Britain says "Farewell" old philosopher, Roger Scruton. Dance no more.

Roger, who has died at the age of 75. was a philosopher who specialised in aesthetics and had written more than 50 books and still liked to dance, but did confess, four years ago : “At my age, it rather depends on my knees. If there’s a local reeling party, I might go to that.”

In his 'Confessions of a Heretic,' a collection of essays  published in 2016, Roger took issue with the dancing witnessed in the nation’s clubs and pubs, in which participants “jerk on to the floor in obedience to the puppet master at the desk”.
In his essay, 'Dancing Properly', he commented that dancers today 'are dancing at each other. The difference between ‘at’ and ‘with’ is one of the deepest psychological differences we know. It is exemplified in all our encounters with other people – notably in conversation and in sexual gambits … The decay of manners that we have seen in recent times is to a large extent a result of the loss of withness and the rise of atness in its stead. Rudeness, obscenity, the ‘in your face’ manners of the new TV presenter – all these are ways of being ‘at’ other people. Courtesy, manners, negotiation and deference are, by contrast, ways of being with.'
It is hard to fault this analysis and post Second World War baby boomers in Britain, born either before, or just after the middle of the last century, would recognise the 'withness' society into which they were born, diminished over the years, to the extent they find themselves at odds with young people across the whole spectrum of social interchange in 'atness' Britain.


Although he confessed that he was “no good at it”, Roger still loved dancing and he looked back nostalgically to the tactile dances of his youth in the early 1960s where "physical contact was permitted in a way that it wasn’t in everyday life. The electricity of physical contact has gone therefore from young people’s lives. For us ageds, I can remember the tingle in your fingertips when you touched a girl’s body anywhere. That’s part of it, but also that touching as a courtesy has gone." It had been replaced by the solitary nature of much modern dancing.

A little conservative in his dancing tastes : "I love Viennese waltzes and polkas, and especially cèilidhs and old-fashioned formation dancing,” Roger also admitted that :“I like rock’n’roll too." In the early days of rock, he claims, dance steps required a partner, and this allowed couples to “touch, swing around each other, move together in an attempt to recapture withness”.
http://www.britishpathe.com/video/this-is-real-rock-nroll/query/Oak

Roger believed a good example of music to dance “properly” to, would be Elvis Presley’s 'Heartbreak Hotel', in which the rhythm is generated by the melodic line and the voice: “There is no violent drumming, no amplified bass, none of the devices which – I am tempted to say – substitute for rhythm in so much contemporary pop. This withness is felt by the listener as an urge to dance, an urge to look around for the person whose hand could be taken and who could be led on to the floor.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUpd6D6IdTs

Roger also believed that this was so 'with the pop music in the days immediately following rock ’n’ roll – music like that of the Beatles, Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead and a hundred others, which is now widely listened to, but rarely danced to, precisely because it contains a memory of real dancing. Its very melodiousness ensures that it will be banished from the disk jockey’s computer table, and replaced by a grotesque caricature of music in which rhythm is replaced by beat and melody by senseless repetition.'

P.S.

The philosophical arguments underpinning Roger's thesis about dancing can be found in his earlier essay :

The Lost Love of Dancing

https://www.roger-scruton.com/about/music/understanding-music/173-the-lost-love-of-dancing

Remainer Britain, must remember it is half the country, fight on with Will Hutton and Winston Churchill and light the coming darkness on January 31st with its candle power

In his column in the Observer today Will, who is 70 this year, began by reminding us that :

'In less than three weeks, Britain leaves the EU. Those vast marches, the crowded public meetings, the indefatigable Remain campaigners, the great speeches, the parliamentary wheeler-dealing and principled resignations were all for nothing. The “get Brexit done” Tories, exploiting the least electable Labour leader ever, won the election and were handed an 80-seat majority. The die is cast.'

He also reminded us that : 'Remain Britain – half the population – has no champion.' However, he said that : 'Brexit must be opposed in every dimension. This is a Conservative project. The Tories must be its sole sponsor and live with the consequences. I think it will break them.'

