Hotel Lutetia Paris - Belle Epoque or Art Deco?

Paris' Hotel Lutetia, built in 1910, is now over 100 years old. From the first details of the 1907 commission, the facade was supposed to set the tone and reflect the hotel’s prestigious character. Note the elaborate sculpture created by Léon Binet and the stained glass windows. Slightly decadent, to be sure, and very Belle Epoque.

This ornate building is located on 45 Blv Raspail in the 6th Arrondissement. Undoubtedly pre-World War One visitors would have loved the Saint-Germain-des-Pres district, the River Seine, Musee d'Orsay, Notre Dame Cathedral and the Eiffel Tower. In fact 1910 was the very year that the hotel's neighbour, Le Bon Marche department store, began selling classy fashions to those who could afford them.

Hotel Lutetia, Saint-Germain-des-Pres

In its own historical documents, the hotel records that the famous brasseries and cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, such as Le Procope, Le Lipp, Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, became a melting pot of intellectual debate. Café society started in the late C19th and continued to blossom in the C20th. This Left Bank area become the centre for Bohemian literary, musical and artistic types, including Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Dancer Josephine Baker, who moved to Paris in 1925 to perform at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, made Hotel Lutetia her second home. Picasso painted Guernica in his atelier in Rue des Grands Augustins. Baldaccini César's sculpture of Gustave Eiffel was added to the hotel interior, to stress the connection between the hotel and its Saint-Germain-des-Prés artiness.

Eventually the good times came to an end in Paris. The French government evacuated Paris in June 1940 and Hotel Lutetia was one of the hotels requisitioned by the Gestapo during Germany's occupation of the city. Hotel Lutetia was not the only famous hotel taken over by the German forces - Hotel Meurice on the Right Bank, for example, was the site allocated to the German military. I am not familiar with this murky part of the Lutetia’s history, so I recommend you read Quazen. After Paris was liberated, the Lutetia clearly had a more optimistic and helpful role to play; it became a centre for family searches and reunions.

Hotel Lutetia, Deco bar and lounge today

Eventually the Lutetia returned to its real role in history as a splendid hotel.

In the late 1980s, designer Sonia Rykiel opened a boutique in the building, and supervised a major redesign of the interior, restoring the splendid Art Deco of earlier decades. Athletic, naked Deco women in bronze hold up lamps; the Lalique crystal chandeliers are classy; and plush red velvet furniture looks intimate. Hundreds of art objects were placed throughout the hotel’s public spaces and 231 rooms.  And like the Radisson Blu Le Dokhan’s Hotel in Paris, cabinets displaying Louis Vuitton accessories are placed alongside the reception desk.

The centenary celebrations in 2010 were very colourful! Now only one question remains. The hotel was opened for business in 1910 and Art Deco was not popular until 1925 and throughout the 1930s. So what did the interior of Hotel Lutetia really look like, in its original state?

Desperate Refugees: 1940 and 2001

Phillip Adams is a columnist in one of Australia’s most prestigious newspaper and a film producer of note. He wrote the most amazing column just recently (The Australian, 18th Feb 2012) that I would like to reproduce and then comment on.

The newspaper article started here. "The remarkable Australian writer-director Ben Lewin being carried shoulder-high through cheering crowds at the Sundance Festival. Lewin's latest film, The Surrogate, should now enter Oscar contention. At the same time, Australia’s wealthiest woman, Lang Hancock's daughter Gina, was upping her strategic media holdings with a tilt at Fairfax. The two stories strangely connected – mining magnate Lang Hancock was a secretive player in the Australian film industry. And, having backed Australia's most famous film Mad Max in 1979, he agreed to back Ben Lewin.

Adams had long loathed Hancock’s bank-rolling of right wing Queensland premier Joh BjeIke-Petersen; his enthusiasm for business partner and Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu; his contempt for Aboriginal land rights; his insane attempts to have the Treasurer of Australia ban the writings of Ralph Nader and John Kenneth Galbraith; and his lunatic plan to create new deep-water ports in Western Australia with nuclear bombs. But Lewin and Adams were finding it hard to finance a feature called The Dunera Boys - and suddenly Hancock came knocking. Waving a cheque for the entire budget.

The Dunera Boys, National Library of Australia

The film would have told why Australia used a prison camp for Jews at Hay. They'd been among a few thousand refugees from Germany and Austria that Churchill had interned during the UK's darkest hours - and then shipped them here on HMT Dunera. He bizarrely believed that the Jews, many of them men of great distinction, might be Nazis. The camp was as surreal as Churchill's notion. On good terms with the guards, the Jews re-created Viennese cafe society in southwest NSW. After the war, many Dunera boys stayed on to make immense contributions to Australia.

All but forgotten, the Dunera story is one of the oddest episodes in our history. Ben Lewin's script was masterful and Phillip Adams was the producer.

The initial approach came from a go-between who'd neither confirm nor deny that Hancock was his client. But he was well known as the magnate's man. Were there any projects that would qualify for the 10BA tax concessions? Yes but, suspecting that Hancock's right-wing views probably included anti-Semitism, Adams warned that his nameless client might not like the story. "He won't be concerned. It's all about tax planning, not the content of the movies. Nor will the size of your budget be the slightest concern."

So in the early 1980s they signed heads of agreement, booked a marvellous cast including Bob Hoskins and Warren Mitchell - and started building a replica of the Hay camp. But before the first take of the first scene there was a phone call. "My client has instructed me to tear up the cheque." No reason was proffered; no discussion would be entered into. "He's found out that our film is about a boatful of Yids, hasn't he?" Once again the lawyer would neither confirm nor deny. Infuriated, Adams warned that the film director and producer would call an immediate press conference to denounce his client as an anti-Semite. The measured response was to say this would lead to an immediate libel action.

They scrambled to save the film, trying to raise the funds within the Jewish community. But time beat them. They had to release the cast and crew, and dismantle the sets. A few years later in 1985, Ben Lewin rejigged The Dunera Boys as a mini-series under a different producer. It remains one of the finest achievements in the history of Australian television. But the backstage story of the Hancock investment scandal appears here, for the first time.

Ben Lewin's success at Sundance was wonderful but his brilliant career has not come easy. He greatly deserves his latest triumph - and to be recognised as one of our best, up there with Weir, Beresford and Schepisi." End of the newspaper article.

**

To my mind, Lang Hancock was perfectly entitled to back any film project he fancied and could have stayed well away from any project he did not like. So why did he seem to at first accept the Dunera Story, a tragic episode in Australian history that is still fresh in the minds of people old enough to remember World War Two, Nazism and terrified refugees?

