I was talking to my friend Henry Wuga the other day. We covered this and that: the intense summer scent of sweet peas, and his grandson’s recent wedding at Wells Cathedral, which Henry attended with the help of his daughters. Quite a feat considering he lives 400 miles away and is 98 years old. We talked about the simple joy of being with loved ones after the past two desolate years. Years in which his wife, my mum, and so many died. And Henry told me he finally got to hold the newest baby in the family; how intently the boy looked at him with his “big black eyes” as they read a book together. “He turned the pages,” Henry said. “What joy to be a great-grandpa.”
We also talked about the government’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. Time is running out and the first flight is scheduled to take off in less than a week. On 14 June, a group of people from countries potentially including Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran, Eritrea, and Iraq will be flown 4,500 miles from these islands to which they fled in hope of just treatment. How wrong they were. There have been reports of hunger strikes in detention centres and some of the 100 or so men selected for ejection say they are suicidal. Now at this grim 11th hour we discover children may be among them. “To be an unaccompanied child is difficult at the best of times,” Henry said to me. “But to send you alone to a country where you don’t speak the language, to which you have no connection whatsoever, and where you may be in danger all over again … well, it is inconceivable to me.”
Henry would know. He fled Nuremberg on a Kindertransport in May 1939, arriving here as an unaccompanied child refugee 12 years before the formation of the 1951 UN refugee convention. Rules that, 71 years later, the government’s Rwanda policy flouts so remorselessly. If Henry was in the same situation now, would he make it here? And if he did, would he be granted indefinite leave to remain? Or would he be wrongly assessed by the Home Office and bound for Rwanda? “May I mention,” Henry said, “that in the 1930s there was a plan conceived by the Nazis to send Jewish refugees to Madagascar. So there you are. It is horrendous. It is simply not the right thing to do.”
The Kindertransport saved the lives of almost 10,000 predominantly Jewish children in the nine months leading up to the second world war. It was a great, flawed humanitarian gesture, initiated not by the British government but by individuals and organisations (religious and non-denominational) who joined forces after the pogrom the Nazis called Kristallnacht. It was the Jewish community who pledged to fund it so the children would not become a so-called burden on the state. All the government had to do was open the door and stand aside. Even so, that’s more than we can hope from a UK home secretary hellbent on deflecting attention from people’s fundamental right to seek asylum with a pledge to “break the evil people-smugglers’ business model”.
This century the Kindertransport has come to represent, for some, the acceptable – and let’s just say it: white, European – face of seeking asylum. The kind for which we can endlessly pat ourselves on the back. A distraction from our current abysmal record on admitting unaccompanied child refugees. Not unlike the kind of migrants that we invite to Buckingham Palace for a marmalade sandwich with the Queen, even as we do our damnedest to offshore real-life – and let’s just say it: brown and black – refugees. History is not always progress and the hastily organised rescue effort that saved Henry Wuga’s life 83 years ago would not happen today.
Henry has never forgotten the moment when his mother sat him down in their apartment in the heart of Nuremberg’s old town and told him: “You are going on a train to Glasgow.” At first Henry didn’t get it. He had relatives in France, so he asked if he could go via Paris and spend a week with his cousin before continuing on to Scotland. I remember that when Henry first told me this he laughed and shook his head. “A bit silly, I know,” he said, “but I was a child.”
Homelands: The History of a Friendship by Chitra Ramaswamy is out now, published by Canongate
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