He ended by suggesting that :
'So at 11pm on 31 January, dismiss Johnson’s extravagant claims for what lies ahead and the faux celebrations. Light a candle in a window, at your door, in your garden; find friends to do it together. We stand for a European Britain. We will be back.'

"You cannot tell from appearances how things will go. Sometimes imagination makes things out far worse than they are; yet without imagination not much can be done. Those people who are imaginative see many more dangers than perhaps exist; certainly many more than will happen; but then they must also pray to be given that extra courage to carry this far-reaching imagination. But for everyone, surely, what we have gone through in this period - 
this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."

Winston Churchill

1941

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywDZKfZ-iZA

Britain says "Farewell" old Prince of Wild Water Swimmers, Charles Sprawson.

Page views : 562

Charles Sprawson, who retained the air of a charming, handsome patrician, into his later years and has died at the age of 78, was born during the Second World War in the summer 1941 in Karachi, the capital of the Pakistani province of Sindh in British controlled India. He was the son of Ann and Eric, a RAF captain, stationed in India and he himself born there, since his father, Major-General Sir Cuthbert Sprawson, had served as an Honorary Surgeon to the Viceroy and Director of the Indian Medical Service.

In 1942 the family transferred to Britain where Eric joined Bomber Command as a Squadron leader and flew many missions over Germany and France before being shot down and bailing out over Caen and had walked through the town twice when it was full of Germans, before being picked up by D-Day forces. After being demobbed at the end of the War Eric took the family back to India where he served as Headmaster of Rajkumar College, Raipur.

Sport played a big part in the Sprawson family. Charles' mother had been an England Squash International player, while his father had played for Rugby against Marlborough at Lord’s in 1928.
Charles himself now learnt to swim in the College pool and also recalled :
"I used to swim in Indian rivers. Dark green, opaque, muddy rivers. I used to gaze down at these rivers, when we went by train over bridges. I always longed to be in the river below." https://vimeo.com/260658367#t=5m08s

"Then father went to Benghazi on the North coast of Africa. Not far away was the old Greek city of Cyrene which lay beneath the waves and every Christmas we'd travel there and I'd swim down and almost walk among the old colonnades and porticos and it was my experiences there that made me somehow link swimming with the ancient classical world." https://vimeo.com/260658367#t=5m42s

With the coming of India's independence in 1947, Eric's headmastership came to an end and the family again returned to Britain where Eric took up a post at the boys' public school, Repton, before returning, yet again, to the Sub-Continent and newly independent Pakistan, to become the first headmaster of Sargodha, a feeder school for the Pakistan Air Force.

Charles now stayed in London with his grandmother in Holland Park before being packed off as a boarder at Tormore Preparatory School, near Deal in Kent, founded in 1907 as a school 'for young gentlemen'. He captained his school team in cricket, rugger and football and absorbed a classical education under the tuition of Myles Raven, brother of the novelist Simon Raven and was inspired by Gilbert Highet's 'Poets in a Landscape' with its visions of Arcadia.

When he was ten in 1951, Charles won a scholarship to Tonbridge Independent Boys' School, where he was, once again, a boarder and added squash and tennis to his sporting prowess and in 1959, he took up his place at Trinity College, Dublin, to read Classics. As a student he allowed himself plenty of time to enjoy travel and adventure, play squash for Ireland and take advantage of his dashing good looks to enjoy the company of the opposite sex. The writer Jeremy Lewis, a close friend at Trinity, recalled that Charles had a penchant for fixing companions with his penetrating blue eyes while at the same time interrogating them about their sexual exploits.

Having graduated in 1962 he stayed on for a further year to study for his Masters degree and then took himself of to a London which was just about to start 'swinging' and got himself a job as an attendant at a swimming baths in Paddington. His marriage to Anne Fenton in 1966 was followed by him answering a Latin advertisement in 'The Times' for a post as a lecturer in 'classical culture' at a University in Rijad, Saudi Arabia.