I have of course seen the final mini-series that Ben Lewin directed, The Dunera Boys, and thought that Bob Hoskins and Warren Mitchell were indeed amazing.

Let me leap forward a few years to 2001 at the Maritime Museum in Sydney, when the 61st reunion of the Dunera Boys their families and friends was being held. Its not far from the place they first landed in Australia on the transport ship Dunera in 1940.

As already noted, they had been 2000 of the Jewish refugees who fled to England from Germany and Austria. England was afraid they might be a security risk so put them into internment camps and later shipped them to camps in Australia; a miserable cargo - unwanted and uncertain of their future. Many of the Dunera Boys went on to become prominent lawyers, doctors, businessmen, professors and artists.

At the Dunera reunion there was plenty of talk about the past, but also about current world headlines regarding the asylum seekers on board the tragic ship, Tampa. Think of events that rocked Australia at that moment and consider the coincidence of place (Sydney wharf), time (2001) and theme (desperate refugees)!

The Norwegian freighter, The Tampa, rescued and protected the refugees, 2001

In August 2001, the Howard Government of Australia refused permission for the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa, carrying 438 rescued but unauthorised Afghans from a distressed fishing vessel in international waters, to enter Australian waters. The Prime Minister ordered the ship be boarded by Australian special forces and the refugees taken out of Australian waters. Later that same August, the Prime Minister introduced an emergency bill entitled the Border Protection Bill 2001. The government subsequently acted to excise Christmas Island and a large number of other coastal islands from Australia's migration zone. It was arguably Australia’s most immoral legislation since becoming a nation in January 1901.

The timing of the Tampa disgrace was exquisitely painful. The surviving Dunera boys, now men in their 80s, wanted to shake the Prime Minister, John Howard, saying “we were tragic refugees. Don’t you forget it. You must never turn a boat away with refugees”.

Ten Pound Poms: from Britain with love

Japan had bombed Darwin almost with impunity during World War 2. After the war ended, the Prime Minister Ben Chifley recognised that Australia needed a long-term strategy for defending the nation against any future invasion. He also recognised that the Australian labour force had suffered under the strains of total war and from massive death/injury rates to its young men. With only 7 million citizens, Australia needed to Populate Or Perish.

Skilled and fit workers were desperately needed. Orphaned children from Britain had been sent to the old British colonies for several decades, but how many orphans did Britain have? Desperate times called for vigorous measures.

Advertising poster, showing a well integrated British family settled into Australian life, Victoria Museum.

The Ten Pound Pom scheme was established i.e an assisted migration scheme that operated in Australia from 1946 onwards. Adult migrants were charged only ₤10 for their fare (a fraction of the true ticket cost) and children travelled for free. Priority was indeed given to British citizens, but workers and their families from all Commonwealth countries were welcome. Of the 400,000 people in Malta, for example, 140,000+ people left on an assisted passage scheme, 60% of them to Australia.

But while working class families were actively recruited, the screening was nonetheless intense. The father in each family needed to be in sound health, under the age of 45 years and ready to work. Every member of the family was given a physical health examination and some sort of intelligence test. People who might drain the health services in Australia were discouraged from applying.

400,000+ British citizens registered at Australia House in London for the project, in 1947 alone! Most were from ordinary, solid working families.

The programme worked very well for Australia, of course, but also for Britain. Seductive recruitment films were shown all over Britain, advertising a life of full employment and freestanding housing, a sunny climate and a sporty or beach-based lifestyle. Britain was still in the grip of bombed out cities, food and petrol rationing, and ex-servicemen looking for employment. And, I suspect, Britain was happy enough to have its working families sent out to the old colonies, to provide “breeding stock” for a vigorous British Commonwealth.

It also worked out very well for the shipping companies. Bunk accommodation on refitted troop ships was at first all that could be provided. Then shipping companies started to compete for the lucrative migrant trade and standards became quite classy.

Passengers welcomed off the SS Strathnaver. Daily Telegraph Sydney, March 1959.

How white was the programme? Australian politicians may have stopped talking about the White Australia Policy, but they still believed Britain had the best quality of citizen. So they looked to Britain (and then to northern European countries like Netherlands) for immigrants, believing that such people would more easily assimilated into the Australian community. Only when applications from British and Dutch migrant families dwindled (in the 1960s) did Australia gradually extend its assisted passage schemes to immigrants from other countries. By focusing on Italy, Greece and Yugoslavia, it was thus possible to maintain the very high levels of immigration enjoyed since the war.

Much of the early accommodation in Australia consisted of disused army camps-cum-hostels where migrant families could remain for up to a year. The goal was to give them training, to help them settle into the Australian community and to find well paid jobs. Fortunately the Nissan huts were gradually replaced with proper buildings and improved facilities.

If migrants returned home to Britain within two years of landing on Australian shores, they had to pay back the true costs of bringing their entire family out on the Ten Pound Pom Scheme. If they fulfilled their two years requirement in Australia, they were free to stay or go as they liked. An estimated quarter of the Ten Pound Poms left Australia within a few years of their arrival, either because they missed Britain and their families desperately, or because the migrant experience in Australia was tough eg the migrant hostels were fairly bleak or the work was too physical. Returnees were referred to as Boomerang Poms.

residential huts, Bathurst Migrant Camp, 1951. National Archives of Australia 

1969 was the peak year for the scheme with 80,000+ people sailing or, by that time, flying to Australia for ₤10. I didn’t realise this but one of the most famous Ten Pound Poms is Prime Minister Julia Gillard who migrated with her Welsh family in 1966. The Bee Gees migrated in the late 1950s from Manchester. Hugh Jackman’s parents and siblings were Ten Pound Poms in 1967.

I asked my in laws how they chose Australia as their forever home. It was easy, they said. They applied for visas to South Africa, Australia, Canada, USA and Argentina. Whichever nation responded first, they would accept. Just as well it was Australia. These impoverished Ten Pound Czechs worked hard from the day they arrived in 1952, providing their children with a lovely home, university education and professions. And me with a fine husband.

Ten Pound Poms: Australia's Invisible Migrants, written by Hammerton and Thomson, told the story of the million plus Britons who emigrated to Australia between 1946 and 1970s. To document migrant life histories, the authors drew on letters, diaries, personal photographs and hundreds of oral history interviews with former migrants, including those who settled permanently in Australia and those who eventually returned home to Britain. It was published by Manchester University Press in 2005.

