Elsa Shamash

Elsa Shamash

Elsa Shamash
She sees the resurgence of the right in Europe as a sign of rising intolerance. 
                           
Even 80 years on from her flight from the Nazis, Elsa Shamash, 93, retains a strong German accent. She is a little deaf and her daughter helps her understand my questions. Her father was a pioneering radiologist and the family, which lived in Berlin, was wealthy. She and her brother Heinz were at private school before Adolf Hitler came to power, but then had to transfer to a Jewish school. The family’s non-Jewish maid had to quit: it was no longer permissible for Jews and non-Jews to work together.

Her father had been a medical officer in the first world war, so was given permission to carry on working in medicine but, from 1936 on, he could only treat Jewish patients. The family was considering emigrating: her father visited Palestine, but felt it would never be peaceful; they also had visas for Ecuador, but worried that the climate would be unsuitable. It seems extraordinary now that they would stay in Germany rather than flee to South America because of the weather, but Shamash says her father was 61 and worried how he would make a living outside Germany. “He didn’t expect Hitler to last,” she says.

That mood changed after Kristallnacht. Her father’s medical practice had been daubed with paint; the children were sent home from school; and her father was warned by phone – Shamash thinks by a former patient – to make himself scarce because Jewish men were being rounded up. Her father quickly left and hid for three days. “For the rest of his life,” she says, “he had terrible nightmares that the Gestapo were coming for him.”

When he returned, they redoubled their efforts to leave Germany. Elsa and her brother got places on a Kindertransport and left Berlin in March 1939. When war broke out, she feared she would never see her parents again but, with the help of relatives in the UK who were able to put up £500 as surety, they were able to follow Elsa and Heinz to Britain shortly afterwards. Elsa’s father was initially interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien, but was eventually allowed to practise medicine again.

Shamash’s family was lucky in that they all survived, but she says they were still traumatised. “My father was very depressed and he always had those nightmares,” she says. “Often in the middle of the night he was screaming.” Over the past 10 years, following the death of her husband, she has devoted herself to working with refugee groups in north London. She sees the resurgence of the far right in Europe and the “hostile environment” towards displaced people in the UK as signs of rising intolerance and fear of the other. Even in her 90s, she is determined to resist.
She has, after all, seen the consequences of the alternative. As her fellow Kindertransportee Ruth Barnett says, nazism took root in Germany because there were too many passive bystanders. The other way, she says, is to be an “active upstander”. The triumph of evil, it has been said, relies on good men doing nothing. But when good men and women make a stand, good can carry the day. An irresistible message from six unquenchable spirits

Photo credit: Andy Hall/The Guardian
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