Now living in the Gulf with Anne and still in his twenties, he started collecting references to swimming in literature, perhaps in reaction to living in an arid environment and climate of extreme heat. On one occasion he demonstrated both his ability in diving and cool head, when a local stuntman was preparing to execute a death-defying circus feat of diving off a 30 metre cliff into a waterhole in front of awestruck spectators. While the stuntman was being swathed in protective bandages before the jump, Charles stepped forward in his swimming trunks and confidently executed the dive in front of the crowd. On another occasion he was arrested by a dessert patrol after being caught among the sand dunes dancing alone to the music of 'La Bamba' played on a portable gramaphone.

Back in Britain, in 1970, at the age of 29, he took up a job as the Director at 'Frost & Reed', an art gallery in Bristol and then in 1980 set himself self-employed itinerant art dealer, specialising in Victoriana. On visits to the Channel Island of Jersey, his car loaded with oil paintings, he stayed at the Prince of Wales hotel in Greve de Lecq located on the beach where he could swim before breakfast. Along with books, swimming was and remained at the heart of his life.

He had, for instance, spent much of his time on his trips to America, swimming up and down legendary Hollywood pools into which he had somehow insinuated himself. He was obsessed with swimming wherever Tennessee Williams swam, had read his 1946 short story, ‘Desire and the Black Masseur’, tracked down the baths of the New Orleans Athletic Club, where Williams swam and then met a black masseur and did the same, albeit with another masseur.
https://vimeo.com/260658367#t=42m31s

Charles' literary career began when he fell in with Alan Moss who persuaded him to write an article on the great German tennis player, Gottfried van Cramm, whose involvement in a homosexual scandal caused his persecution by the Nazis.

His old friend Jeremy Lewis painted a picture of him in these years : 'Irrespective of the weather or the occasion, he would be dressed in an open-neck shirt, a dark blue, sleeveless pullover, thick-ribbed corduroy trousers and gym shoes. An avid attender of literary parties, whether invited or not, he refused to adapt his clothing for even the grandest occasion.' He went on : 'A friend of Petra and mine, Charles had for years, swam silently in and out of our lives like a disconcerting, blue-eyed shark. A sportsman, a classicist and an authority on low life in Hamburg, Paris and Amsterdam.'

In emulation of Byron, while on holiday in Turkey with Anne and their 3 daughters, he swam the the Hellespont, the four-mile strait that connects Europe to Asia. On his first attempt “Within seconds of entering the water I was enveloped in waves and dragged sideways, but managed to cling to some rocks, from where I groped my way back to the shore, to the vast amusement of the passengers lining the decks of the departing ferry.”

He successfully completed the swim accompanied by one of his daughters, who, being young and blonde, received a little medal and certificate from the Turkish tug-boat captain supervising the crossing, while Charles got nothing. She declined, on another occasion, however, to accompany him across the estuary of the Tagus in Lisbon, also swum by Byron. This time he was picked up by the naval police as a suspected drugs smuggler.

It was after he had written another piece for the London Magazine in which he had interwoven unusual swimming lore about Byron, Rupert Brooke and Leni Riefenstahl with his own experiences that Jonathan Cape made the suggestion that he should write a full length book on the subject. To this purpose he met Jeremy and Alan Moss, who both referred to him as 'The Swimmer', in Rome with the aim to travel around for a few weeks in search of sacred pools and glowing Claudian scenes to provide research for a book about literature and swimming.

For inspiration, Charles had brought his copy of Highet's 'Poets in a Landscape' which set the lives and loves of 6 Roman poets against the idyllic pastoral scenes in which they grew up. Jeremy observed that 'Charles felt it his duty to immerse himself in any water with literary and mythological associations.' Charles systematically visited the Egarian Spring, where they found the Roman basin still intact, but the spring itself littered with rubbish and brightly coloured rags. At Horace's villa, Charles went in search of the Bandusian Spring and 'returned two hour later with his trousers plastered in mud to his thighs.' The waterfalls of the Villa Gregoriana smelt of sewage  and The waterfalls of the Villa Gregoriana had been turned off and Clitumnus, the most sacred spring, had a motorway running along one side.

