Once Upon a Nightmare

This is the story of Anna and Stefan. These are not their real names, but they are real people, and their story is all too real. Anna and Stefan come from Hungary and live in the next town to me. Anna works in the local library, which is how I met her, leading 'Baby Rhyme Time' when Little G and I used to rock up every Thursday to sing along.

Anna and Stefan arrived here twelve years ago, moved into a flat and found jobs. Stefan works for an agency in the social care industry, on low wages, visiting elderly people in their homes to help them live an independent life. Anna had a variety of jobs, but the arrival of their 2 lovely children meant that she was not in continuous work, as she took time off to care for her babies.

Neither of them ever thought about returning home outwith family visits. As Anna told me: 'Hungary has an awful despot as a prime minister.' And so their lives pottered on, the kids grew, started school, and Anna gave birth to their third child.

Then Brexit happened and their lives suddenly turned from OK to nightmare. It started with the abuse. Comments and looks if they spoke their mother tongue in the street. Stefan came home to find a group of local men waiting for him. He was threatened, called names and told to 'go back where he came from'. The abuse went on. The family went to the police. The harassment ceased. Then their very  loved cat was poisoned. The family stopped feeling safe, and started to look around for new accommodation.

Eventually, the council found them a small derelict house that had been used by druggies as a base. It was filthy, needles everywhere and nothing 'worked'. Luckily, Stefan is a practical man, and their friends all piled in to make the house habitable again. Once they were settled, they decided to apply for permanent residence. And the nightmare began all over again.

To complete the 86 page documents, Stefan needed 5 years of payslips, bank statements etc. 3 kilograms of documents. They managed to get this together, sent it off, and the Home Office promptly 'lost' some of the documents. Three months later, they were requested to resubmit everything. (This is only the first stage ~ it gets them a permanent residence card, which is compulsory for a nationality application.)

And it isn't free. It will cost Anna and Stefan £1,500 each, plus £1,000 for each child. Did I say that they both work in low-waged jobs? But even if they get the money together, that may well not be the end of their problem. There is worse. Much worse. Because Anna doesn't have 5 years continuous employment, having taken time out to be a stay at home mum, she cannot apply now with Stefan but must wait until next May.

And there is more: Stefan and Anna are not married, so Anna, in the eyes of the government, has to prove she is a family member. She may have no right to remain here. Mistakes and missteps dog the application process. As she says: 'Twelve years, & 3 children doesn't count.'  Once Stefan's application, and that of the children goes through, she could be told to leave. Who knows?

So while our MPs posture and bluff and accuse the EU (from whom WE chose to detach ourselves) of 'bullying' and 'intimidating' the UK, I offer this little (true) story to help get a sense of perspective. Anna and Stefan are just ordinary hard-working, tax-paying people. Like you. Stefan looks after elderly frail people, maybe like someone in your family. Two of their children go to a local school, like yours do. They have made their life here. And this life is being stress-tested and torn apart. Needlessly.

STOP PRESS: On their recent visit to Hungary to see family, Anna and Stefan took the decision to get married. They didn't want to, but they decided it was better for their application that they did, lest Anna's sporadic work record meant possible deportation back to Hungary and away from their three children, the youngest of whom is 18 months.

It is now February 2018, so how's it going, Anna? 

"Bloody HMRC sent my stuff back 😤😤 in Hungary they take your old passport and ID card back when you get a new one. HMRC wants my previous ones to prove its me. Called them and explained.. Funny enough this person said it should be OK and I need to resend it. I told her I'm not paying again... Ridiculous, 5 years of payslips and bank statements and they do this!!!!"

In May, I gave Anna £1k to help with the registration of ONE family member.

June 23rd 2018 (2 years after the EU Referendum decision ...where are we now, Anna?

Sajid Javid is another prick
Sorry for the late reply, its been crazy
My Life in the UK test is on 7th July and I have been working on it every free second I have. I know its not hard but I want to make sure I pass first time.

I would love to get Farage, Boris and their gang to complete it along with the language test.
Luckily we don't have to take the language test due to the British uni degree
Oh, Home Office is just unbelievable. They called me back on time but I was at work so they left a voicemail. They gave me the phone number " I needed".

