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From shortly after the Anschluss until the beginning of the Second World War, about twenty thousand Jewish refugees were admitted to Britain as live-in domestic servants in British homes. These women (and a few men) comprised about one-third of all Jewish refugees admitted into Britain in the 1930s, but unlike prominent scientists and intellectuals or the Kindertransportees, they have remained at the margins of British public memory of the 1930s. However, hundreds of these former refugee domestics have left testimonies and memoirs that narrate their experiences before, during, and after the war including their reception by Anglo-Jews and non-Jews, and their experiences of alienation, belonging, adjustment, and loss. This paper examines these testimonies to find commonalities in Jewish refugee domestics' pre-emigration and refugee lives and argues that the very terms under which they were allowed to come to the United Kingdom as well as the limits of testimony-giving have perpetuated their marginalization and absence from Jewish refugee and wartime social histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kindertransport has long been interpreted as a heroic response to the refugee crisis of the 1930s and has recently re-entered the British national conversation as a model to be applied to the current Middle East refugee crisis. Kinder case files are utilized to argue that an unambiguously celebratory narrative is a misreading of the Kindertransport, especially when considering the plight of parents who had to make agonizing choices to send their children away. The majority of Kinder were never reunited with their families after the war, and even those who were suffered various traumas related to their long estrangement. An examination of the fate of parents and siblings who were not welcomed to Britain suggests that it is a mistake to call for the reimplementation of the Kindertransport on any scale to respond to the wave of religious and political refugees currently crossing into Europe in large numbers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]