Erna Nelki (née Liesegang)

My mother Erna wrote about her life in a book chapter - Eine stumme Generation berichtet Edited by Gisela Dischner. Pub: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1982. A copy of the English translation can be downloaded here.

My mother was imprisoned in Holloway prison on the eve of the outbreak of war, August 31st 1939. She says ‘I was calm as I expected all foreigners to be interned. I had a shock when I discovered that none of my German friends were in Holloway. As I heard later, English newspapers announced that all German agents had been arrested at the beginning of the war. Apparently, I was one of them!” She was in solitary confinement for 6 week with no access to a solicitor or newspapers. The only book she had to read was the bible. You can read more detail in her story but in the end she was released with the help of Wolf (her boyfriend at the time) and Fenner Brockway, of the Independent Labour Party. They married but 2 months later both were interned on the Isle of Man, to separate camps, and did not see each other again for a year. She has also written separately about this. Click here to read the full article.

This time, Erna, classified B, was interned together with many of her friends. On May 26th and 27th 1940 they were rounded up and taken to a police cell in Fulham. ‘nobody knew where they were going. We were just asked to pack a few things. There were women with young children, sick women, old women, pregnant women. The night was spent huddled on chairs or in dirty cabins; toilet and washing facilities were dirty and insufficient. We were crowded in a special train and were never allowed to move without a special police escort. Even toilet doors had to be left open during use. Many women cried bitterly…..

One in Liverpool, we were taken in buses to the harbour and marched all along the quay accompanied by the boos of the local population…’

...’it is difficult to imagine our experience of the first days and weeks on the Isle of Man. There were 3000 women suddenly descending on the Isle. We were allocated accommodation in Port Erin and Port St Mary…nothing had been organised for this influx……

We had to share a house, a room and very often a double bed with complete strangers…’

‘It has been estimated that of the 4000 women interned during the summer of 1940, approximately 85% were Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution, 3% were political refuges from Hitler and about 12% were Nazis or Nazi sympathisers. As the selection of people to their accommodation was quite arbitrary, there was hardly a boarding house which did not house Nazis side by side with Jewish refugees. This really was the bitterest, most resented and unforgiveable blunder..’

Over time, organisation developed and the Jews and Nazis took separate accommodation. Erna and another woman, Ingeborg Gurland, became very concerned about the children and started a school. See the article Erna wrote about this. Any contact or any form of ommunication between Wolf and Erna was very difficult. Married camps were set up after they had left (with help from Eleanor Rathbone). Initially, there was no postal communication at all and eventually letters could be written, but were then sent back to Liverpool by ship for censorship and back out again to the Isle. The government encouraged people to go to Australia and my parents considered it – but luckily did not.

Eventually Erna was released in May 1941 (after a tribunal hearing).

In 1941 Erna wrote an article about educating the children in the internment camp.

THE NEW LEADER SATURDAY OCTOBER 4 1941

INTERNED BUT WE STARTED A SCHOOL!

BY ERNA NELKI

On May 27 1940, three to four thousand women of German or Austrian nationality, the majority of whom were refugees from Nazi oppression, were interned and sent to the Isle of Man. They were accompanied by about 350 children. The camp had been organised at very short notice and no provision had been made for the children. There were no special rooms for them, no helpers, no school.

The children ranged from babies of a few months to boys and girls of sixteen years. They shared bedrooms with their mothers and spent their days in the lounges of the commandeered hotels. They played in a corner (being reminded constantly not to make a noise or a mess) or were taken to a table (so a better watch could be kept on them), where they listened to the gossip, the stories, the criticism of other women. Many of us realised that every day spent like this would influence the children badly.

A school must be organised! A proper environment, interests and occupation must be found for the children! As nothing was organised by the officials, we took the matter in our own hands. Those of us who were teachers collected the children at the bigger hotels and started classrooms in the bedrooms.

“A school is going on at the top of the Towers!” “A school has been opened at the Hydro” (These were the two biggest hotels). It ran through the whole camp and soon children living in the smaller hotels turned up as well.

The landladies who were concerned about their furniture protested and the whole enterprise threatened to be stopped unless we found another building. Negotiations began with camp officials and with local ministers and in the end we were given the Methodist Chapel Hall. It was a big dark hall, with blacked-out windows, a small vestry and a cloakroom without windows or ventilation. These three rooms were our ‘school’ for about 150 children for the next three months.

Hesitation to start under these conditions, criticism that we could not start without necessities like pencils and paper, the refusal of some professional teachers to teach under these circumstances, were counteracted by enthusiastic refugee volunteers who realised the danger to the children of growing up in a precocious and unchildlike way.

Give them their own environment, even under such bad conditions as ours were! Help them overcome the shock they had experienced by the sudden breaking up of their newly formed homes in England, this sudden herding together of them as ‘enemy aliens’, this breakdown of their values.

Our aims could hardly be scholarly achievement, but we could at least do something to counteract the effect of years of flight from home, wanderings through strange countries, the feeling of not being wanted, the sense of insecurity which these children had experienced before their internment.

We pooled our resources to buy pencils and paper, we wrote our own reading books. For painting we used the sharpened quills of seagull feathers and writing ink. Gradually books came in, sent by the Society of Friends, and one of the camp officials gave us a pound out of his own pocket to buy other necessities. That’s how we began.

But the school could do comparatively little for the children. With 100 children in a hall, with 20 squeezed around a table and the noise of 80 other children having lessons at the same time, with the lack of light and fresh air and of sufficient material to keep their interest alive – we could not steady and balance the children. After three months hard struggle, we closed the school and discussed new ways.

For two months the children ran wild under the influences we wanted to save them from. Complaints from shopkeepers and landladies, from other women reached us.

Finally we were given the lower portion of a café. The bigrooms were changed temporarily  into smaller ones by getting light walls installed with doors. The cold basement rooms - formerly used for storing -were provided with electric fires.

It was not a very good place for a school but compared with the chape hall it was an improvement. More material and schoolbooks came in and the Camp Office had a fund for the school at its disposal. As the accommodation was not enough for all the children, we introduced shifts – three hours a day, either in the morning or the afternoon.

The school in the new building was a success. We could not only help the children psychologically; we could also carry on successfully with their education. When the releases started in December 1940, children wrote us form the mainland how well they were able to continue in their English schools. 

We had some of the children for almost a year; others we had a shorter time. To the children, the school was a place not only where the teachers taught lessons but where you could work, play, sing, where adults listened to you, where you were not scolded and pushed out of the way.

I had never up till then so fully realised the problems of these children. I had taught working class children and knew of their difficulties, but the problems of these refugee children were different in many respects. Many of them had had quite a comfortable life in Germany. Suddenly they were uprooted. When Hitler came to power, they had to flee, either because they were Jewish or because their parents were opposed to the Nazi regime. They lost their homes and their backgrounds. They had nothing to hold on to any more. Often they had to leave their parents behind sometimes in a concentration camp or prison.