Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley Read online

  Title Page

  LET IT GO

  Dame Stephanie Shirley

  Written with Richard Askwith

  Publisher Information

  Published in 2012 by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  The right of Dame Stephanie Shirley to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998

  Copyright © Dame Stephanie Shirley 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Cover photo by PS:Unlimited Photography

  1: A Strange Journey

  MY EARLIEST memory of England is of Liverpool Street station. It was a grey day in July, a few weeks before the outbreak of World War II. I’m not sure if it was raining as I stumbled from train to platform, or, indeed, what time of day it was. All I remember is the shadows, and the great cast iron pillars and walkways, and the pain in my foot.

  I was five years old. My nine-year-old sister and I had been travelling for more than two days, on a grim, tearful journey from Vienna. We knew scarcely half a dozen words of English between us, and I, at least, had only the vaguest idea of where we were going and why.

  There were about 1,000 of us on the train: all Jewish; all children - apart from two young women charged with looking after us all; and nearly all distraught. We had numbered tickets hanging around our necks as if we were lost property. In a sense, we were.

  Two-and-a-half days earlier, we had all said goodbye to our parents (in my case, just my mother) for what was, for most of us, the last time. We were among the last - and I was almost the youngest - of around 10,000 child refugees who were saved from Hitler’s terror by that great gamble of hope and despair that came to be known as the Kindertransport. For much of the previous year, millions of Jews in Germany and Austria (and, later, Czechoslovakia and Poland) had been struggling to come to terms with the once unthinkable truth that the civilized nations in which their lives were rooted had descended into deadly barbarism. Many resigned themselves to staying put and hoping for the best, but others calculated - correctly - that staying put was equivalent to signing their families’ death warrants. Yet the rest of the world had largely closed its borders to refugees. So when a coalition of concerned groups in the UK formed the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany - later known as the Refugee Children’s Movement - and gained official permission for up to 10,000 Jewish children to be admitted as refugees, some families, including mine, decided that they had no choice but to send their children away to Britain to be fostered.

  It is almost impossible, from the comfort and safety of today, to imagine the mental agonies that such parents must have endured. Extraordinary leaps of faith and imagination would have been required - faith in the kindness of unseen strangers but also imagination of what Nazism must ultimately lead to. Unbearable pangs of doubt and regret must have followed.

  For us children, it was simpler. Our lives - as we had known them - were coming to an end when they had scarcely begun.

  Not all of us realized the full awfulness of what was happening, as our families voluntarily dissolved themselves. I suspect that most of the parents had scarcely faced up to the full truth themselves, let alone spoken unambiguously about it to their children. But the sense of bereavement on the platform in Vienna had been overwhelming. There were enough wailing adults, never mind howling children, to make a mockery of those who were trying to put a brave face on it. Maybe there were a few of us who really believed that we were being sent off on a nice adventure. But it was hard not to see the truth in the grown-ups’ eyes.

  Perhaps I should have been grateful for the pain in my foot. Most of my fellow passengers had nothing to distract them from the pain of being sent away. But I was too miserable to be interested in anyone else. I had grazed a big toe a few days earlier, and the wound had somehow become infected. Now, with each passing hour, the dull, throbbing ache became more tormenting. Perhaps it masked the ache of separation, or perhaps the two aches have merged in my memory.

  It is hard, after all these years, to be certain how many of the remembered details of the journey are real and how much I have added to my mental picture from other sources. Was the weather outside really grey? Or have I just seen too many black-and-white photographs of the Kindertransport? Did one boy keep getting out to be sick during the train’s many unscheduled pauses? Or was that just a dream?

  I am pretty certain that children slept on the floor as well as on the long wooden benches that lined the sides of the carriages; there were some large strips of corrugated cardboard that they used as mattresses. I presume that I slept too, although I cannot remember doing so. I think our parents had given us sandwiches for the journey; but, again, I may be wrong.

  But I do know that they had given us presents (in my case, two tiny model dogs, joined together on a miniature leash) which we were forbidden to open until the train was moving - making us heartlessly eager for the journey to begin. I know, too, that I clung grimly for most of the journey to my favourite doll.

  I remember many stops, and occasional frightening interruptions from uniformed guards. I recall vividly the cold, oily smell of the sea - an entirely new experience - when we eventually reached the Channel (presumably at the Hook of Holland); and I vaguely remember a nauseous crossing in a cabin below deck. I am certain that, at some point in the train journey, children slept on the long overhead luggage racks - although the scene in my mind’s eye is quite different from the carriage interiors I have since seen in archive photographs. And I doubt that there is much wrong with my impression that there was scarcely a moment in those two-and-a-half days of travelling when our miseries were not exacerbated by the jarring sound of other people’s crying.

