Certainly; inevitably; naturally, many of the articles published by The Jewish Chronicle during “The Great War” – as well as during the Second World War – focused upon the experiences, travails, challenges, and living conditions of civilians. Alas, this would seem to have been inevitable, given that the Twentieth Century was the century of “total war”.
The following article is one such example, and covers the plight of Jewish refugees who had been evacuated from Antwerp, Belgium, at the beginning of the war. The author focuses upon refugees at Great Alie Street, in Whitechapel, and Soho Street, in Westminster. At least one refugee was a resident of Lodz, who, while visiting family in Antwerp, was caught up in the storm of war. Doubtless, the same or similar would have pertained to many other refugees in the context of this article.
(Like most – if not all – reports carried by the Chronicle, the reporter’s name is not given; he is simply referred to as “our representative”.)
____________________
IN THE TRACK OF THE STORM
PATHETIC SCENES AMONG THE JEWISH REFUGEES
The Jewish Chronicle
September 18, 1914
[Special to the “Jewish Chronicle”]
“Never have I witnessed so much weeping as in the past week. It has been a veritable vale of tears.”
The words were addressed to a representative of the JEWISH CHRONICLE by the Secretary of the Jews’ Temporary Shelter, and they could easily be believed. But unless hearts be stone there was cause for years among the visitors and the workers, as well as among the wretched refugees who have fled pell-mell to the shelter for asylum.
It is a motley throng that crowds the building. They stand in the doorway; they block the staircase; the fill the dining-room; they bear in their appearance and often forlorn state the unmistakable appearance of human flotsam and jetsam, swept hither and thither in the track of the storm.
It is a mixed gathering – most of them young. Only a few greybeards to be seen here and there, and no schnorrers. Some of them had offered their last few coins for the food they received, but proffered them, of course, in vain. Men there are with hundreds of thousands of francs in the bank, and unable to draw more than ten shillings a week. A number are well dressed; most “receive” with reluctance.
Here a student poring over a book; there a little group watching a game of chess; elsewhere a crowd pressing forward for dinner tickets; or a knot of Russian volunteers, in Belgian uniform – not the advance guard, by the way, of a certain elusive army. And everywhere the child – the child in arms, the child at the breast, the playing child, the weeping child. The playing child is delightful. For it the Kaiser and all his men are a myth. How merrily it laughs. But the crying child and the sick child –
Half a dozen mothers are waiting for Dr. Morris – who is generously busy among the refugees – with their little ones in their arms. A few of the infants are wand and pale and evidently ill. One of the mothers turns the child over, and glances anxiously at it; and the tears well into her eyes.
A father walks up and down the room to soothe his baby, and a tiny tot of two years at most – his other infant – marches alongside of him, holding the corner of his coat, with a look of stolid determination on its grimy face to hold on till grim death, what would look ludicrous, if the circumstances were not so tragic. The children! They sit on the steps. They walk around your legs. They cry in their perambulator. Yes, how did that mother bring that perambulator with her in her precipitate flight from Belgium? But there is, wedged in the variegated crowd – a wheeled miracle of the exodus.
A young woman sits in the corner with her two children – one at her breast. Beside her, her mother, with three other grandchildren, and not far off the father and mother of the three other little ones. All are ill-clad and apparently penniless. The first-mentioned daughter had come from Lodz on a visit to her mother at Antwerp, and was caught in the fury of the gale. Her husband? – Heaven knows where. Perhaps in the army; but she has had no word from him for eight weeks.
“Why were you driven out?” one asks.
“Driven out?” is the answer, “No; we escaped.” And then comes the explanation. The Zeppelins had terrified them. They had been ordered down to the cellars at the first sound of the air-craft’s approach – damp, dark cellars; and the family had fled in fear. It is the same story everywhere.
“We had three weeks of Zeppelin terror,” says an intelligent young girl; “we could stand it no longer.”
Round the corner in Monnickendam Rooms, Great Alie Street, another throng is gathered. Here clothes are given out, and down below dinner is served. It is a spacious, pleasant room, and the meals are distributed at separate tables, and the cry is – “Women and children first” – not so inappropriate after all, for the people have suffered shipwreck. One little girls grasps a toy with grim and inflexible tenacity. Pretty scene! Most welcome touch.
What wizard is conjuring up the wherewithal to feed this host? The 4s. per person provided by the Russian Government goes a very short way. During the last two weeks or so about 1,400 Jewish refugees have flocked to the Shelter, to say nothing of one hundred Christian guests. The women and children – some one hundred and fifty in number – are lodged at the Shelter.
Three hundred men are housed and fed in the workhouse at Poland Street, given by the authorities at the Local Government Board. Others are housed with good, kind, if poor, hosts in the East End, who surrender sometimes their own bed to the strangers from over the sea; and for yet others bedrooms are hired. Between six and seven hundred receive meals at the Shelter, and between three and four hundred more in the Monnickendam Rooms. And food is plentiful. Mr. Landes and his friends find, the money from someone and somewhere.
But the tide is still coming inwards. The Leyland Line picked up 52 Jews at Antwerp a few days ago and brought them here, and no one can place limits to the influx or would; for the Aliens Act, most crazy of structures, collapses at the first serious crisis.
The institution at Poland Street is being got ready for 800 persons and that will relieve the pressure in the East End. A library of 500 books has been sent there, and a synagogue has been fitted up; and the refugees will be made as comfortable as may be. But “How Long?” is the cry. Who can find employment for at least some of these people so that they may resume the independent self-respecting lives that they lived till the swarms of the modern Attila swooped down on Belgium and turned civilisation into a sham and a peaceful land into a shambles? Meanwhile, Mr. Landes and his colleagues move among this host, bringing succor, and the refugee’s lots is brightened. But that cry of the children rings insistently in the ear!