During the last week of January, this sculpture tucked against a wall inside Liverpool Street Station crowded my peripheral vision. When I stopped to take a photo, the couple of people leaning against the plinth, attending to their phone screens, looked a bit taken aback – they, too, hadn’t noticed it was there. This blinkered ambivalence echoes the oft-quoted line from writer, peace activist and Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” My attention was drawn to the modest Kindertransport memorial by a knot of co-incidences: the passing of Boris Johnson’s “Brexit Bill” [the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act] on 22 January 2020, Holocaust Memorial Day on the 27th of the month, and the “departure” of Britain from the EU on the 31st.
Für das Kind, by the scuptor Flor Kent, is part of a series of similarly named sculptures linking London to Hlavní Nídraží Station in Prague and Vienna’s Westbahnhof Station. The series both memorialises some 10,000 children who arrived in the UK around 1938-39 to escape Nazi persecution and also pays tribute to those private individuals and charities, acting without state funding, who lobbied the British government to initiate a visa waiver system for unaccompanied minors fleeing persecution and helped facilitate the transport. Many of these children disembarked at Liverpool Street Station in London. Among these was six-year-old Alf Dubs – one of the 669 children transported from Prague in March 1939. After 48 hours on the train, Alf was met by his father, Hubert, who had previously managed to flee Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. His mother, Frida, originally from Austria, was also able to escape shortly afterwards on 31 August, immediately before war broke out on 1 September. Hubert died not long after that, and Frida was left with nothing. Despite these tragic circumstances, the Dubs family was able to stay in the UK. Many others in similar circumstances were unable to turn their temporary entry permits into more permanent visas since Jewish refugees were not considered particularly desirable, displaying an attitude that glimmers of today’s “hostile environment” for immigration. (Indeed, Becky Taylor and Kate Ferguson, the authors of “Refugee History: The 1930s crisis and today” – a report by historians from the University of East Anglia for an All-Party Parliamentary Group – have commented that the word “undesirable” cropped up frequently in the archives related to wartime and post-war immigration, particularly in relation to policymakers keen to curb state support for refugees.)
Little Alf later became a Labour activist and MP, and was eventually given a peerage in 1994. In April 2016, at the height of the recent migrant crisis and at a moment when the Vote Leave campaigners were cynically stirring up xenophobic sentiment to secure the populist vote, Lord Dubs successfully petitioned an amendment to the Immigration Act, offering protection to 3,000 unaccompanied refugee children travelling to Britain from other parts of Europe. Despite his efforts, in the first two years of the scheme, just 220 children were able to benefit from the legislation (based on the Dublin Regulation) as it was promptly submerged by Teresa May’s “hostile environment” for immigration – a strategy for the continuance of state racism that has been exposed during the (ongoing) Windrush scandal.
While the Dubs amendment was written into May’s EU withdrawal bill, it was removed after the election of Boris Johnson’s government, blocking the legal right to family reunion for lone children, many stranded in refugee camps in Calais, Greece and elsewhere. On 22 January 2020, Boris Johnson’s “Brexit bill” passed through parliament after the government overturned five House of Lords amendments, including one tabled by Lord Dubs that aimed to restore the right of unaccompanied child refugees to be reunited with their families in the UK after Brexit. This amendment, which was rejected by Conservative MPs by an 88-vote majority, sought to reinstate a previous version of the Brexit bill that required the government to coordinate with the EU to ensure that unaccompanied minors could continue to join relatives in the UK. Yet Boris Johnson happily made political capital on Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January, despite his government’s thumping refusal to assist asylum for children currently adrift from their families and barely surviving in unimaginable conditions. Five days later, Britain had “left” the EU (although, despite rumours, that doesn’t mean Brexit “got done”).
On Friday 31 January 2020, a message appeared on the Tyrone GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) Facebook page:
Anocht is Uaigneach Tír Eoghain … Tonight Tyrone is Lonely.
The post’s author also cited the Irish saying Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine, which translates as something like: “It is in each other’s shadow that we flourish,” encompassing the wider implications of mutual support and shelter, hospitality, community and empathy. By contrast, Tyrone (NI) was “lonely” that dark night at the end of January in anticipation of its removal from the EU and its guarantee of a continuing mutual interdependence promised to this particular Ulster sports’ association. The poster continued: “It’s a bit perverse that this happens on St Brigid’s Eve, when the welcoming of strangers into the house is a central part of the St Brigid’s Cross-Making tradition.” St. Brigid’s Eve marks the last day of winter and the transition to spring on 1 February. The commemoration derives from Imbolc: one of the four festivals (Celtic quarter days) marking seasonal transitions in pre-Christian Ireland. St. Brigid is a Christian version (or appropriation) of an ancient nature goddess – the Celtic goddess Bríd. Traditionally, crosses woven out of rushes were (are) hung over doors or in rafters as a sign of welcome and an invocation to St. Brigid to watch over the forthcoming lambing and calving season. Crosses hung in stables invited the saint to bless animals and ameliorate birth – ‘Imbolc’ translates as “in the belly” and is associated with parturition. Lore suggests that Brigid also protected cows, their calves and also their milk. In some places, poorer neighbours were offered gifts of milk and butter. St. Brigid is also associated with generosity towards the poor and ill, and the welfare of children and young adults.
Faced with the impression that the veneration of Brigid offers of an ideal symbiosis between communities and natural resources based on empathy and mutual sustenance, it seems little wonder that the good people of the Tyrone GAA felt somewhat bleak over the imminent reconstitution of the border with their neighbours at the end of their lane in Donegal. A few days later, former European Council president Donald Tusk, speaking to Andrew Marr (Andrew Marr Show, BBC, 2 February 2020) pointedly explained:
“Brexit is not about frictionless trade but about friction-more trade […] Brexit is about borders […] the synonym of Brexit is the re-establishment of borders.”
Still, the return of the light and new hope, signified by Brigid, may beckon renewed calls for the promise (or risk, some might say) of the reunification of Ireland, which was underscored a week or so after St. Brigid’s Day when Sinn Féin won 37 seats in the Irish General Election. In that battle, it was housing and welfare – “home” even more than “homeland” – that seemed to have been the key issues. Maybe this is what Bríd/Brigid had in mind for 2020.
Elsewhere:
