Theo’s Bar Mitzvah

September 7 1940. My brother Theo’s Bar Mitzvah. The tiny shul in Coventry was fairly full as three boys were celebrating their Bar Mitzvahs. Luckily the other two boys had had regular lessons so were not too bad at reciting their Brachot. Theo stumbled a bit here and there – he was definitely not a regular shul-goer. In fact, it had been quite difficult for him to get there at all as we were living with a non-Jewish family who weren’t really au fait with Jewish customs or sympathetic to them. However, they too came along, Uncle wearing a sports cap and Auntie in a hat she’d been advised to wear for the synagogue, with Theo’s sisters, Bertha (later Leverton, founder of the Kindertransport Reunion) and I, sitting in the small Ladies’ Gallery, suffering with every mistake Theo made. Eventually the service ended and the congregation trooped into the shul hall, where a modest reception had been prepared by the parents of the other Bar Mitzvah boys. The rabbi had given Theo a small tallit in the forlorn hope that it might be worn now and then. I don’t remember any tefillin – in fact, no present from anyone – and we returned to our foster home to our ordinary life in a non-Jewish household. Our parents were not at the Bar Mitzvah, of course: we hadn’t heard from them, except for a few Red Cross messages every few months, since the War had started. They had sent Bertha, Theo and me on the Kindertransports, the two older children in January 1939 and me in July, six weeks before war broke out. Bertha and Theo had, after a few weeks at Dovercourt reception camp, been literally sent to Coventry – Bertha as a housemaid and Theo as a playmate to a milkman’s (reluctant) son. I couldn’t wait to join them – as everyone knew, England was the home of kings and queens, princesses and various other aristocrats and a way of life I hoped we would soon join. (How marvellous a nine-year-old’s imagination can be ….) How we missed our parents that day, more than on any other! We had come from a traditional Jewish home and the change of life in our new environment was quite a shock. Nevertheless, children are pretty adaptable and we soon learned to fit in. However, what we did not know – and, had we had any inkling we would have been in seventh heaven – was that on that very Shabbat morning my parents did celebrate my brother’s Bar Mitzvah. A year into the war, and with no escape on the horizon, my father decided to risk an illegal emigration to Yugoslavia, where there were still possibilities of getting across the border from Austria. At that time, if one left Germany (without any money, of course) it was still possible to be smuggled via Graz to Zagreb with the help of a people-smuggler named Josef Schleich. (All other routes were out by that time – no boats to Palestine, North or South America, Shanghai, Japan or most other longed-for destinations.) So they crept out of Munich on a Sunday morning, made their way to Graz by train and, after several very difficult days at the smuggler’s house, they were taken together with other refugees to the border near Yugoslavia. There peasants who knew the landscape inside out were recruited to guide the refugees over the mountains. If a border patrol approached, the peasants fled and left the refugees to fend for themselves. Needless to say, it was a horrendous journey, but my parents managed it and arrived in Zagreb a few days later. There they were looked after by the Yugoslav-Jewish community, who had thousands of refugees to care for. At that time, Yugoslavia was still neutral and the Jews there did their utmost to care for the influx of young orphans from Poland and Austria as well as any adults who needed help. It wasn’t until months later that the Germans invaded and many Yugoslav Jews met the fate of their fellow- Jews elsewhere. But on the morning of September 7 1940 my father and mother went to the local synagogue, where he was honoured as the father of a Bar Mitzvah, as well as saying the prayer for having been delivered from danger (for the time being anyway). And so it was that my brother did get a present – the best present anyone could have wanted for his Bar Mitzvah – except of course he was unaware of it at the time! It took another three and a half years before we were reunited as a family in England, during which our parents had wandered through Yugoslavia, Italy, Spain and Portugal. But that’s another story …. Inge Sadan