businesses that often supported and served the local enterprises of fishing, farming and mining. Soon there were vibrant communities at Truro, Penzance and Falmouth. Those in Falmouth and Penzance particularly flourished with the establishment of synagogues and cemeteries. Falmouth’s synagogue closed in 1882 and Penzance’s in 1906. Today a small community continues centred on Truro. As a young child I frequently attended with my parents and siblings the Christian church that was held in the late 1960s/early 1970s in the old synagogue in Penzance and through the services sat fascinated by the large Ark or Aron HaKodesh between the large east-facing windows with the Decalogue tablets showing the Ten Commandments inscribed in Hebrew above it, and after the services would sneak up the stairs to the women’s gallery to look down on everyone mingling below and wonder about those who had worshipped here in days gone by. These memories were reflected in those of the Major on page 71 of No Small Stir.
It was fitting, therefore, that during the dark days of World War Two, Jews again found a welcome and acceptance in Cornwall. The Shoah saw the mass murder of 6 million Jews with 2 out of every 3 European Jews being killed. Approximately 2.7 million Jewish men, women and children were murdered at the five killing centres of Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz Birkenau. Even before the Wannsee Conference advanced the ‘Final Solution’ 1 million Jews had been murdered. Another million would die in mass shootings and massacres afterwards. Many more would die of starvation, exhaustion and disease in the brutal conditions of the labour and concentration camps.
It was not just the Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis, millions of others were murdered as well. They included political opponents, Jehovah Witnesses, asocials, black people, the disabled, people from the Roma and Sinti communities, Poles, Soviets, evangelical Christians as well as people of the occupied nations, and that doesn’t include the casualties of war. For example, from the summer of 1939 the euthanasia of German disabled children began. In the autumn that spread to adults in the T4 programme. By T4’s own calculations they killed 70,273 mentally and physically disabled persons at 6 gassing facilities between January 1940 and August 1941. The total is thought to be nearly 300,000.
The Holocaust was a heinous crime perpetrated by Hitler and his henchmen and carried out on an industrial scale. However, even today in Cornwall there are those who seek to deny its horrors, minimise its scope and negate the Nazi responsibility for it. They often quote David Irving who claims to be an historian despite having no formal training in the subject (he studied physics at Imperial College, London, but didn’t graduate). He has written numerous books about the history of World War Two in which he expresses his pro-Nazi sympathies. He has denied the Nazis murdered Jews in gas chambers – a claim that has seen him fined in Germany and sentenced to 3 years imprisonment in Austria. He is thoroughly discredited in academic circles as even his work on military aspects of the war is tinged by his bias. It is right for historians to call out such myths and aberration of the truth and frustrate the pernicious agenda such deniers propagate.
Inga Jane Jacoby was born in Austria in 1927. She lived in Vienna with her parents and older sister who had been born in 1924. After conditions in Austria deteriorated under the racial policies of the Nazis and events like Kristallnacht in 1938, the Jacobys made plans to leave the country. Her father put his girls on the Kindertransport to come to the UK in 1939. He then was able to move to Paris for work with the expectation that his wife and her mother would follow shortly afterwards.
Inga came to Falmouth with her sister where they taken in by a rich family with 2 maids. However, the arrangement didn’t work satisfactorily and the girls were sent to St Joseph’s, a small Catholic boarding school in Falmouth. Inga’s father managed to escape Paris when it fell to the Germans and came to Plymouth on one of the evacuation boats of Operation Aerial. Having nothing other than the clothes he stood up in, he joined the Pioneer Corps. He would later set up in business in the UK. He persuaded his daughters to be christened as Protestants while in Falmouth in the belief it would save them should Hitler ever invade England. That was when Inga chose the name Jane after her literary heroine Jane Eyre.
Inga’s mother and grandmother were rounded up in Vienna. The last known sighting of them was on a train heading for Minsk. It is believed they were both shot at the Maly Trostenets mass killing site. It took about 30 years for the family in the UK to discover their fate. Inga and her sister stayed in Falmouth during the war. Her account of her time in Cornwall can be read in “My Darling Diary: A Wartime Journal. Vienna 1937-39, Falmouth 1939-44” (published 1998) written under the name of Ingrid Jacoby. The two sisters are mentioned in A Place And A Name on page 111 when they visit the Major’s parents for tea. This was based on a reference in Ingrid’s book about visiting a Jewish couple once a month.
A second group of Jews found refuge in Cornwall, escaping not from the Holocaust but from the Blitz on the East End of London. The Jews’ Free School was evacuated to Mousehole arriving on Thursday 13th June 1940 at Penzance Station. The 100 children aged 5 to 13 and five teachers such as Ralph Barnes were put on green Western National buses for the short drive to their destination. They were billeted with local families. School was held in the Mousehole Infants School with synagogue services held in Paul church hall.