Southern Cross immigration poster, Victoria Museum (date?)

I also like Adventure Before Dementia where the author published her mother's experiences, both en route to Australia and after the family arrived. The photos, diary entries and menus provide wonderful material for the family to relive and for other readers to examine.

Sir Nicholas Winton: ordinary man, extraordinary story

My husband was born in 1947 in Czechoslovakia. My father-in-law lost every single member of the family during the war; my mother-in-law’s family survived marginally better. Clearly I have a vested interest in this story.

Czech children leaving Prague, 1939

In 1938 Nicholas Winton (1909-), then a young office worker in Britain, was asked by a friend to travel to Prague where he would find an exciting and worthwhile project to get involved in. The BBC said his friend was Martin Blake, a master at Westminster School and an ambassador for the British Committee for Czech Refugees, which was helping adults escape. War was imminent. Only two months earlier, Hitler's troops had occupied the disputed territory of Sudetenland, on Czechoslovakia's border with Germany.

Nicholas Winton, 1940

In other countries, refugee organisations had begun organising the Kindertransports, long trains that could carry thousands of Jewish children out of central Europe. It was not clear why Czech­os­lovakian children weren’t being rescued, but once Winton visited refugee camps outside Prague, he quickly realised that there was a mission with his name on it.

People had warned him that the British government would never allow refugee children to flood into Britain, especially since there were no organisations in London and in Prague to deal with virtually orphaned children. People also warned him that Jewish parents in Czechoslovakia were unlikely to send their precious children away. But in both cases, people were wrong.

BBC map of the trip from Prague to London

Winton immediately started raising money to save the children, and on his return to Britain, began finding homes and organising visas for them. This was not an easy task since Londoners, especially children and new mothers, were being evacuated OUT of the city, into the safety of the countryside in 1939.

After recruiting a team to organise the train trips, Winton returned to the UK to obtain permits for the children and to find foster homes for them. Nicholas raised enough money to give each foster family £50, hardly enough to look after the children until the age of 17. But decent families did respond. Winton found homes for all 669 Jewish children.

Nosey Parker and Make A Difference In The World – Be The Change! blogs noted that the only other country that would take these children, apart from Britain, was Sweden. Some of the children were indeed sent to foster homes in Sweden.

Throughout early 1939, Winton trains carried 669 children to safety. Parents stood at the railway station in Prague, bravely waving goodbye to their babies, presumably for the last time. Only one planned trip failed. The last train, with 250 children on board, was due to leave on 1st of September 1939, the day war broke out. At the last minute German troops intervened; the children were taken off the train and never seen again. They, and most of the families left behind, were eventually exterminated.

Sir Nicholas Winton’s heroic acts were unknown, until his wife Grete found an old scrapbook in an attic, detailing his mission forty years after WW2 ended. I find it incredible that he had never told his beloved wife the story!

Lancaster Unity blog showed how Survivors gathered to pay tribute to 'British Schindler' (although the comparison between Schindler and Winton seems to be unfair to Winton). The Czech Railways ran a train so that the Winton children could retrace their 1938 journey. 100 people travelled between Prague and London; among them 20 of Winton's Children, now with children and grandchildren of their own. These now-elderly Winton Children were determined that their own grandchildren should under­stand how much they owe to an otherwise ordinary man. What is even more amazing is that Winton, now 100, stood at the platform at Liverpool St station to welcome them.. again.

Christina’s This and That found a powerful film detailing the story of Winton's Children called “All My Loved Ones” by David Silberstein. And schoolchildren in the Czech Republic will see Matej Minac's film called "Nicholas Winton - The Power of Good."

Statue on platform of Prague's Central Railway station

In retirement, Winton continued to live in Maidenhead and to raise money for worthy causes; the Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead is 42 ks to the west of central London. In 1983 he won an MBE for his work with the Abbeyfield Housing Association, whose retirement village in Windsor was appropriately named Winton House.

There is even an art connection or two. Since 2003, there has been a bronze statue outside Liverpool St station, perfectly depicting the children who were rescued. A thousand ks away, the new Statue of Sir Nicholas Winton in Prague shows a bronze statue holding two of the children he helped escape. The two sculpture pieces rightly stand in the two railways stations where the epic rescue project started and ended. And in 2010, a bronze life sized statue was placed on the platform at Maidenhead railway station. The sculpture showed Sir Nicholas reading a book that contained images of the Jewish children he saved. And it showed the trains he used to transport them from Czechosl­ovakia to Britain in 1939.

Statue outside Liverpool St Railway Station, London

History Today magazine (March 2004) has a wonderful review of the rescue programme called Kindertransport: terror, trauma and triumph. Written by Caroline Sharples, the article mentioned Sir Nicholas Winton but focused largely on what happened to the children once they found foster families in the UK.

Cafe Scheherazade: remembering refugees' stories

I have ranted and raved about asylum seekers and refugees who desperately try to escape the death and destruction in their own countries by coming on small boats to Australia. It strikes me as barbaric to allow the boats to sink, send the refugees back to the hell holes they escaped from or imprison them on small Pacific islands.

Australia’s current policy became even more embarrassing when looking at the play Café Scheherazade, adapted by Therese Radic from the novel by Arnold Zable. The play is showing at fortyfivedownstairs in Melbourne and although there aren’t too many Holocaust survivors still alive, there are plenty of their children and grandchildren who were born from 1946 on. fortyfivedownstairs was packed.

Cafe Scheherazade, Acland St StKilda, 1950. (Photo: Jewish Museum of Australia)

After the war, a young couple called Avram and Masha Zeleznikow returned to Poland, found each other, got married and agreed to meet up in Paris. They chose to meet in a Parisian café named after the storyteller Queen Scheherazade who apparently told stories for 1001 nights to save her life. The name seemed appropriate since the Paris café was filled with refugees from Eastern Europe, sharing the stories, looking for any distant cousin who might have survived the Holocaust and eating cheesecake.

When they arrived in Australia in the 1950s, the Zeleznikows opened their own cafe in 1958 and of course they called it Café Scheherazade. They and their Eastern European patrons spent endless hours in Acland Street St.Kilda, recounting their own experiences as hunted enemy aliens in Poland and as refugees in the new country.

The play Café Scheherazade uses the device of Eastern European migrants in Melbourne telling their stories to a young journalist. The journalist wants to get down the details for a book; the café patrons just want to remember their journeys and their experiences of displacement and survival. There is nothing unique about this – I am certain the Afghanastani and Iraqi refugees are in the same position in 2011 that the Jews were in 1951. Refugee lives face universal problems, whether they analyse the issues in Yiddish, Polish, Russian, Arabic or Uzbek.