  But what about my sense that, when we finally arrived at Liverpool Street, the platform was silent? It seems somehow implausible, and perhaps I have merely projected the numbness of my emotions on to the past. None the less, that is how my mind has preserved it: we spilled out on to the platform, speechless and wide-eyed, as if in a dream. Most of us were wearing hats and overcoats. We were allowed to bring only as much luggage as we could carry, and so our parents - desperate that we should not go cold or ragged in the strange new world to which they were banishing us - had packed our little cases to bursting-point and then flung a few extra garments on to us for good measure. Our coats still bore the yellow stars we had been forced to have sewn on to them in Austria.

  The slow river of exhausted, bewildered, tear-stained faces flowed noiselessly down the platform. Renate (my sister) and I found ourselves in a huge, high, cavernous hall - now long-since demolished - where, after a quick roll-call, we waited for our new families. There were piles of palliasses - big bags filled with straw - heaped up against one of the walls, and the air was sickly with the smell of unwashed children.

  None of us had any idea what to expect. The RCM had simply advertised in various British newspapers for families who were willing to foster a refugee child or two, and Renate and I knew nothing about the couple who had volunteered to take u
s in beyond their names. Every now and then adults would hurry past and say things, and occasionally announcements were made, but the strange language meant nothing to us. Our father had, at the last minute, taught us a handful of English phrases, but they were bizarre and random things such as “windscreen wiper” and “slow combustion stove”. I had no idea how to ask to go to the toilet, let alone how to understand strangers’ explanations about what was going to happen to us.

  The afternoon wore on. Renate and I sat on a palliasse at the back and watched as more and more children were led away, usually in ones or twos. No one seemed to protest when confronted with their new parents. Perhaps they were too tired and scared to do so. Or perhaps I was too absorbed in my own miseries to notice.

  I don’t know how long we sat there. Eventually, however, Renate and I were summoned. We were led outside by a serious-looking, gruff-voiced, middle-aged man in dark clothes. The streets seemed strange and dirty compared with Vienna. A big red Morris car was parked nearby, with a middle-aged lady, wearing lots of make-up, waiting in the passenger-seat.

  We all got in, and drove off to our new life.

  The journey, which lasted several hours, could not have been more miserable. We were tired, hungry and traumatised. Our new parents, who went by the name of Guy and Ruby Smith, spoke no German, so conversation was impossible. Meanwhile, it had just dawned on me that, in addition to my other woes, I had somehow managed to lose my precious doll. I am told that I howled my heart out for the entire journey.

  Was it really the doll that bothered me? Or had its loss become a symbol of everything else we had lost? I cannot be certain: not after so much time. But I am sure of one thing. This was not really (as it seemed then) an ending. It was a beginning. This was the moment when, to all intents and purposes, my life began.

  I have done more in the seven decades since that miserable day than I would ever have believed possible. I have achieved undreamt of riches - and given most of them away. I have built a global business empire, founded schools and institutes, dined with heads of state and exchanged ideas with some of the most brilliant minds of our time. I have been involved in pioneering achievements in business, science, medicine, academia and philanthropy. I have, I hope, changed many hundreds of lives - perhaps more - for the better. I have achieved fame and influence and am in the fortunate position of being able to do more or less what I like with my own life while also being able to make a difference to the wider life of the nation.

  I have, in short, been extraordinarily lucky.

  I have known failure and heartbreak as well as success, but I have never quite lost sight of two life-defining ideas - both of which I can trace back to my arrival in England all those years ago as a terrified, weeping child refugee.

  The first is the conviction that even in the blackest moments of despair there is hope, if one can find the courage to pursue it. Sometimes the worst is less overwhelmingly awful than we fear; sometimes the right attitude can create good even from life’s most terrible situations..

  My second big idea is the matching conviction that, even though I ostensibly lost everything when my parents were forced to send me away, I was not just the victim of bigotry and cruelty. I was also the fortunate beneficiary of the unearned generosity of many people: the Jewish and Christian activists who set up the Kindertransport, the Quakers who kept the project going when it ran out of money, the ordinary people who chipped in with the various tedious administrative tasks that allowed the project to function, the Catholic nuns who helped to educate me, and the quiet, middle-aged, nominally Anglican couple who took me in.

  Without my being fully aware of what was going on or why, a large number of good-natured strangers took it upon themselves to save my life. It took me some years to digest this fact and its implications. But, once I had, a simple resolution took root deep in my heart: I had to make sure that mine was a life that had been worth saving.

  I may not always have succeeded in this aim. But I have at least learnt lessons along the way: about how to make things happen, how to deal with setbacks and how to turn the most improbable dreams into realities.

  If I now presume to write this account of some of my life’s defining episodes, it is because I believe that these lessons - the lessons life has taught me - are worth sharing.

  It has, at any rate, been an unusual life.

  2: My Lost World

  MY LIFE wasn’t supposed to be interesting. I began it in a respectable, well-off family in Dortmund, Germany. The four of us lived in a nice town-house in a fashionable part of the city, with two live-in servants, and Renate went to school with the children of other prosperous bourgeois families.

