Tablet Magazine..
27 January '20..
On May 8, 1945, when the war ended in Europe, 19-year-old Esther Cailingold and her younger brother Asher danced the night away in London’s Trafalgar Square. “We youngsters had never felt so happy,” he said. “But when we got home in the early hours our father greeted us with a doom-laden warning that dark times were ahead for the Jews. We didn’t understand what he meant, but the reality was soon to catch up with us.” Three years later, Esther lay dead in Jerusalem’s Old City, after a battle that Reuters reported was reminiscent of Stalingrad.
The Cailingold siblings grew up in a closed Orthodox society in an atmosphere that Asher, 89, said “retained the feel of Eastern Europe.” But this was still “London—the heart of the British Empire on which the sun never set,” he recalled. “When our teachers pointed to the pink shaded masses on the map of the world our little chests puffed out in pride.” But in the months following the end of hostilities, Asher watched as his sister was transformed from “a prim trainee schoolteacher into a frontline fighter who traveled alone to a strange land and changed into someone we never knew.”
Along with millions of British cinema goers, the siblings spent the summer of 1945 watching newsreel images of emaciated Holocaust survivors and skeletal corpses. It had an enormous impact on Esther. “We were both members of the religious Zionist movement, Bahad, now Bnei Akiva, and when they asked for volunteers to go to Germany to work with the survivors Esther was determined to join them, but our father refused to let her go,” Asher recalled. Then one day in August 1945, she “stomped out of the house” without telling the family where she was going.
Days later, when 300 child Holocaust survivors who had endured slave labor, concentration camps, and death marches stepped out of RAF bombers at an airport near Carlisle in the north of England, Esther Cailingold was waiting to greet them.
The children, mostly teenage boys, were brought from the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia by the Central British Fund, now World Jewish Relief. Their story is retold in a major docudrama for BBC and Germany’s ZDF, The Windermere Children, to be broadcast later this month as part of the U.K.’s 75th anniversary commemoration of the end of the Holocaust. It is being sold as a redemptive feel good story of British generosity, but it fails to tell the whole story. It is a tale that will not mention 22-year-old Esther and how meeting child Holocaust survivors in England’s Lake District turned her into a radical Zionist with a gun in her hand.
The story of the collapse of British control in Palestine is rarely discussed in the United Kingdom and does not appear in school textbooks. It is odd that such a seminal moment in history seems to have fallen through the cracks, as it links two crucial events of 20th-century history—the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel. So I recently met with Dave Rich, an expert on anti-Semitism, in a coffee shop in north London.
The fact it has been brushed under the carpet has, Rich told me, had a negative impact on Britain. Rich said it has allowed the hard left to present an incorrect “narrative which sees Jews before World War II as anti-fascists, during the war as victims of fascism, and after the war as fascist oppressors.” He said the topic is too uncomfortable even for the Jewish community to counter, with many unwilling to speak about it, almost as if it were as bad as “homegrown ISIS terrorists today. British Jews were going to Palestine to fight the British Empire.”
Rich was right; finding someone who was willing to talk about this was not an easy feat and I almost gave up. But at the 11th hour, I stumbled across an unexpected lead while at Kibbutz Lavi in northern Israel, not far from the Sea of Galilee. It was founded by Bahad in 1949 and I came to find out about its founders who cared for the child Holocaust survivors. But Lavi’s British side is fading fast. The hotel lobby was full of characters who look like they have stepped out of an episode of Netflix’s Shtisel and the buzz of conversation was Hebrew and English with an American twang. The United Kingdom seemed very far away. There wasn’t a single person from Britain in sight until I walked into the old people’s home.
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Rosie Whitehouse is the author of The People on the Beach: Escaping Europe After the Holocaust, which will be published by Hurst in September 2020.
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