For people who love klezmer music, the music was evocative of a time well and truly gone. From the moment Ernie Gruner struck up his violin, Arnold Zable noted, the theatre audience was back in the café. Back in Acland Street. Back on the roads of Siberia, the forests of Lithuania, the crowded streets of war-torn Shanghai, the back alleys of Kazakhstan or the streets of Warsaw.

The original Café Scheherazade in St Kilda was indeed an Acland Street icon. Throughout the 1958-70 era, my family joined thousands of others on Sunday afternoons enjoying beetroot borscht with sour cream, potato latkes with sour cream, cheese cake with sour cream, and black tea with lemon slices. Then we would walk to the beach (4 minutes away) for some vigorous exercise.

the play Cafe Scheherazade, remembering stories and drinking lemon tea

But not just an icon - I should call Cafe Scheherazade a haven. The play reminds us to celebrate and embrace those refugees who continue to arrive in Australia, because they are the future of this nation. They provide workers for our industries, chefs, artists and musicians, teachers and historians, as well as contributing to the rich diversity of this culture.

Anti-Fascist Art Exhibition, Melbourne 1942

When he opened the new Victorian Artists’ Society exhibition in 1937, Robert Menzies (Australian prime minister from 1939-41 and 1949-66) said: “Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand, the people who call themselves modernists today talk a different language”. The metaphor that Menzies chose to protest about the incomprehensible visual coincided with the complaint by Anglophone Australians thatthe “Refujews jabbered away to each other in their own tongues, plotting sabotage for all one could tell”.

In response to Menzies and his conservative supporters, modernist artists formed the Contemporary Art Society in Melbourne in July 1938.

Bergner, Pumpkins, 1942,  National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

In 1939, a Melbourne newspaper sponsored a show of the very best of modern European art. Called The Herald Exhibition of Modern French and English Painting, the works were exhibited in Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney. It gave Australian audiences the opportunity to view original and modern works by Cezanne, Picasso, Seurat, Van Gogh, Vuillard, Gaugin, Matisse, Dali, Ernst, Leger and others. Modern yes, but it was politically neutral and not really radical in artistic terms.

However just one year later, in 1940, an exhibition of the Contemporary Art Society evoked a virulent attack upon foreign artists via a letter from Sir Lionel Lindsay to the Sydney Morning Herald. And it was reiterated in Lionel Lindsay’s book Addled Art. The art Establishment could be very vicious indeed to Jews, foreigners and refuges, even in the middle of a hideous world war.

I read about the 1942 Anti-Fascist Exhibition, held in Melbourne’s Athenaeum Gallery, in two separate sources. The first was Melbourne Art & Culture Critic. This source provoked a question - why did this exhibition move on to Adelaide and not, for example, Sydney or Brisbane? Perhaps because the Angry Penguins (a group of modern literary scholars) were founded in Adelaide in 1940. Or perhaps it was because Lionel Lindsay had become a Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and was soon knighted for his services to Australian art. He may have been influential enough to ruin the Anti-Fascist Exhibition, had it attempted to open in Sydney.

The second source was Painting the Town: A Film About Yosl Bergner 1987. Bergner, a Polish Jew, arrived in Australia in 1937. Bergner had grown up in Warsaw where he took painting lessons and was inspired by European modernism. In Melbourne, he sought out and befriended painters like Albert Tucker, Jim Wigley, Joy Hester, Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval and Danila Vassilieff. He continued his studies at the National Art School in Melbourne and joined the new Contemporary Art Society.

Counihan, The New Order, 1942

Presumably, by 1942, influential figures in the social realism movement were horrified by the hardship caused by the Depression and the war. Bergner and his fellow artists were determined to paint the life of cities and the ordinary people around them, which brought them into opposition with both the art and political establishments of the day. They were painters with a message who wanted to deal with the injustices of the world in their work. But more than that. By 1942, information of the mass slaughter of Jews, gypsies and communists in Europe was becoming readily available in the West.

In his paintings, Bergner used his memories of Warsaw and observations and experiences of Australia. His depiction of refugees, ghettos and the destruction of Europe were exceptional, but most extraordinary were those of urban Aboriginal people. When the Contemporary Art Society of Australia mounted the anti-fascist exhibition in Melbourne and Adelaide, Bergner drew parallels between the dispossession of urban Aboriginal people and that of the Jews in Eastern Europe.

Finding details about the Anti Fascist Exhibition has been difficult. I have included paragraphs from each artist’s biography, if he/she participated in the exhibition, but I would love to have seen a contemporary, published catalogue.

Sidney Nolan, Going to School, 1942

The first 3 publicly exhibited paintings by John Perceval were shown at Melbourne's Contemporary Art Society in 1942. John Reed loved the 19-year-old's audacious work and published them in the Angry Penguins magazine .  Perceval's work was included in the Anti-Fascist Exhibition in Melbourne later that year, helping to establish the young man's reputation in the national art scene!

The exhibition had pieces from other artists who saw their work as having an important social and political role in documenting the suffering of the oppressed. James Wigley (1918–99) participated in the exhibition after he became friends with Noel Counihan and other social realist painters and writers. Noel Counihan and James Wigley clearly shared Bergner’s social conscience.

A founder-member of the Contemporary Art Society in 1938, Noel Counihan (1913–86)  initiated its 1942 anti-Fascist exhibition. The New Order, one of the few paintings that he preserved from the show (and perhaps the best of them), was influenced by one of William Gropper's paintings also entitled The New Order and also painted in 1942.  Later Counihan helped organise an Artists' Unity Congress, receiving awards for his paintings of miners in the Australia at War exhibition in 1945.

Other young contemporaries in Melbourne had already asserted the intellectual and imaginative freedom of the artist and his/her independence from political doctrines. But we can say that matters came to a head with the Anti-Fascist Exhibition produced by the Contemporary Art Society.

Reason in Revolt noted that Albert Tucker had been called up in April 1942. It was a critical time for him since he held deeply anti-war sentiments. It was the Communist Party's shift to an all-out support of the war effort after the invasion of Russia that placed him at greater odds with the party. Yet four months after the invasion, he still cited himself as a member of a neo-realist group that included Bergner and Counihan. Although he was doubtful about the wisdom of the Anti-Fascist Exhibition when it was first mooted, he did contribute 6 paintings and several drawings to the show. He was in fact, with Counihan and O'Connor, one of the three major contributors to the exhibition.

