Life_under_Siege_The_Jews_of_Magdeburg_under_Nazi_Rule.pdf

238
accepted as a Jewess in Adelaide. They wouldn’t even let her marry a Jew,
they wouldn’t accept her at all, so she married a non-Jew. This was so
unfair, as she was Jewish; she lived Jewish. 117
Whilst families such as the Rosenbergs emigrated to Australia there is no evidence
to suggest that unaccompanied ‘Mischlinge’ youth succeeded in emigrating to
Australia.
Clearly, in the wake of the Nuremberg Laws the Synagogen-Gemeinde and
particularly the Provinzial-Verband reconsidered their positions on and their
attitudes to the emigration of unaccompanied children and youth. The pressure
from the youth themselves must have played a role in this, together with the
realisation of parents that the situation was deteriorating rapidly. This emigration
was facilitated by local organisations and co-ordinated through its associated
welfare organisations, chiefly in Berlin. The most significant impediment to this
process, however, was the unbearable thought of families separating.
Nevertheless, this was undertaken.
The final area in which direct preparation for emigration was undertaken was
when the families themselves organised the emigration without the assistance of
local organisations. The case of Hemmi Freeman was one such example. He
always felt that his emigration shortly prior to the Reichskristallnacht in 1938 was
more a stroke of good fortune than good planning, as he explained:
My sister had married an Englishman living in South Africa and he worked for
an English lady who was a very great pacifist and she arranged for me to go
to England. In fact, she paid. In those days we had to pay £200 to the
government as a security and she took in six refugees, paying £1,200; in
those days quite a lot of money. This enabled me to come to England;
otherwise I wouldn’t have had a chance either. 118
117 Kent, op. cit., 5 January 1998.
118 H. Freeman, op. cit., 3 June 1998.