  If all had gone according to plan I would have remained in that comfortable world indefinitely. I would have married a nice professional man and raised a similar family myself. It is unlikely that I would ever have had a meaningful job. But the shadows had been gathering since shortly before my birth, and my time as a member of the leisured Westphalian bourgeoisie turned out to be so short that today I can scarcely remember it.

  My mother was beautiful but brittle: the younger daughter of a wealthy gentile family in Krems, in Austria, who had educated her to be a middle-class wife. She had never worked - beyond a little dress-making that she pursued more as a hobby than as a business - and put her energy instead into fussing about appearances. She was always immaculately turned-out, and so were we. Yet she usually seemed discontented, as if she had wanted something quite different from life.

  My father was a high court judge: a brilliant but rather distant man. I think he was almost a genius - but maybe a bit autistic too. A coffee-importer’s son, he was a gifted violinist who spoke seven languages and had the most extraordinary memory. He could recite railway timetables by heart - and, to our embarrassment, sometimes did.

  But he was also charming and had a quality of absolute integrity: a single-minded devotion to principle that was slightly unworldly but also, sometimes, slightly inhuman. I have a vivid early memory of going for a family walk in some semi-rural setting - presumably one of Dortmund’s famous parks - and stamping, for some reason, on a beetle. My father exploded into a blazing fury. “How would you like it if someone stamped on you?” he shouted. It was an extraordinary rage, really, to direct at a mere toddler. Yet he did get his point through to me.

  I also remember him suffering occasional bouts of violent vomiting. I later learnt that these were connected with the ghastliest aspect of his job: like all German judges at the time, he was required to witness the execution of anyone he sentenced to death. I’m not sure if the sickness occurred before or after the events (which were mercifully rare); but the memory shows that he did not take his responsibility lightly.

  I think he imagined that his incorruptibility would enable him to fight the evils of Nazism, but the tide of evil proved too strong. He had been a rising star of his profession, becoming a judge shortly after his thirtieth birthday (that is, in 1930). But by the time I was born - on 16 September 1933 - career doors were starting to be closed in his face, partly because of his Jewishness and partly because of his open contempt for National Socialism. Again and again, we were forced to move - from city to city and eventually from country to country - in search of work and security. By the time I was five we had lived in seven different European countries. Of these, I dimly remember Germany, Italy and Hungary; and Austria, where we eventually settled on the outskirts of Vienna.

  We had a nice home there - a big, square town-house at the top of a hill in the leafy suburb of Perchtoldsdorf, near the Vienna Woods - and my father had work for a while. But the Nazi plague soon infected Austria as well - the Anschluss annexed Austria into the Third Reich on 12 March 1938 - and by my fifth birthday, a few weeks before Kristallnacht, the writing was on the wall for anyone who dared to read it: Jewish families who stayed in Central Europe faced catastrophe.

 
One of my clearest memories of Perchtoldsdorf is of walking to fetch my sister from school; I particularly remember a huge stone wall - like the side of a giant’s castle - that lined part of our route. Years later, I discovered two things about this memory. First, the wall wasn’t huge at all. (I learnt this when I revisited the city a few years after the war.) More importantly, there was a reason why we were going to collect my sister. It was because, even as a nine-year-old, she was beginning to suffer from the kind of violent anti-Semitism that was about to overwhelm us all. She was lucky enough to have a kind teacher, who used to let her out early so that that she could get home - under escort - without being stoned by her fellow pupils.

  I imagine that it was my father - with his habit of interpreting the world with his head rather than his heart - who first faced up to the unthinkable reality that the once solid social framework in which our lives had been built had collapsed, leaving a choice between escape and eventual extinction.

  It was 1939 by then, and country after country was closing its borders to refugees. But we had some remote family in America, and it seemed possible that, with their help, we might end up there. Time was running out, however, and my parents’ immediate priority was to protect their children. When they heard about the Kindertransport, they decided that Renate and I should be sent to safety.

  I was too young to suspect what this desperate decision must have meant to them. Later on, I would feel guilty about this - just as I would feel guilty about a lot of things that can hardly have been my fault. The fact was, these were troubled times, and ours was already a troubled family.

  My mother had had high hopes of her life. Pretty, clever and well-educated, she had married well: my father was not only brilliant and handsome when she met him but cultured and well-connected - with a circle of sophisticated friends that would later include Georg Solti, the great conductor - and he had dazzling career prospects. I think she entertained visions of being a lady of leisure, hosting a glittering salon in which clever people played music and discussed philosophy. Instead, she found herself uprooted and persecuted, with a husband whose prospects diminished by the day. Not being Jewish herself, she blamed my father for her misfortunes. Yet their relationship had been in trouble even before the Nazis came to power: I was once told that I had been “the child to save the marriage”. If this was true, it was not a role that I performed very successfully. I was largely brought up by nurses, and I have little memory of my mother being loving or maternal towards me. Instead, in my mental images of my early childhood, Mutti - as we called her - is always displeased with me.