I called the number and spent 30 mins on the line by the time I figured out what was the number.. They gave me a company's number that help people find INFORMATION ON HMRC WEBSITE. I'm not joking. They thought I was an idiot (or perhaps don't speak English) who can't find information on the website.

So I sent a complaint letter to HMRC and am waiting for the reply.
Absolutely unacceptable that NO ONE at HMRC knows about the worker registration scheme that was compulsory for the new EU members. They say its finished and they don't deal with it
But it is needed for backdating your residency, even if you provide payslips
Utter nonsense and I am just so fed up with the system
I also spoke to Immigration and they said they had to provide this in the SAR request, that's what I requested 3 times now!!! They only answered once!!!
Anyway, think of me on 7th

Anna

September 2018. I guess it's all done and dusted now, Anna?

I have just posted Stefan 's PR application, 5.3 kilos, £25 to post with parcel force for tomorrow delivery
I wrote a heartwarming covering letter about the 2 year long struggle to get a copy of his WRS (worker registration) paper and included the copies of the requests and their answers. Fingers crossed. I hope that the person processing it has a heart and common sense.

However, now I have to get two people to give my daughter references! It never ends! I will seriously turn completely grey by the time we become British citizens

Chat Conversation Start

Holocaust (Greek: sacrifice by fire)

 Results for:  Last / Maiden Name = Flatauer        First Name = Alma        Place = Berlin
                                                                                                                         
Alma
Flatauer 1889 Berlin, Germany List of murdered Jews from Germany    murdered
Alma
Flatauer 1889 Berlin, Germany Page of Testimony                                   murdered
Alma
Flatauer 1889 Berlin, Germany List of deportation from Berlin                murdered
Alma
Flatauer 1889 Osnabrueck, Germany Page of Testimony                          murdered

We live in a 'post fact' (or as I prefer to call it, downright lies) era. In this Holocaust Memorial time,  the internet is ablaze with Holocaust deniers, claiming that the massacre of Jews, gypsies, disabled people and gays under the Nazis did NOT happen.

The survivors of Hitler's 'Final Solution' are gradually dying. Those that are left, frail but undaunted, spend their last few days having to tell their harrowing stories over and over again, as the stinking sewage of denial washes through social media. When they are gone, who will bear the torch?

As many of you know, I am the daughter of German Jewish refugees, and post the fiasco that was Brexit, I have applied for restored citizenship, so that my descendants will never have their 'citizen of the world' status wrenched from them, as mine was by the alt-right German government. At the head of this piece is the visual proof, taken from German documentation, of the 'fate' of my paternal grandmother. 

But this is my mother's story, not mine: she was born in Berlin and as the anti-Jewish laws started coming into force, she was in her early twenties. She had to leave university, where she was studying art & design, and went to work for one of the many Jewish organisation that had started getting Jewish families out of Germany as they could see what was going to happen in the future.

UK Daily Mail pre-WW2 headline

She helped organise Kindertransports and her refugee organisation supplied the papers and documents needed for adults to leave. These organisations also helped make the situation of German Jews very public and were hated as a result. Eventually, Hitler decided to close the borders. The last train was scheduled to leave Berlin on December 7th, 1941.

The way my mother always told it: she sent her own parents to the UK where, as the Daily Mail article shows, the identical 'anti-semitic/illegal immigrant' rhetoric was alive and well then, as now, but she felt it her duty to stay in Berlin and help out to the end.

So it wasn't until the last day that she packed her suitcase and headed for the station. The queue stretched for yards. She stood in line, wondering whether she was too late. Then the German police started going down the line, checking passports and documents. Time ticked on. Finally they reached her, and roughly demanded her papers.

My mother handed them over. A brief scrutiny. A consultation. A list was checked. Then she was beckoned out of the line and ordered to go with them. Her heart sank. Was she about to be refused exit? Was she going to be imprisoned? Tortured? Deported to a work camp?  She followed the police .... along the platform ... past the waiting crowd ... straight to the barrier where the train was waiting.

A curt command and the barrier was raised. She was pushed onto the platform. The barrier was closed. Still not quite believing what had just happened, she took her place on the last train and came eventually to the UK, where she met and married my father, also a refugee. Nine years later, I was born in the UK.