In his book, 'Haunts of the Black Masseur : The Swimmer as Hero', published by Pantheon Books in New York in 1992 he wrote : 'I became passionate about swimming when a child in India and North Africa. In the course of writing my book I became aware that many others were similarly affected by swimming, most of them much more so than I. So I began to identify them from their characters and writings. They were usually misfits, idealists for whom water was a refuge from everyday life and swimming was a mystic, spiritual experience, an attempt in some cases to recover contact with the classical past, to get in touch again with a pagan existence. I tried to swim where they swam, particularly Byron.'  https://vimeo.com/260658367#t=13m50s

It was, and still is, a masterful work of cultural history in which Charles explored the meaning that different cultures have attached to water from classical Greece and Imperial Rome to nineteenth-century England and Germany and the States and Japan in the twentieth century. Literary heroes who were wild swimmers were brought to life : Byron leaping dramatically into the surf at Shelley’s beach funeral; Edgar Allen Poe’s lone and mysterious river-swims; Rupert Brooke swimming naked with Virginia Woolf; Hart Crane swallow-diving to his death in the Bay of Mexico.

It ranged across the windswept beaches of English seaside towns, Niagara Falls, the First World War landings at Gallipoli. It was informed by the literature of Swinburne, Goethe, Scott Fitzgerald and Yukio Mishima and the films of Reifenstahl and Vigo an and delved in and out of Olympic history.

The book received critical acclaim : JG Ballard called it 'an exhilarating plunge into some of the deepest pools inside our heads' and Iris Murdoch said ‘This splendid and wholly original book is as zestful as a plunge in champagne' and the Guardian 'A luminously romantic history of swimming.’ But it was 'The New Yorker' which identified that 'it is the submarine presence of Sprawson’s own personality which creates the book’s strangely mesmeric quality.'

As is so often the case, Charles was fêted and then forgotten.

Then in 2004, when Charles was 65, Charles collaborated with Canadian filmmaker Jeff McKay to produce an hour long documentary which brought his classic book to life. The viewer was invited to accompany Charles as he swam the Hellespont, the Tiber, the English Channel and Antarctica. Jeff commented : "He had to swim the Tiber. Once it was crystal clear, but the cloaca maxima sewer has a lot to answer for – by the time Sprawson arrived, it was filthy. So that when he started to strip off, then dived in, even the boatmen paused mid oar and yelled a warning. On he went, his head bobbing up in the river amid a flotilla of used condoms. He was very sick afterwards, but he swam the Tiber." https://vimeo.com/260658367#t=37m54s

Charles used the film to extol the beauty of the swallow dive : "The prolonged symmetry of the dive. The arms flung out like the spread wings of a bird or some mythological figure. I think the swallow is diving in its purest form. It's so superior, in my view, to the flicks and twists of modern diving, which are too fleeting and quick for the eye to follow." https://vimeo.com/260658367#t=46m31s

Charles was struck by personal misfortune in the years that followed : in 2009, his wife Anne was killed in a car crash in Crete; Charles himself was treated for cancer of the throat. One bright spot was that he saw 'Haunts' receive a new lease of life when it was reissued by Vintage in 2013 with a new introduction from the writer Amy Liptrot. He worked on a second book, 'Among Jagged Tears' about Slovenian endurance swimmer,Martin Strel, but it in remained in draft form and in 2017 he said “I write slowly so my books take a long time…Of course, then I got ill." His illness was vascular dementia.

Senior Editor at Vintage Classics Nick Skidmore, who republished Haunts in 2018 said that Charles was "a true adventurer-author" and was "Exquisitely erudite, intrepid and charmingly self-assured - he seemed to have gracefully swallow-dived into the antiquity he so brilliantly brought to life on the page. His one and only book, the Haunts of the Black Masseur, radically altered what was possible with non-fiction inquiry, and paved the way for the recent revival in writing about swimming, not to mention nature writing. Haunts of the Black Masseur will endure as a modern classic – a monument to a writer whose passionate, searching spirit can never be exhausted."

