The true story of a teacher who defied Hitler
In 1933 Germany, headmistress Anna Essinger was ordered by the newly-elected Nazi party to fly a Nazi flag above her school.
Refusal would have meant imprisonment and the closing of the school. She quickly organized a 3-day camping trip for her students, and put the flag up when they were away.
Essinger understood the implications of the order. Jewish, though not overtly religious, she decided to get her school out of the country. Her friends thought her over-reactive, but she had read “Mein Kampf” and knew there was no moderation in Hitler.
Deborah Cadbury, author of “The School That Escaped the Nazis” (Public Affairs Press, 2022, 440 pages), describes Essinger’s philosophy. “It came down to one issue: freedom. Freedom to think, to question, to challenge, to live without fear; freedom of spirit — this was her life’s work.” In other words, she valued exactly what the Nazis would not tolerate.
The decision to leave Germany was easily made, and then began the work of finding a place to start a new school, finding teachers willing to leave and talking with every parent. All talk had to be in secret. Most of the Jewish parents wanted to let their children go, and some of the non-Jewish parents did as well. Essinger scouted countries, chose England, and found backers in London. She returned to Germany to complete the plans of escape, instructed parents to pack for two years, then left with 6 of the older students and 6 teachers. They were to prepare the school for the others.
The rest, 65 students divided into 3 groups, each group led by a teacher, followed two weeks later. The groups took separate routes out of the country. Children and parents were warned to show no emotion on the railway platforms. On the trains, everyone was tense as they approached the border. Everyone made it. Everyone escaped Nazi Germany.
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When they arrived at their English destination, a three-story manor house in Kent, they could have been looking at a palace in a fairy tale. Inside the large assembly hall were three long tables “gaily covered in yellow tablecloths and set ready for dinner.” Up the wide staircase “a hundred beds were ready and the children found rooms with their friends.” It didn’t take long before “the house swarmed with children,” as one of the teachers recalled years later.
Schoolwork was secondary for a few weeks as everyone explored and pitched in to work. There was no money for domestic workers, but the children were used to chores at home. The only problem was homesickness, complicated by the situation back home. Essinger, by now known as “Tante Anna,” was convinced that the teachers needed to do all they could to foster an atmosphere of “warmth and security.” They all met daily for tea and discussed this. Classical music from the grand piano at the foot of the staircase, plenty of time outdoors, an insistence that the children help each other, the devotion of the staff, and the fact that all the children were in the same situation — all these things worked wonders. The schooling itself was “an incongruous mixture of informality and discipline.”
The children’s emotional well-being was first in Tante Anna’s mind, but it was far from the only problem. As autumn approached, the deficiencies of an old manor house, very little heat and very little water and no lights, became more apparent. The crucial need to fit into British culture required much effort. Only English was spoken at school, except on Fridays. Fundraising was always a necessity. Desperate parents in Germany were calling one after another to beg for a space for their children. Food was never plentiful. A case of polio broke out. For “a foreigner in a foreign country with no money,” the problems could seem overwhelming. But the children were doing well, and not just emotionally. Several passed the British exams and Bunce Court, as the school became named, finally passed the elusive inspection process.
Meanwhile, the situation in Germany deteriorated, as Essinger had foreseen. The year 1933 brought 42 new anti-Jewish laws, and formerly assimilated Jewish families were suddenly shunned.
By 1935, there was “a marked increase in anti-Semitic violence, not just from Nazi officialdom but from the grassroots. It was as though Hitler had given ordinary people permission to turn on their Jewish neighbors.” Arrests were common, and concentration camps, originally built to imprison Hitler’s political enemies, became more brutal, especially toward Jews.
In 1938, the German army marched into Austria and took over the country without firing a shot. Tens of thousands were arrested within days and Jewish shops were burned. Austrian parents joined those who were trying to get their children to England. Then Czechoslovakia, then Poland, then war. The book alternates between life at the school in England and life in areas under German control. There are stories of children who eventually ended up at Bunce Court, children who went through what is barely imaginable.
What saves from despair here are the people who gave so much to help the students. Tante Anna, foremost, but also the German cook with the fiery temper and huge heart, the Englishman Norman Wormleighton (“Wormy”) who could entrance a class with his reading of sonnets, the motherly Gwynne. Refugee William Marckwald was hired to stoke the “dreaded boiler,” and children would gather to hear him sing tenor as he worked. He turned out to be a renowned director.
Leslie Brent, student, spoke these words as an adult about Bunce Court: “All the violence I had experienced before felt like a bad dream. It was paradise. I think most of the children felt it was paradise.”
I read this book and wrote most of the review before October 7. The war in Gaza is complex. The story of Tante Anna’s school, with both its sad and uplifting aspects, is not complex. To me, it is a simple story of faith, faith in human goodness, embodied in children, which compelled Anna Essinger to create something magnificent.
(Anne Bevilacqua is a retired veterinarian who lives in Haywood County. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
