Masked males in black shirts ‘echo the Nineteen Thirties’ warns Lord who escaped Nazis
At the Czech embassy in London, well-wishers have gathered to celebrate one of the former Czechoslovakia’s most famous sons.
“Our loss,” Václav Bartuška, the Czech ambassador says, “was Britain’s gain”. It is almost nine decades since the British peer Lord Alf Dubs escaped the Nazis in 1939 as a six-year-old Czech boy on the Kindertransport trains arranged by British stockbroker Nicholas Winton.
Alf’s extraordinary life story – told in a new autobiography ‘The Boy with the Knapsack’, published this week – should now be a history lesson. But the day we meet, the Far Right Alternative for Germany (AfD) have just caused a political earthquake by winning a sweeping victory in Saxony-Anhalt.
In the UK, men dressed in paramilitary-style black clothes and balaclavas have gathered in Dover and Portsmouth to protest against the RNLI bringing people in small boats to safety. And a woman appeared to have been assaulted for protesting at Reform Party Conference.
“Things feel worse than they have been for a long time,” Alf says quietly. “There are echoes of 1930s Europe, including with anti-semitism. I think the AfD’s victory is very depressing. I have always admired the way Germany has worked so hard to come to terms with its past. So, to see these horrible election results for a party hostile to everything modern Germany believes in is terrible. In the UK, seeing people show such hostility to people who have come here in a bid for safety, is very sad. I thought that it was against the law for masked men to parade in the streets. It feels ominous.”
Referring to Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists from 1932 to 1940, whose supporters wore distinctive black military-style shirts, he added: “The black-coated thugs are a bit reminiscent of Oswald Moseley’s Black Shirts. How influenced they are by history I do not know, but the hostile, nasty way they are behaving, is like fascism was. This was organised, with people whipping it up. Politicians’ language can inflame the situation.”
Where others fear to tread, Lord Dubs is – like many survivors – fearless. When Zia Yusuf posted on X – “Do you understand what’s happening?”, referencing Somali-born Sagal Abdi Wali standing for Labour in the Holborn by-election, a tweet widely condemned as a racist dog-whistle – Alf was quick to reply. “I understand exactly what’s happening,” he posted. “I’ve seen it before.”
In June 1939, six-year-old Alf was taken to the station in Prague wearing a luggage tag with his name written on it, and carrying a packet of sandwiches and a bag of clothes. Nazi soldiers with swastika armbands were swarming all over the concourse, as he watched his mother get smaller on the platform.
“My memory of the Kindertransport was that it was all very bewildering for a young boy,” he says now aged 93, at his narrow office at the House of Lords. “I remember saying goodbye to my mum, but I don’t know what I felt. There were German soldiers everywhere which was visually quite a powerful thing, the army on the streets.
“The first I knew of the Nazis was that my father, who was Jewish, disappeared. He told his cousins that he would go as soon as the Nazis arrived. They didn’t go, and they were soon taken to Auschwitz, although we didn’t know that until after the war. The second thing was that we were told to tear the picture of the Czech President Benes out of our school books and replace it with one of Hitler.”
When Alf’s mum Bedruska went to Gestapo headquarters in Prague to ask for permission to leave Czechoslovakia, they threw her violently down the stairs. But somehow she managed to get her son a seat on the Kindertransport that saved 669 children’s lives. “We travelled in carriages of six to eight children,” Alf writes. “I was one of the youngest. We had hard wooden seats on which to sit… it seemed an interminably long journey.”
When they reached Holland the older children cheered, and Alf – too busy looking for windmills – only realised later it was because they had escaped Nazi-occupied territory. Some 87 years on, the boy with the knapsack has never stopped giving back to the country that adopted him – and is still living a life dedicated to public service. Nor has Alf ever stopped trying to help other unaccompanied children caught up in wars beyond their understanding.
Despite growing up with his mum cleaning floors after the early death of his father, he went on to become the Labour Member of Parliament for Battersea. In 1994, he took his place as Lord Dubs, later serving as a minister for Northern Ireland in Tony Blair’s government.
A former director of the Refugee Council, he spent years battling to get the ‘Dubs Amendment’ into legislation, leading to hundreds of children arriving safely in the UK – although it has now been closed. He has campaigned alongside celebrities from Gary Lineker to Vanessa Redgrave for refugees and for human rights, and raised his voice on behalf of vulnerable children countless times in the Lords.
“When I arrived in the UK, lots of us were sent to a school in Wales for Czech children who had escaped the war,” Alf says. “It was in a converted hotel in Llanwrtyd Wells in Powys. They welcomed us in what was really a small village, and would switch from Welsh to English, and we would switch from Czech to English so we could speak to each other. They saw us as part of the village. I’d like all refugees to have that welcome.”
Today, Alf’s decision to speak up for refugees means he suffers abuse, mainly online. “It’s not a nice thing in public life that you should be abused for sticking up for vulnerable people,” he says. “But it’s always much worse for women than men, and for black women than white women, so perhaps I have been sheltered from the worst of it. There’s one message I remember that said “You still alive?” He laughs. “I didn’t know if it was a compliment or a threat!”
At 93, Alf Dubs is very much still here, as vocal, active, articulate, kind and determined as ever. And his realist approach to politics is still shot through with steely optimism. “I’ve always felt that evil men can do such terrible things in politics, but there are so many good people in this country,” Alf says. “We hear so much about these black-masked thugs that are appearing, but what about the people who welcome refugees, and especially refugee children? There is some evidence that foreign money is funding the extreme right wing in the UK. We can’t allow foreign influences to distort our politics.”
Back at the Czech Embassy, His Excellency Bartuška says that he always remembers Alf telling him that he never ate the sandwiches his mum made for him, on his 1939 train journey, which lasted two days. “As a father, I think of that little boy,” he says.
Alf has a final message for the many people gathered to celebrate his book, among them the very last surviving passengers on the Kindertransport trains. “I’d like to thank Britain – this country – for having given me such a wonderful reception,” Alf says. “And,” he adds to warm applause, “I’d like to think that in the future other child refugees will be given the same warm reception that I was given when I came here.”