In 2019 BBC Radio 4 made a poignant documentary about Charles' life in a nursing home entitled 'Searching for swimming pools' which was described as a 'portrait of lifelong obsession, the debilitating effects of dementia and the transformative power of swimming'. Producer Paul Smith, introduced Charles as he was then : searching for his words and wandering the corridors looking for swimming pools, opening doors in the hope of finding shimmering water to plunge into and Charles as he once was, fluent in language, a writer passionate about his love of swimming. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00024pw

On hearing the news of his death his friend and fellow author Alex Preston, called him “a majestic writer, a brilliant mind, a great friend”, and 'Haunts of the Black Masseur' “the best book about swimming, perhaps the best book about any sport, ever written. hope that wherever Charles is now, he is doing what made him happiest – swimming.”

"The swimmer is a romantic figure who throws himself naked into something so mysterious to me - water. Swimming over great depth, naked, you seem vulnerable. It's the mixture of the unknown, danger, darkness and the envelopment by this black masseur."

Is Britain still the country which once gave old men like Arek Hersh and other boy refugees called 'The Windermere Children', a home in 1945 ?

Page views : 566

 Arek is one of the five old men in the photo below. Like them he has one thing in common : they were all, once, boy refugees who came to Britain 75 years ago at the end of the Second World War. All of them had survived up to 6 years in labour and concentration camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe. All of them had witnessed scenes and experienced hardships which are impossible to imagine. All of them were given a new home and a fresh start in that generous and loving Britain we seem to have lost. Now, television screen writer Simon Block has scripted their story in the BBC's 'The Windermere Children' which will be broadcast on later this month.

From left to right : in the programme, refugee :

Chaim ‘Harry’ Olmer is played by Kacper Swietek
Arek Hersh is played by Tomasz Studzinski

Pascal Fischer is played by Ben Helfgott

Marek Wroblewski is played by Sam Laskier

Kuba Sprenger is played by Ike Alterman

Describing the challenge he faced as a writer, Simon said : “Your first instinct is to try to think your way into their heads, but you realise that’s impossible. I can’t imagine what Arek, who was in four different concentration and labour camps including Auschwitz, went through. And not just for a day, but for years. You can’t recreate that trauma; all you can do is reflect how their behaviour may have manifested some of that while they were at Windermere.”

Simon, who also wrote the 2015 BBC drama 'The Eichmann Show' about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, interviewed a dozen Windermere survivors and found that most of them were “very eager to get on with life. They couldn’t bury what happened to them completely because it would come back in their sleep, in their subconscious, but they wanted families and all the rest of that. It was when they retired and they had more time to reflect that it all came barrelling back to them.”

“The Windermere children are the most patriotic people I’ve ever come across. They’re so grateful for the chance they got to start their lives again in the UK, and they want to express that in many ways, by being successful here and paying taxes and raising their families here. Hopefully viewers will think, ‘Well, it’s not impossible to bring people here and help them rather than be scared of those who might be fleeing from terrible experiences.’ We can bring them in, help them and then that’s repaid many times over.”

When Simon was working on the script the anti-child refugee measure written into the Government's Brexit legislation had yet to be passed through Parliament when, in December last year, Members of Parliament voted to remove 'the Government’s existing obligations (under section 17 of the European Union Withdrawal Act) with regard to unaccompanied children seeking asylum in the EU who have family members in the UK.' The clause was included in the original Withdrawal Agreement Bill after a campaign led by Lord Dubs, 87, who fled Nazi Germany via Kindertransport when he was six years old.

However, Simon reflects : “Windermere is a story of refugees and child refugees and I thought it was very pertinent considering what was going on at the time [in Calais] when we started working on it.”

* * * * * * * 

Arek Herszlikowicz, who is 91, has spent 75 of those years in Britain. Born in 1928 in Sieradz, a garrison town for the Polish Army in West Poland, he spent his first ten years with his Jewish family, his parents, brother and three sisters, supported by his father's income as a bootmaker, much in demand for making army officers’ footwear.

