Edited by Marian Malet and Anthony Grenville

Most studies of exiles and émigrés from Nazi Germany have concerned the lives of outstanding scientists and scholars in various fields. This book is based on in-depth interviews with thirty-four men and women who had to flee from Germany and came to Britain between 1933 and 1940, and focuses on the lives of the ‘ordinary’ people among the total of some 70,000 who arrived here. Special attention is given to the social, educational and cultural backgrounds of the exiles, all of which were to play a crucial role in their new lives. Attention is also given to the historical and personal circumstances of their enforced departure, including family members who voluntarily or for other reasons stayed behind, often to perish ultimately in the Holocaust. The invariably traumatic arrival in Britain, followed by the even more traumatic internment as ‘enemy aliens’, during the invasion panic of spring 1940, preceded the experience of the war itself and the wide variety of activities in which the exiles found themselves involved. At the same time, they faced the urgent problems of language, social integration and assimilation. For those – the majority – who were Jewish, there was the question of their relationship with or abandonment of their Judaism. After the war, all the exiles had eventually to come to terms with their country of origin, invariably learning for the first time about the fate of their family and friends. Such was the background to the lives of the exiles in post-war Britain – lives often so disrupted and varied as to seem more than one life, reflecting the experience of exiles everywhere, including those of our own time.

Published by Libris in 2002