The Herald Sun said Sidney Nolan's reputation rests on a handful of masterpieces, including the famous Going to School 1942, shown at the anti-Fascist exhibition.

Once embarked on her art course, Ailsa O'Connor became involved in all the highly charged meetings of the period. She identified with the radical forces supporting modern art against Menzies' push for a traditionalist Art Academy and joined the Contemporary Art Society at its first meeting in 1938. She became increasingly politicised and was the only woman to exhibit in the 1942 Melbourne Anti-Fascist Exhibition, where she showed crayon drawings.

Tucker, Death of an Aviator, 1942

June Tuck and Dorrit Black certainly participated in the same exhibition the next year when it moved to the RSASA Gallery in Adelaide. And one of Jacqueline Hick’s paintings from this period, Landscape, 1943, was exhibited at this exhibition in Adelaide, and subsequently purchased by the National Gallery of SA.

I wonder if the Australian artists had seen a 1942 poster painted by Ben Shahn and printed by the USA Government Office of War Information. Shahn was referring to Lidice, a Czech mining village that was obliterated by the Nazis in retaliation for the June 1942 shooting of a Nazi official by two Czechs. All men of the village were killed in a 10-hour massacre; the women and children were sent to death camps. The destruction of Lidice became an anti-fascist symbol everywhere.

Shahn, This is Nazi brutality, 1942, poster

After all this time, I cannot be sure if the Australian Anti-Fascist Exhibition was directed to the fascists plundering their way across Europe, Africa and Asia OR to the right wing artists, thinkers and publishers in Australia. Clearly the Contemporary Art Society had been created by young radical artists to loosen the grip of the conservatives who dominated the Australian art establishment of the time. To me, these artists were stating that art had an important role in expressing political and social criticism at a time when the conservatives HERE bitterly opposed the exhibiting of art inspired by social concerns. Yet Reason in Revolt thought differently. They said that most of the paintings exhibited in the Anti-Fascist exhibition of 1942 had been urgent responses to events in Europe, grounded in feelings of political outrage.

Child migrants/deportees from Britain to the Empire

“On Their Own - Britain’s Child Migrants” is a collaborative exhibition that came out of the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney and the National Museums Liverpool in the UK.

An organisation known as the Church of England Central Home for Waifs and Strays opened for business in 1881. By 1905 the Society had 93 homes throughout England and Wales, accounting for 3410 children in care. Two thirds of these lived in Society's homes, a few hundred in affiliated homes, and the rest were fostered. Because there weren't enough beds for all the children needing assistance, many of these young British citizens were sent to Canada.  The National Children's Homes, a Methodist organisation established in 1869, also emigrated over 3,000 of the children they took into care.

Under the Empire Settlement Act of 1922 and 1937, the British Government formally assisted private organisations to help people who wanted to settle in His Majesty’s Overseas Dominions. Most were adults. But some 130,000 children were also sent from Britain to Canada, Australia and other Commonwealth countries through child migration schemes.

The child migrants were largely lied to; they were told their parents were dead so that they were being sent on holiday to a place where the sun always shines and fruit can be picked off the trees. But few of the children were true orphans; many had originally been placed in the British orphanages because their parents had been unable to care for them, temporarily or for the long term.

Child migrants from Fairbridge, setting out for Australia, 1938.
Photo from Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool

Child migrants were sent abroad without passports, social histories or full birth certificates. Thus it was easy to tell the children that their parents had died and that there was no member of the family who could ever care for them or adopt them. And as the majority of the transportees were only between seven and ten years of age, they were in no position to have argued with the authorities.

The British government thought that they would offload their needy families and save the British economy a fortune. But the charitable and religious organisations in Britain often had a more moral and less financial motive. The Fairbridge Plan for caring for British child migrants originated with Kingsley Fairbridge’s “vision splendid”. He was truly appalled at the conditions of the thousands of under-privileged children with no future other than poverty. He wanted to transplant such children to the wide-open spaces in the colonies; the orphanages agreed and were very happy to send their charges overseas.

For their part, the Australian and other British Empire governments hoped these schemes would supply them with much needed population and labour. They could have imported cheap labour from any country, but they wanted sound, British stock. “Stock” was always the word that was used. In 1913 the first children arrived in Western Australia to take up residence on The Fairbridge Farm near Pinjarra, south-east of Perth. In 1937, The Fairbridge Farm Schools were opened in New South Wales.

"This is not a charity", declared the Prince of Wales in 1934 of the work of the Fairbridge farm schools... "it is an Imperial investment".

The Britain’s Child Migrants Exhibition’s own documentation notes that the lives of these children changed dramatically and fortunes varied. Some succeeded in creating new futures for themselves. Others suffered lonely childhoods, brutalised and exploited by the church organisations that were supposed to protect them. All experienced disruption and separation from their families and from the British towns they grew up in.

Exploitation and misery were not exclusively the fate of those children sent to Australia. The Child Migrants Trust said that while children in New Zealand were often placed with foster parents, those in Canada could be entrusted to the care of farmers, often without sufficient supervision. Some Canadian farmers were charged with manslaughter, such was the extent of their cruelty. Very few children were legally adopted in Canada and the vast majority spent their entire childhoods in farm schools or large, impersonal institutions which accommodated up to 350 children.

These child migration schemes received poor publicity from the outset, yet they continued until the 1960s. So why didn’t the schemes attract the critical attention of historians and welfare workers until the 1980s? And even then it was accidental. Margaret Humphreys was a social worker in Nottingham, specialising in child protection. One day an Australian woman contacted her, saying she had been taken from a children’s home in Nottingham and sent as a toddler to Australia by boat after WW2. Could Humphreys help her find her mother?

Humphrey’s pursuit of the scheme took her all over the British Commonwealth. To her very great credit, Humphreys also founded the Child Migrants Trust, to help those who suffered under the policy. What seems improbable to me was that Margaret Humphreys was the first concerned professional to raise the issues of involuntary child migration. Perhaps she was just the bravest. Or perhaps the others had been turned away by obdurate government officials.

Fairbridge Farm children on the SS Ormonde, 1950
Photo from the State Library of WA

Even so, it took until 1999 for the British government to set up and endow a travel fund to be spent on onetime visits for family reunions. Unfortunately there were so many restrictions that only 300 of the 10,000 post-WW2 migrants to Australia were able to go back home. The travel fund expired in 2002, but in any case, how many mothers and fathers who placed their children in care in 1938-46 would still have been alive in 2002? Formal apologies from the Australian Government in 2009 and British Government in 2010 were late, but were welcomed by the transportees.