On 1 September 1939 the Germany army attacked Poland. Arek’s family had to leave their home town and stay with relatives in Łódz, a big industrial city similar to Manchester. The 65-km  journey took them three days on foot. Arek remembers seeing the German motorbikes, tanks and planes that far outclassed anything the Polish army had to fight with. He also remembers seeing German soldiers laughing and joking while they humiliated Jewish men by cutting their beards off.

In 1940 the Jews of Łódz had to start wearing the star of David on their outer clothing and soon were forced into a ghetto, where food was rationed and people lived in very cramped conditions. Towards 1941 the authorities came to take Arek’s father to a work camp, but his father and brother both managed to slip away.

Eleven year old Arek was less lucky and was arrested and transported to a labour camp near Poznan to lay railway lines and sleepers for the Poznan-Warsaw Railway, which would speed up the German attack on the Soviet Union. One of his responsibilities was to clean the room of the Camp Commandant, who every day would leave Arek a hunk of bread on his desk and he believes that saved his life and has said :  “We started with 2,500 men. Within 18 months, there were only 11 of us left alive. And I was one of them. Very, very lucky.”

In 1942 Arek was sent back to the Łódz ghetto.  Alone, and without his family, Arek was accepted into the orphanage where he worked in the textile mill and was able to find food.  He stayed there for two years and then in 1944 at the age of 16, was sent to the Death Camp in Auschwitz. On arrival with a transport of children, he lied to the SS officer and told him that that he was 17 years old and a locksmith. This saved his life : “So that’s what I said, and they told me to go to the right side and 180 children all went to the wrong side. And they were murdered.”

He was given a striped suit to wear and was tattooed with the number B7608.  From that day onward Arek lost his name and was only referred to by his number.

Arek was put into a block with political prisoners of different nationalities and had to work as an agricultural labourer for the SS, ploughing fields and fertilising them with ashes from the crematorium. He remembers feeling the bones as he spread the ashes on the ground. He later worked in the fishing commando which involved catching fish from the River Vistula to be transported to Germany for food.

His greatest challenge came early in 1945, when he was evacuated, first on foot, in the bitter cold and in deep snow, to the Buchenwald camp in Germany. Wearing only his thin, striped pyjama, no hat and wooden clogs, he marched for three days with the other prisoners, sleeping at night on the ground. Those who faltered were executed on the spot with a bullet in the back of the head and dumped on the roadside. Arek simply said : "I saw so many bodies." He then went on  "the train of damnation" to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. As he has said : "A whole month on open wagons without food. We ate grass. I ate the leather on my left shoe to keep going. I didn’t swallow but I chewed it.”

He was still only 16 and after arrival in Theresienstadt, expected to be killed at any moment. Then, when the camp was liberated by the Russian Army on 8 May, 1945 he was moved to Prague. On arrival he was selected for the 'Committee for the Care of Children from Concentration Camps', which was set up by the British philanthropist Leonard Montefiore. A leading figure in the Anglo-Jewish Association he had persuaded the British Government to accept 1,000 displaced children aged 8 to 16 and the Home Office had agreed on condition that the funds were found by the Jewish community.

Arek was one of the first intake of a pioneering rehabilitation scheme, in which 650 boys and 80 girls from labour and concentration camps in eastern Europe were transported to the Lake District to find new families and start afresh. He was photographed in Prague in August 1945 before being flown to Britain before on one of a squadron of 10 converted Stirling bombers. The children were organised in groups of 30 to each aeroplane, with 15 sitting on each side on the floor. Arek recounted : “They cut us some bread. We thought it was cake. They gave us each a piece and it was great.” 

After landing at RAF Crosby-on-Eden, near Carlisle, they were driven then driven to the Calgarth Estate in the village of Troutbeck Bridge. A mile from Windermere, it consisted of wartime housing which had been used for workers from the Short Sunderland Aeroplane Factory. The children slept in dormitories with single rooms for older boys, like Arek. After 6 years in the camps, his needs were modest and he recalled :  “Each one had a bed, a chest of drawers. There was everything you needed.”

