‘The Saved and The Spurned’ – Derry as a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution in Nazi Vienna

‘The Saved and The Spurned: Northern Ireland, Vienna and the Holocaust’ looks at the plight and progress of Jewish people from Vienna fleeing the persecution and upheaval as the Nazis took hold.

On the eve of World War Il, several hundred persecuted Jews, mainly from Nazi-occupied Vienna, tried to escape to Northern Ireland.

They had learned of a Stormont scheme to tackle the region's chronic unemployment by offering financial support for skilled professionals to move to stimulate local economic growth.

Almost all applicants were rejected, and more than 125 of these men, women and children were murdered in the Holocaust.

It would appear the number who were successfully admitted was in the region of 70 to 100 people. More perished than were allowed to come.

Mr. Russell’s fascinating new account of this unexplored and unexpected aspect of World War II is being launched next week.

In the book, the journalist, film-maker and writer shines a light on Derry’s role in this forgotten episode in our history.

The key figures locally were Professor Thomas Finnegan, a young Professor of Classics at Magee College in Derry, his wife Agnes, and Archie Halliday, who owned a commercial college in the city, and was also active in the city’s Labour movement.

The Finnegans visited Nazi Germany in the 1930s and met Alfred Rosenberg, the leading racist ‘social philosopher’ of the Nazi Party, who was hanged for war crimes and crimes against humanity at Nuremberg in 1946.

They also secretly met anti-Nazi resisters, many of whom had relatives in concentration camps.

Professor Finnegan brought Viennese refugees to the city, but was arrested by the RUC who treated him as a subversive and detained him twice while he gave lectures.

In 1938 two small groups of Viennese Jews managed to emigrate to Derry. The anti-Semitic violence and persecution that accompanied the Nazi invasion of Austria in March 1938 motivated the first group of sixteen workers.

The Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938 impelled the second group. They obtained jobs with both local Jewish and Gentile employers, largely in the clothing and handicrafts industries.

These included Ludwig and Paul Schenkel, Robert and Elsa Sekules, Fred Szilogyi and Harry Lazarus, the Gold family, and Otto Goldberger. Szilogyi and Lazarus opened a factory that produced leather goods, shirts and uniforms for the British and Commonwealth armed forces.

Ludwig Schenkel married a Viennese woman, Loni Rauser, whom the Finnegans had brought out as a domestic servant, and he also set up a small factory.

A Viennese businessman, Alfred Neumann, who had opened a factory in Newtownards, started a clothing factory in Derry with a local businessman, David Gilfillan, and employed Jewish refugees.

One of the key figures in bringing out Jewish workers from Vienna to Northern Ireland, Neumann, ‘Ulster’s Oskar Schindler,’ was interned as an enemy alien.

He drowned along with 800 Italian, German, and Austrian detainees when their ship, the SS Arandora Star, was torpedoed by a U-boat off the Irish coast en route to Canada in July 1940.

World Holocaust Remembrance Day marked in Derry

Prior to his tragic death Alfred brought out 70 Jews from Nazi Austria to Northern Ireland. He was treated as a ‘real Ulsterman’ by the Ministry of Commerce, only to be sacked over differences with staff, interned a few months later, and killed when a fanatical Nazi U-Boat captain, Günther Prien, sank the ship carrying him and 1200 other detainees across the North Atlantic.

The survivors, astonishingly, were put on another ship, the Dunera, within days and almost sunk by another U-boat in the Irish Sea en route to Australia.

They were robbed, assaulted, and held in terrible conditions on board. A board of inquiry awarded them compensation for their terrible treatment.

Otto Goldberger, a Jewish shirt factory owner arrested after Kristallnacht, was saved from a concentration camp by a school friend who had joined the Nazi stormtroopers, made it to Derry, and set up his own business in Belfast.

The book also focuses on the fate of refugees who made lives in other parts of the North as well as those who helped them:

George Bloch, an eleven-year-old boy, escaped Warsaw with his mother and brother on the last train west the day before the Germans invaded Poland. The family set up a business in Portadown which employed 750 people at its peak.

Margaret Fink (nee Loewenthal) and Margaret McNeill, two young Belfast women, became leading figures in helping Jews come to Northern Ireland, defended them at internment tribunals, and in Margaret McNeill’s case, joined female refugees detained as ‘enemy aliens’ in Armagh women’s jail.

Czech lawyer Franz Kolner and his wife Edith escaped Nazi Prague in 1939 and managed the Refugee Resettlement Farm in Millisle, County Down, looking after a hundred Kindertransport children. He fell out with the orthodox Rabbi Jacob Shachter, but set up his own business in west Belfast, which was destroyed during the August 1969 sectarian disturbances, and rebuilt successfully again by his children.

Based on extensive archival research, unpublished family memoirs and letters, and interviews with Holocaust survivors and their descendants, this extraordinary book describes the applicants’ desperate efforts to save their families and themselves, and highlights the tireless work done by committed Northern Irish people to rescue them.

It also explores how the small numbers of refugees admitted to Northern Ireland made a major contribution to its economic, social, and cultural life that continues to this day.

Though small in number these exiles played a significant role in the business, social and artistic life of the city for decades.

New book chronicles Ireland’s WWII ‘Champions of sea, land and air’