by Sue Lukes
The government has paused and may restrict refugee family reunions. I read the announcements about it, and my mind turns to a tombstone in Edgwarebury, on the north edge of London. It reads
Thomas Lukes
15th November 1928 – 26th August 2014
Refugee Scientist Father.
And I think about him, my father, and about the grandparents I never knew, his parents, Pavel and Jana. The parents he never saw after 12th May 1939 when they said goodbye to him at the train station in Prague. He got on the third Kindertransport organised by Sir Nicholas Winton and came to safety in the UK and, eventually, his distinguished scientific career and the family he and my mother created in England.
The Journey
His parents stayed in Prague, then were thrown out of their flat, eventually walking one morning to a different station to take the train to the camp at Terezin. Their’s was another journey: five years after they last saw their son, they were murdered in Auschwitz. So, there is no grave, but we did install a memorial “stolpersteine” outside their flat a couple of years ago.
My Reflections
When I had children of my own, I began to appreciate just how terrible that decision to put him on the train was. I honestly don’t know if I could have plucked my daughters out of danger and into the care of unknown strangers like that. I was told that one father simply couldn’t; he grabbed his child from the moving train, and neither he nor his child survived the Holocaust. But because of that brave decision by Jana and Pavel (and the incredible work of Sir Nicholas Winton), my father lived, and we all exist. I have three brothers, two daughters, four grandchildren, and a nephew, and we all owe our lives to Jana, Pavel and ‘Nicky’.
My father was 10 when he arrived in England, and he was alone. He was housed and fed, he got a grant to study, but until he met my mother, he had no one. He did not talk about it with us, and the truth is that he never really recovered from those losses. His mental health suffered, he found family life difficult, and we struggled sometimes to look after him well. He took great pleasure in the company of his grandchildren, especially, and was proud of us, but we were all he had, and we could not fill the gaps left by those taken from him so cruelly..
I met others who arrived on Winton’s trains. One told me about going from house to house to ask people to take their parents as domestic servants so they could get visas, and others of their desperation to get their parents to safety. Few did: 41% of the Kindertransport children never saw their parents again.
Legacy: Safe Routes Today
For the British government of the time, even rescuing 600+ children was too much: Nicholas Winton had to forge some of the visas to get them on the trains. There was no appetite to let their parents in too, so the children were left orphaned. When the UN drafted the Convention on Refugees, after the war (1951), it included the right to family reunion: the memory of the hurt caused was strong.
And now politicians talk about taking us back to a time when there are no international refugee protections. Today, children seek safety in Britain, with no heroic Nicholas Winton to bring them. But once here, they are as desperate as my father and the other Winton children were to see and hold their parents and to make them safe.
Politicians may find it difficult to imagine the distress and real harm caused when they do not allow family members to join refugees here. I don’t. I saw it in my father’s eyes. When was in hospital, near the end of his life, someone had found a cache of letters from Prague in 1939, which included one from a family acquaintance who wrote to her daughter that “Thomas’ mother was so worried about him alone in England”. I read him the translation and showed him a copy. He listened, and looked at me, as he drifted back to that train platform where he said goodbye to those who loved him as a child.
So, there it is. There are people who can choose not to inflict that pain on refugees today, and on their children. And if you read this, please tell them why they should make the right choice.