My father's family refused to leave Germany, believing, as so many EU citizens, migrants and refugees believe today, that civilized people would never try to deny them their human rights. They perished at Auschwitz. I am the bearer of their story. If you read a tweet, or an article, or a book by someone denying that Hitler and his military machine ruthlessly and systematically exploited, tortured, and murdered eleven million human beings whose only 'crime' was that they were not ''them'', then remember this: the people who ignore their mistakes are destined to repeat them. Over and over again.

Some 2016 UK Brexit headlines

A journey to myself: The end of the journey.

It is one thing to be researching the past for a work of fiction, it is quite another thing to be searching it for one's own past. I sent my family name out into cyberspace, not sure what was going to come back. Not much did, to begin with. I found a reference to my father's business. I found a list of the books my mother had translated from German to English. Nothing significant.

I emailed the German Embassy to suggest that I was probably not going to be able to apply for restored citizenship after all as I was not in possession of the correct documentation. Privately I decided to give up. The Embassy's reply, when it came, was unexpected and heartening:

''Dear Ms Hedges,

if you are not in possession of the documents you can nevertheless apply according to Art. 116 and submit all documents or copies of documents you find. The application process is free of charge.

Best regards''

I resumed the search. And then someone on Facebook suggested I try Yad Vashem - the organisation that has painstakingly listed the names and last known details of every Jewish person who perished during the Holocaust. So I found their site online. I typed in the names of my paternal grandparents. I pressed send. And unbelievably, there they were on the database. Alma and Raphaele.

Their names were on pages of testimony from survivors, on a deportation list from Berlin, on a list of murdered Jews from Germany. The map accompanying their entries gave their final destination as Katowice, in Poland. The location of Auschwitz concentration camp. Under the heading: Fate, one word: murdered.

When I got over the shock of what I was looking at, I tried to recreate what I'd been told about them. It was so pitifully little. They were affluent members of their community. They were highly educated; they had read Goethe and Schiller. They had a maid called Kate who spoiled my father and his brother with sweets and cake.

I also knew that, despite the huge privations they were beginning to suffer, Alma made up a food parcel every fortnight to send to my father in England. Like all Jewish refugees, he was interned here for the duration of the war, meaning that he was forbidden to work and was dependent upon charity and meagre handouts from the state.

I thought about their final days together as the net closed upon the remaining Jewish population in Berlin. How two intellectual and cultured individuals were marched out of their comfortable family home, pushed into an over-crowded cattle truck, denied food and water and then, when they reached their destination, brutally separated from each other and summarily gassed, because the government of that time had decreed they weren't human beings any more.

And when I had stopped weeping, I thought about all the words we use to describe those other people, the ones that are not us: migrant, foreigner, immigrant, refugee. Jew, Arab, Muslim. Words that we think give us permission to hate. And I felt great sadness that nothing much has been learned.

So my journey to discover myself reaches its final stages. At the end of this month, I shall make an appointment with the German Embassy to present my documents. I hope that what I have discovered is enough to convince them to restore my family's citizenship and ensure that my descendants will forever be members of the European family to which they have a right to belong.

I will let you know their decision in due course.

UPDATE 

I heard back from the lovely UK German Embassy last night (23rd November)

Dear Carol,

 I hope this email finds you well.

I have today received an email from the Federal Office of Administration  stating that the processing of your application is just about to be completed!

However they need certified copies of the following documents:

-          your marriage certificate

-          your parents’ marriage certificate   

       We are making progress! The first document is not a problem. The second will involve some searching through the UK General Register Office. I have initiated the search.

 UPDATE 2

 Feb 2018. Halfway through radiotherapy (another story): THIS arrived:

Dear Carol,

Happy New Year!

I am delighted to inform you that ‘Bundesverwaltungsamt’ in Cologne has approved your application for naturalisation according to Art. 116 (2) Basic Law. I have just received your certificate of naturalisation, which needs to be handed out personally.

I can currently offer you dates throughout Jan/Feb/March/July for an appointment in the Embassy.

Meanwhile .....

 
Out locally campaigning for staying in the EU in the middle of radiotherapy

FINAL UPDATE

April 16th 2018: I am given my certificate of naturalization, my badge, and (later) a lot of prosecco!

My journey finally comes to an end.

I