VICTORIAN POVERTY: Coming to your neighbourhood soon

  "I was one day dealing with a case in which a poor woman was in great distress of mind because she had got some washing to do and had not the money to obtain the necessary materials wherewith to accomplish the work.

    "I shall lose eighteenpence if I can't get it done," she said, with tears in her eyes, "and perhaps lose other work too, for people who have washing to give out won't study you if you have to disappoint them."

"You don't look fit to stand at the wash-tub," I said, noting her weak and hunger-worn appearance.

"I could manage that all right," she exclaimed eagerly. "By working late I could get it done and take it home to-night, and then I could get something to eat out of the pay for it. As to eating, though," she added, " I am thinking more of the children than of myself. It is not often that we are so hard put to it, but this morning they had to go to school without breakfast, poor little things They knew it was my misfortune and not my fault that I had nothing for them to eat, and they tried to be brave and not to cry, but you could see their poor little lips quivering."
   

 I had every reason to believe that the woman was telling a literal and painful truth. Her husband was sober, and steady, and until a year previously had been a strong and capable labourer, able to command tolerably constant employment. But one day when engaged upon some heavy work he had, in labourers phrase, "overlifted" himself. From that time he had been, "off and on," an out-patient of various hospitals, and was practically an invalid.
    

"You had better get something to eat before starting your work," I said, in reference to her last remarks. "Here are two tickets, each for a shilling's worth of goods; they will enable von to get a little food, as well as the washing materials you require."

"Oh, thank you," she exclaimed, her face flushing with pleasure; "won't the little ones be delighted when they come home and find I have got a dinner for them?" - The Pinch of Poverty, by The Riverside Visitor

A Letter from a Curious Citizen

 Dear Ms Patel

I know you are very busy at the moment processing thousands of applications from Hong Kong people with British National (Overseas) status plus their extended families, who have been given permission from you to settle in the UK. And then there are all the failed asylum seekers to be deported. I do appreciate that you have a lot on your desk. However, I wonder whether you can help me. You see, I remember what you promised when you were part of Vote Leave. 

You said: " There will be no change for EU citizens already lawfully res
ident in the UK. These EU citizens will automatically be granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK and will be treated no less favourable than they are at present. (June 1st 2016 /Vote Leave)

Now, your government's position seems to have changed. EU citizens are told to apply for pre-settled status, or for settled status. This is a complicated procedure, involving a lot of past records, documents, photocopies and certificates about employment, NHS, tax, and all sorts of things that some, particularly the very old, or the disabled or those who came here to live because they had that thing called Freedom of Movement (remember it?) just don't have. Your department says applicants must register on an Android device or an iPhone. Again, some people do not have these either. 

You have certainly managed to deviate a long way from your original pledge, haven't you, Ms Patel?

Setting all this aside (as you seem to have done with our human rights and your promises), I find myself in a bit of a dilemma. You see, I am a dual national ~ I was born here, of Jewish German parents who arrived in the 1940s as refugees. As I lost family members in the Holocaust, I have applied for, and recently been granted, 'restored' German citizenship. So now I am a citizen of here, and a citizen of there simultaneously. 

But you say that any EU citizen without pre- or settled status post 30th June 2021 may be removed from the UK. So here is my problem, Ms Patel: 50% of me (the German bit) does not currently have pre- or settled status, and will certainly not have it by the required date. I would therefore be grateful if you could inform me, as soon as possible, which part of me will be deported, so that I can make the necessary preparations and warn my family.

Yours sincerely

Carol Hedges (British/German dual national)

Rejoicing or 'Remoaning': How's your Brexit journey?

So how is it for you? Are you basking in those sunny uplands yet? Enjoying the gold dust of the Golden Age?  Celebrating your newfound status as OfBoris?

Me neither.

As many of you know, three years ago, as a direct result of the Referendum outcome, I applied for, and got, restored German citizenship, as my Jewish parents were forced to flee their birth country and my grandparents Alma and Rafaele were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. You can read about it here.

What I did not realise at the time, was that the after-effects of the Holocaust were felt not only by those who survived the camps, or escaped from Nazi Europe, but can be tracked, by some process I do not comprehend, in those born later.

In combat terms, it is like having PTSD. Another description could be 'survivor guilt'. For Jews like me, born to parents who got out of the utter hell that was Nazi Germany, it manifests as a constant reminder that however safe we feel, there lurks in the shadows of our past, a time when a whole nation lost its reason, when millions of people who had done nothing more than not be 'them', were denied basic human rights and dignity, rounded up, starved, worked to death, experimented on, or shoveled into huge ovens and gassed.

And we were told, over and over, by concerned parents and relatives that the time could easily come again, if the right circumstances and the wrong leaders align.

Listen, I grew up on stories of the gradual indifference of neighbours, the relentless seeping into public consciousness, via a carefully controlled media, that certain races and religions were responsible for all society's problems, and needed to be expunged from the face of the earth. I lived with it. I still do.

But back to you. How's your journey? Did you just shrug when the media was full of photos and video clips of Union Jack-waving white guys setting fire to EU flags and singing Rule Britannia? Were you concerned when certain journalists were banned from government briefings? Does it worry you that attacks on EU citizens (and Jews) have now become so frequent, they almost don't register as shocking any more?

You should be worried.

We, who carry the horrors of the past in our DNA, are lighting our candles and stepping out into the encroaching darkness, and as we hold them up in front of us, we can clearly see shapes and contours that are both alien and strange, and yet chillingly familiar at the same time.

A journey to myself ...ctd.

The 'welcome' that awaited my parents

To be honest, the fightback to preserve my identity post Brexit was going no further than a few rants on social media. And then last week I saw an article in the Guardian 'Family' supplement and everything changed. I did not know before reading it that I was entitled to apply for 'restored citizenship' thanks to a little known act passed at the end of WW2 which states:

 'Former German citizens who between 30th January 1933 and May 1946 were deprived of their citizenship on political, racial or religious grounds, and their descendants, shall, on application have their citizenship restored.' 
German Basic Law, Article 116, para 2

The phrase 'and their descendants' leaped out at me. The writer, also of Jewish descent, described how his feelings towards the nation who had destroyed his family had, over time, undergone a change. Like me, he had been favourably impressed by the way Angela Merkel welcomed refugees into the country, comparing her actions with the weasel words uttered by our own Prime Minister.

It is easy to point the finger at Nazi Germany and conveniently forget that this country's government did very little to help Jews fleeing persecution. The extract from the Daily Mail shows clearly the thinking of many people in the UK, an attitude that we have seen emerge once again thanks to the legitimization of xenophobia during the EU Referendum campaigning.

So here's the plan: I am going to apply for restored citizenship, given that I and my family will soon be restricted in our opportunities to work, study or live abroad by a set of mendacious politicians intent on promoting their own agenda. I have already emailed the German Embassy. Ideally, I'd like dual nationality, so that my family could take advantage of it too.

I am estranged from my family - and my parents are now dead, so I have little original documentation to support my application - no birth certificates or proof of residence, thus I am now researching on the internet, looking for any information about my father's Jewish parents~ my grandparents, whose names I know, but whose faces I never got to see in this world.

Wish me luck!


To be continued ....