The Australian National Maritime Museum has suggested the following reading list:

1.Bean, Philip & Melville, Joy Lost children of the Empire. London; Sydney Unwin Hyman, 1989.
2.Coldrey, Barry M Good British stock: child and youth migration to Australia.  National Archives of Australia, 1999
3.Gill, Alan Orphans of the Empire: the shocking story of child migration to Australia. Milsons Point Vintage, 1998.
4.Humphreys, Margaret Empty Cradles. London Corgi Books, 1995.
5.Sherington, Geoffrey & Jeffery, Chris Fairbridge: Empire and child migration. University of Western Australia Press, 1998
6.Wagner, Gillian Children of the Empire. London Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982.
7. Wheeler, Charles Carried away, in BBC History, October 2003. Great article!
Months after writing this particular post, I saw the film Oranges and Sunshine, starring Emily Watson as the Nottingham social worker Margaret Humphreys and directed by Jim Loach. The film, which opened in Britain in April 2011 and in Australia in June 2011, focuses on the individuals' experiences of Britain's semi-secret child migrant programme to Australia. I say semi-secret because, although the relevant government ministers and church authorities thought they were doing the best thing for the unfortunate children, they destroyed the children's paperwork on purpose and lost the children's true identities. The film skilfully depicts the impact of this loss of identity, 50 years or more after the children had been deported from their homeland.

Young migrant children put out to labour in the fields,
Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney

Stolen art treasures claimed in court: Herzog's collection in Budapest

I have written quite a few times about art stolen from Jewish families during WW2, and I have examined various stages of the repatriation process: stolen art that has been identified, exhibited and compensated.  But I have never focused on Hungary before.

Hungary, a wartime ally of Nazi Germany, was the country that eventually organised the deportation and extermination of its own Jewish citizens. In May 1944, relatively late in the war, the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior issued a decree requiring Jews to register all art objects that they owned. And despite years of negotiations and international appeals for repatriation of this art, Hungary still has those paintings and sculptures.

El Greco, Agony in the Garden, c1595

The works I want to examine today come from the collection of Baron Mór Lipót Herzog, a banker and an avid pre-war art collector in Hungary. Heirs to the Herzog Collection, possibly the largest private art collection in Hungary prior to WW2, filed suit in the USA District Court in DC for the return of their grandfather’s artworks. These art objects are currently in the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest, the Hungarian National Galley and the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest.

Before his death in 1934, Baron Mór Lipót Herzog had bought a total of c2,500 paintings, sculptures, Renaissance furniture, jewellery, silver and other art objects for his collection. They included unbelievable masterpieces by El Greco, Velázquez, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Corot, Renoir and Monet, the best known being being: The Agony in the Garden by El Greco, The Annunciation to Saint Joachim by Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Spring by Gustave Courbet and Portrait of a Woman by Camille Corot.

I have also chosen to show a painting by Francisco de Zurbarán who was born in Spain in 1598. Zurbarán's works were almost all of a religious nature, but his spirituality seemed deeper and more austere than most 17th century artists. Zurbarán's mastery was best seen in his portraits, which I loved, but this all begs the question of why Spanish Catholic Zurbarán appealed so deeply to the urbane, Jewish Hungarian Baron Mór Lipót Herzog.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, Annunciation to Saint Joachim, 1516

After Baron Mór Lipót Herzog's widow died in 1940, the collection was passed to her three children. The three Herzog children  attempted to save their artworks from confiscation by hiding it in the cellar of one of the family’s factories. Nonetheless the Hungarian government and their Nazi collaborators discovered the hiding place, and an art historian carefully inventoried the art objects as they were taken away. Blogger Les cahiers d'Alain Truong says that the seized artworks were taken to Adolf Eichmann, who selected some of the best pieces of the collection, and shipped others to Germany. The rest was handed over by the Hungarian government to the Museum of Fine Arts for safekeeping.

One Herzog son (András) died during the war, but István and Erzsébet survived and there are heirs from all three branches. In fact András’ daughters, who fled to South America in 1944, are very much part of the litigation.

The family has the support of an American organisation called The Commission for Art Recovery, a body focused on ensuring that governments comply with the Washington Principles for Holocaust-era looted art. Fortunately the works have been assessed by the International Foundation for Art Research as being of museum-quality, comparable to the Frick Collection in New York and Wallace Collection in London.

Francisco Zurbarán, St Andrew, 1631

It is fascinating for me to hear that the Germany and Austria governments already returned artworks from the Herzog Collection to the heirs, without need for legal action. So far, the Hungarian government’s view remains that the case is a matter for the courts, not for individual galleries to negotiate.

The Hungarian government also wants to know why the family is only going after masterpieces in Hungarian galleries and not Herzog art works in other nations' galleries. Mainly it is because the 1947 Treaty of Peace between Hungary and the Allies was very specific -  ownership rights to the Herzog Collection in Hungary remained with the children and grandchildren (and if they wait much longer, with the great grandchildren).

But I suspect there was another factor. It was the Hungarians who most devastated Jewish family life in 1944 and 1945, sending two of the three Herzog children to camps, along with 500,000 other murdered Hungarian Jews. The Italians, Czechs, Romanians and Dutch, on the other hand, tried as best they could to protect their Jewish citizens.

Baron Herzog's study in Budapest, in 1934

It may surprise readers to find that the stunning gold and silver art from the original Herzog collection is being sold off at auction this month (May 2011) by Christie's New York. Who officially owned this gold and silver art, and who consigned the lots to the auction house? Who will receive the proceeds from the auctioned art objects?

Interested readers should find The Rape of Europa 2008 by Lynn H. Nicholas and The Monuments Men by Robert Edsel.

From Germany to Australia: photographic art of the 1950s and 60s

The author Robert Deane refers to the years from 1938 till after WW2 as a period of foreign influences in Australian photography. As a young man, Deane didn’t know of non-British or non-Australian photographers in Australia, and was rather delighted to find an entire generation of beautifully trained artists on our shores. Sadly the efforts of Australian security and suspicion of enemy aliens had largely denied one immigrant photographer, Margaret Michaelis, the opportunity to work to her potential during the war. And three of her artist contemporaries had to serve their time in the Australian Army, labouring: Wolfgang Sievers and Henry Talbot in Employment Companies and Helmut Newton as a truck driver.