The immediate priorities for the children were to get clothing and find out about their families. The Red Cross supplied clothes, but they were odd shapes and sizes, so many children walked around in their underwear for a few days until donations of garments from local families started arriving. Arek found out his mother had been gassed and thrown into a mass grave at the Chelmno extermination camp. Of his immediate family, only his older sister Mania had survived, having escaped to the Soviet Union. His father, brother and two other sisters were gone. Like the majority of the children, he was alone.

Mixed with tragic news there were moments of childhood, regained : "Some kids brought us bicycles and they said, ‘Go on, have a ride!’ We didn’t understand what they were saying, but they gave us a bicycle. So we went on the main road, and we were cycling on the right-hand side, so they tooted the horn like mad, shouting from the cars. We didn’t know what they were shouting at us. We couldn’t speak one word of English! But we caught on quite quickly, and we went to the cinemas, sixpence per seat, and it was very nice and we made our own life and things were OK.”

In an age where post-traumatic stress is recognised and alleviated, it seems incredible that at the Calgarth estate, the children received no counselling and instead, were encouraged to swim in the lake, play football, and given basic English lessons. Arek recalled :  “There were three or four boys I had been with in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. We were always together. So I could talk to them, because they had a similar story to mine, but not to anybody else. We just had to suffer. Terrible. I had about 30 years of nightmares. Middle of the night, I used to get a nightmare and so on.”

The Calgarth Estate Programme was designed to be a temporary scheme, running for four months, after which, the younger children would be placed in the care of foster families, and the older ones would live in hostels and prepare for work. Arek moved first to Liverpool with his friends and then Manchester where he trained as an electrician. Eventually, living in Leeds after marrying Jean, he bought and let property, mainly to students. He shortened his name from Herszlikowicz to Hersh in the 1950s because, not unsurprisingly, he was fed up with having to spell it out.

Now, long into his retirement, Arek is involved in education, at schools and universities and with the charity 'March of the Living', which each year organises a walk between the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps. In 2009, he was awarded an MBE. “When I first went back to Auschwitz, it was awful for me. I couldn’t get through the gate. But after three attempts I got through and since then I’ve been going there with children and young people to show them the place. I don’t want people to think that it just happened many moons ago, and people forgot about it. I talk to everybody, so young people know that what actually happened to me can happen to anybody. That’s the main reason I do it.”

The Windermere programme is not as well known as the Kindertransport initiative, which moved nearly 10,000 mostly Jewish children from Nazi-occupied territories to Britain between 1938 and 1939. At that time, some British politicians, including former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, argued that it was a humanitarian duty. “I have to ask you to come to the aid of the victims, not of any catastrophe in the natural world, not of an earthquake, but of an explosion of man’s inhumanity to man.”

For many years Arek spoke to no one about his Holocaust experience. Neither to his three daughters, nor to Jean, his second wife, whom he married in the early 1970s. Eventually, around 1995, Arek decided to write it all down. The words came slowly : “Two lines a day but I wrote it, and then after that I could speak, I could talk about it.” After he has completed his book, 'A Detail of History', in 1998, he finally began to heal and the nightmares subsided : “It’s left me now. After I wrote the book actually, it left me then.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0qRRpxouhI

Update : January 9th : 

The House of Commons has rejected proposals to keep protections for child refugees in the redrafted EU withdrawal agreement bill, triggering dismay from campaigners and Alf Dubs said it was a “very depressing” development. It is very disappointing that the first real act of the new Boris Johnson government is to kick these children in the teeth. It is a betrayal of Britain’s humanitarian tradition and will leave children who are very vulnerable existing in danger in northern France and in the Greek islands.” 

MPs voted 348 to 252 against the amendment, which had previously been accepted by Theresa May’s government and which would have guaranteed the right of unaccompanied child refugees to be reunited with family members living in the Britain after Brexit.

Update : January 23rd :

Brexit Britain is no country for a bitterly disappointed old lord called Alf Dubs
https://britainisnocountryforoldmen.blogspot.com/2020/01/britain-is-no-country-for-bitterly.html

Brexit Britain confirmed as a country, hard-faced, unloving and uncharitable.