The decision to evacuate was justified as their school in London was bombed in 1941. Once the Blitz came to an end in the summer of 1941 numbers in Mousehole declined and JFS Mousehole closed and the 30 remaining children went to Mousehole School. Some children stayed for the duration of the war. About 15 years ago a small group of them returned to visit Mousehole recalling the welcome they were given and the happy time they had in the Cornish harbour village. The account of the school’s time in Cornwall is told by school archivist Susan Soyinka in her book “From East End To Land’s End” (published 2013).
The contrast of children travelling by train to safety in Cornwall with those children of countries occupied by the Nazis travelling by train to a horror unimaginable is both powerful and moving.
Eva Geiringer was born in Vienna, Austria, in May 1929. In June 1938, after the Anschluss, they went to the Netherlands where her father had relocated his shoe business after a short stay in Belguim. Eventually they settled in Amsterdam in a flat on the square Merwedeplein on which the Frank family also lived.
On Monday 6th July 1942 , when a card arrived in the post for her brother Heinz, 3 years older, to report for transport to a labour camp in 3 days’ time, the family enacted their plan to disappear. Eva and her mother went into hidden rooms in the house of Mrs Klompe, a teacher in the Resistance. Father and Heinz went into hiding in the countryside. Eva and her mother made occasional visits out to see them despite the dangers. Eventually increasing Gestapo raids and the blackmail of the rural host meant the Underground moved all four of the family to new hideouts, again separating male and female.
On Eva’s 15th birthday, 11 May 1944, the Gestapo raided and Eva, her mother and their hosts were arrested. At Gestapo headquarters they found her father and brother who had been betrayed by their new hosts for financial rewards. Their hosts had also followed Eva and her mother after a visit to see where they were hiding so the Gestapo pounced on all the family on the same day.
The family all ended up in Auschwitz. Eva was given a coat and adult hat as they got off the train and managed to survive selection while many girls her age were placed in the lines heading straight for the gas chambers. She worked in the area known as ‘Canada’ sorting the belongings of those who had been murdered. She even managed a couple of chance conversations with her father through the fences that separated the various parts of the camp, and on one day bumped into Otto Frank from their square in Amsterdam. Miraculously Eva survived the war with her mother and they returned to Holland via Odessa after liberation by the Russians in January 1945.
On Wednesday 8th August 1945 Eva and her mother received a letter from the Red Cross which said that after being on the last forced march to leave Auschwitz Heinz had died of exhaustion in April 1945 at Mauthausen. Her father had died 3 days before the end of the war. They have no graves.
Otto Frank also returned to Amsterdam and learned that his daughters Anne and Margot had died from typhus fever in Bergen-Belsen. His wife Edith had died in the arms of a Dutch woman from exhaustion, starvation and despair in January 1945 shortly before liberation.
When Otto was given Anne’s diary by Miep Gies, one of Otto’s employees who had helped the family survive in their hiding place and who had found the notebooks in the secret annexe after the family had been captured, he shared them with Eva and her mother. After they were published in Holland Eva’s mother helped Otto with all the correspondence that came. The two survivors, who had been through similar circumstances, had a lot in common and became close. They married in November 1953 and moved to Switzerland where Otto’s family lived. That meant Eva became Anne Frank’s ‘step-sister’.
Eva studied to become a photographer and during a time in London met her husband Zvi. They were married in 1952 in Amsterdam but set up home in England where they had 3 daughters. Otto and Eva’s mother visited often including a holiday in Cornwall in 1965. Eva said Otto and her mother loved the beauty of Cornwall and enjoyed playing on the sandy beaches and swimming in the sea with the grandchildren. Again Cornwall was a refuge for those seeking to find balm for the tortured memories of their war.
I had the privilege of meeting Eva twice when she told her story to groups I had taken to the London Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition and she gave me a copy of her book. The story of her wartime experiences can be read in “Eva’s Story” by Eva Schloss (first published 1992).
May Cornwall continue to welcome those in genuine need and work its charm on them, not only through the rugged beauty of the landscape, but through the kindness and grace of its inhabitants. This we have seen in recent years with many Ukrainians finding refuge from Russian aggression and brutality here. Cornwall also needs to stand for historical truth and combat the lies and propaganda that are still directed against the Jews as they seek to combat terror organisations that again seek their removal from the face of the earth. As Christian poet and author Steve Turner wrote, “History repeats itself. Has to. No one listens.”
I end with a 3,000 year old prayer for peace that no doubt would have been prayed in the synagogue in Penzance: ‘I rejoiced with those who said to me, "Let us go to the house of the LORD." Our feet are standing in your gates, O Jerusalem. Jerusalem is built like a city that is closely compacted together. That is where the tribes go up, the tribes of the LORD, to praise the name of the LORD according to the statute given to Israel. There the thrones for judgment stand, the thrones of the house of David. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: "May those who love you be secure. May there be peace within your walls and security within your citadels." For the sake of my brothers and friends, I will say, "Peace be within you." For the sake of the house of the LORD our God, I will seek your prosperity.’ Psalm 122.
Until next time. Shalom.
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