As this blog has shown before, several of Australia’s leading artists and art critics of the period were either virulently anti-Semitic or derisive of the new art forms being introduced by émigré artists. Nonetheless these emigres, largely German speaking, did eventually get into their proper careers.

I have analysed the contribution of Wolfgang Sievers in this blog in the past, but readers should also consider Athol Shmith, Helmut Newton and Heinz Tichauer/Henry Talbot. After the war, for example, Henry Talbot revived his passion for photography and in 1956, he set up a joint studio specialising in fashion and advertising in Melbourne with fellow Dunera internee Helmut Newton. Their joint contribution to the history of post-war photography in Australia was displayed in an enormous book of photographs from the 1950s-60s.

The Paris End of Collins Street: Photography, Fashion and Glamour Exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (2006) showcased the work of some of Melbourne’s best-known photographers from the period up to the 1960s, including Athol Shmith, Jack Cato, Julian Smith, May and Mina Moore, Ruth Hollick, Helmut Newton, Henry Talbot and Wolfgang Sievers. All of them had established studios in the glamorous area at the top of Collins St, fondly called the Paris end.

Block Arcade Melbourne, 1960s, by Strizic

A few years ago, spouse and I were invited to visit the rural retreat of another very fine photographic artist, Mark Strizic. Mark gave a speech about what it was like being an artist after the war, who was doing good work and who was doing dodgy stuff, who was sleeping with whom etc. Then all the visitors moved into the studio where the tables were loaded up with photos, folders and documents, the massive papertrail of a long, creative life.

Strizic was born in Berlin in 1928, moved to Croatia during the war, and then finally moved to Melbourne in 1950. He became a labourer at Maribyrnong's Department of Works and Housing, then went to an office job at the railways. But even those dingy jobs were acceptable. I would imagine like many other Displaced Persons after the war, Strizic chose Melbourne to be as far away from the carnage of Europe as one could get, without falling off the globe. Fortunately Strizic had arrived in Australia more or less at the same time as these other art photographers, mainly German speaking as I noted. And in 1957 he felt he could take up photography as a career.

Arguably it was his new-comer status that allowed Strizic to photograph this booming city with fresh eyes. Boomerang Blog believed that as Strizic was the product of Europe, and viewed Australian life through post-war European eyes, his images did not celebrate our good fortune, but merely wondered at it. StevenClark also found the work of this immigrant photography to be incredibly interesting. He particularly loved the display “Melbourne: A City in Transition”.

Immigrants were very grateful for a secure, peaceful life and here was a grateful migrant with a good eye and a fine camera. I personally remember Melbourne in the early 1950s as a beautiful Victorian city, not yet destroyed by the developers’ bulldozers. Just as well Strizic captured those final years of Melbourne's architectural beauty and endless parkland. Young people today will have few other historical records of what Melbourne looked like, but for my generation it wasn’t history. It was our lives!

By the 1960s, the decision-makers wanted a smarter, taller, more modern Melbourne and “Whelan The Wrecker Was Here” signs started appearing on building sites (bomb sites?) everywhere. Even the very beautiful Paris End of Collins Street, Melbourne’s most prestigious address, was changing. And so were Melbourne's less than lovely back streets and inner-suburban slums.

In any case, Strizic had to move quickly. He photographed the destruction of buildings, before, during and after the wreckers were busy. Melbourne's architectural beauty, with its romantic European skyline of spires, cupolas and arches, was disappearing fast.

Modern domestic architecture, designed by Robin Boyd, by Strizic.

Strizic’s father had been an architect and Mark himself clearly had a lifelong interest in art and architecture. As well as the freelance photography of Melbourne’s architecture, Robin Boyd collaborated with Strizic on specific book called Living in Australia, in 1970. And in a special issue of the magazine Architecture in Australia commemorating Boyd in April 1973, Strizic did the photography.

Now a new book, by Emma Matthews, has emerged. Mark Strizic, Melbourne: Marvellous to Modern was published in 2009 by Thames & Hudson in association with the State Library of Victoria. Matthews said of Strizic that he was astounded by a general disregard for aesthetics in what he thought was such an opulent country, so his work became a kind of visual essay. Too late of course, but at least the book documents what was lost of the grand, the Victorian, the Marvellous Melbourne years.

Capers Restaurant, 1960s, by Strizic

Perhaps his most intimate photos were those of people going about their daily business in town. In the 1960s a shopping trip to the city was rather special, and restaurateurs created elegant, stylish environments where ladies could lunch. The restaurateur Ross Shelmerdine commissioned architect Robin Boyd to redesign Capers Restaurant in 1960. The renovation was finished in 1962 and included a courtyard cafe with umbrellas and plants.

In 2007, the State Library of Victoria acquired Strizic's entire archive of about 5000 negatives, colour transparencies and slides. Last year, the library received a collection of Strizic's photographs donated through the Australian Government's cultural gifts programme.

Emma Matthews' new book on Mark Strizic and Melbourne

Read: Foreign Influences in Australian Photography 1930-80 by Robert Deane (on line).

An exhibition called Melbourne – A City in Transition was held at Gallery 101 in Melbourne in 2009. Art Blart reviewed that exhibition and included some amazing Strizic photographs in the blog.

Berlin Philharmonic and the Third Reich

The Berlin Philharmonic, founded in 1882, established its reputation when guest conductors like Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and Edvard Grieg were invited to Berlin. For this post, I am particularly interested in its history as the so-called orchestral wing of Goebbels’ propaganda machine, from 1933 until the end of World War Two.

Misha Aster’s book, The Reich's Orchestra: The Berlin Philharmonic 1933-1945

Nothing was accidental in cultural decision-making. The National Socialists regarded art, and especially music, as an expression of Germany's long and glorious culture, capable of fostering great national pride and a powerful sense of national unity. Because they regarded themselves as guardians of their nation's cultural heritage, the Nazis opposed socialist and modernist trends in all the arts and viewed the culture of the Weimar period with reactionary disgust. Their response stemmed partly from conservative aesthetic taste and partly from their determination to use culture as a prop­a­ganda tool.

The Orel Foundation put it succinctly. Germany's leaders planned to mould their fellow citizens along approved cultural lines. Clearly they regarded the Berlin Philharmonic and its conductor as an essential component in promoting a positive image of German culture. Hermann Goering controlled the Prussian state theatres, including the Staatsoper. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, administered the Berlin Philharmonic almost by decree. Both ensembles depended on government funding, but loss of financing was not the worst punishment available for not toeing the party line!

The relationship between music-loving members of the Nazi party and the Berlin Philharmonic was secured. The orchestra served as formal representatives of the Nazi regime, providing the musical programme for the Nazis’ party congresses in Nuremberg and the Olympic Games, and giving regular concerts for other Nazi organisations. The musicians were the only able-bodied men in Germany to be fully exempt from military service - a huge privilege! But the cost was their loss artistic independence and their involvement in propping up an obscene regime.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, 10% of the orchestra were Jews or were Christian men married to Jewish wives. Those who were themselves Jewish were expelled from the orchestra and made their way, as quickly as possible, to Britain and France. Some of them later travelled on to the New World.

But musicians were not the only people affected. The great compositions of Salomon Sulzer, Jaques Offenbach, Erich Korngold, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schönberg and Felix Mendelssohn were banned throughout Germany and eventually Austria, even though some of these composers had only the remotest connection to Judaism.

The Jewish conductor Bruno Walter (1876–1962) left the Berlin orchestra for Austria in 1933. At the time of the 1938 Anschluss, Walter happened to be recording music in Paris and fortunately was offered French citizenship.

Furtwängler bows to a delighted Hitler and Goering, 1940

Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886–1954) was the German conductor and composer who was given the responsibility of leading the orchestra in 1922. People far more musically educated than myself totally supported his reputation as one of the leading conductors in Europe. The question remains, however, why did he remain in Nazi Germany, even though he was not a member of the Nazi party? And how did he react to the many Jewish members of his orchestra, from 1933 on?

There were plenty of stories that told of his distaste for the Third Reich. According to Fans in a Flashbulb, his championing of composers labelled by the Nazis as degenerate, like Schoenberg, and his protection of Jewish musicians were risky and impressive stances. The six Christian musicians who had Jewish wives managed to stay in the orchestra, largely due to Furtwangler’s refusal to obey Goebbels’ orders. Furtwangler even insisted that Jewish wives be allowed in the concerts to hear their husbands perform. Yet the fact that he stayed in Germany until 1944, conducting benefit concerts for the Nazis and receiving their protection and praise in return, led to the severe diminishing of his international reputation. At his denazification trial, Furtwängler made an impassioned but rather pathetic defence of his actions during the war.

Herbert von Karajan (1908–89) was in a different situation. Firstly in 1935, von Karajn actively applied for membership in the Nazi Party (something Furtwängler never did) and expected that his career would be given a significant boost. Secondly Karajan was 22 years younger than Furtwangler and didn’t make his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Berlin State Opera until 1938. Das Wunder Karajan had fewer moral choices to make since he established his career under Nazi patronage and didn’t become the Principal Conductor in Berlin until well after the war (1954–89).

Read Misha Aster’s book, The Reich's Orchestra: The Berlin Philharmonic 1933-1945, published by Souvenir Press in 2010. And read Entartete Musik blog.

An extraordinary war heroine: Irena Sendler

I have known a great deal about the German Oskar Schindler, ever since I became close friends with the daughter of a Schindler-Jew in 1965. And I knew even more about the Swede Raoul Wallenberg because he was the greatest hero of my parents’ generation. Even the American Varian Fry and the Englishman Nicholas Winton became familiar names amongst Jewish historians of the 20th century. But Irena Sendler?

Irena Sendler (1910 – 2008) was a Polish Catholic social worker who served in a Polish resistance organisation in German-occupied Warsaw during World War II. The daughter of socialist and medical parents, the young woman was already committed to saving human life wherever possible, but that seemed like an improbable dream in Nazi-controlled Poland.

Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1942

Zegota, the Council for Aid to Jews, was already organised by the Polish underground resistance movement. But Sendler, who was part of Zegota, had one big advantage. The Warsaw SocialWelfare Department’s canteens used to provide meals, financial aid and other services for orphans, the elderly and the destitute. By 1942 Irena could ensure that the canteens could also provide clothing, medicine and money for some Jews whom she registered under fictitious Christian names. And as an employee of the Welfare Department’s Epidemic Control Section, she had a special permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto to check for signs of typhus, something the Nazis feared would spread beyond the Ghetto. She and her colleagues wore nurses uniforms (see photo below).

Using these typhoid-focused inspection tours of sanitary conditions, Sendler and a team of other brave Catholic women smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and public transport, wrapping the toddlers up as parcels. She also used the old courthouse at the edge of the Warsaw Ghetto as one of the main routes for smuggling out children.

As soon as it was safe to do so, the rescuers found heroic Polish Catholic families who would take the Jewish children in, as if they were their own nieces and nephews. When they couldn’t find families, Sendler used the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage in Warsaw, or various Roman Catholic convents more distant from the capital city. It is estimated that the team saved 2,500 Jewish children by getting them safely out of the Warsaw Ghetto, against all odds.

The project only came to an end in 1943 because Sendler was captured by the Gestapo and sentenced to death. But she had taken precautions. She had carefully noted, in coded form, the children’s original names and their new identities. She buried the records for safe keeping, hoping she could one day reunite the children with their true parents. Alas not a single Jewish mother or father survived the war.

Sendler in Epidemic Control Section uniform, 1942

The Polish Genealogy Project has a wonderful photo of Irena in a Social Welfare Department car, during Warsaw’s 1st May Parade in 1948.

Again against all the odds, Sendler survived into old age. Quite rightly, she was recognised by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as one of the Righteous among the Nations in 1965. Sadly Poland wouldn't allow her to travel to Israel until 1983; then she could finally be acknowledged before the entire Jewish world. Clearly things have changed in Poland. Joedresch's blog noted that Irena Sendler was awarded Poland’s highest distinction, the Order of White Eagle in 2003, and she won the Jan Karski award for Valour and Courage in 2003. This very very old lady was officially designated a national hero in Poland and schools have been named in her honour.

Sendler was nominated for The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize; eventually it was awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore, which was as it should have been. But what a shame that Irena Sendler wasn’t nominated earlier. Like Winton in Britain, they waited until she was 100 years old before giving her the recognition she so richly deserved.

Two films have been made, celebrating her life. Irena Sendler, In the Name of Their Mothers 2003 was a documentary based on the last interviews given by Irena Sendler before she died, and interviews with some of the children she saved. And The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler 2010 is a dramatic recreation of the events of 1942 and 1943.

A book called The Other Schindler: Irena Sendler was written by Abhijit Thite and appeared in 2010. The publishers used an imaginative method to release the book; they held their launch next to the tree planted by Irena Sendler herself, along the Avenue of the Righteous in Jerusalem.

Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles, Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, Jerusalem