Bertha Bracey

Bertha Bracey
Born 1893
Bournville
Died 1989 at age 95
Occupation teacher, youth worker, aid worker

Bertha Lilian Bracey (1893–1989) was a Quaker teacher and aid worker who organised relief and sanctuary for Europeans affected by the turmoil before and during the Second World War. These included many Jewish children threatened by the Holocaust and rescued in the operation known as the Kindertransport.

Early life and education

She went to Birmingham University and, after graduating, she worked as teacher for 5 years.[1]

Quaker relief work

She joined the Society of Friends – the Quakers – when she was nineteen.[1] In 1921, she left teaching to work at the Quaker Centre in Vienna where she founded and operated youth clubs. The Quaker International Centres had been conceived by Carl Heath in 1916 and eight of them were established across Europe after the First World War. After Vienna, Bracey moved to Germany where the hyperinflation and instability of the Weimar Republic caused great hardship. At the centres in Nuremberg and then Berlin, she organised aid for the population, especially children. The provision of food to the impoverished and starving was known as the Quäkerspeisung – the Quaker feeding – and it so endeared the Quakers to the German people that it enabled them to aid refugees during the Nazi era.[2]

In 1929, she became an Administrative Secretary in the Quaker headquarters in London, responsible for the relief operations in Germany and Holland.[3]

Schools

She helped found the Stoatley Rough School for German refugees in Haslemere in England.[4] This started when Hilde Lion contacted the German Emergency Committee in 1933 with plans to form a school to help German children adjust to British education. Bracey chaired the board of governors from 1938 to 1945 and continued as a governor of the school until 1960.[5]

In 1934, she helped establish a school for German Jewish children in the castle of Eerde in Holland.[6]

Kindertransport

Bracey had recognised the threat to the Jews of Germany in 1933, after Hitler became Chancellor and the Nazi party took control, "Words are not adequate to tell of the anguish of some of my Jewish friends".[3] After the great pogrom of Kristallnacht in 1938, she visited Berlin and was then part of the delegation which met with the British Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare to convince him to expedite the acceptance of Jewish children as refugees from Germany. She then led the Quaker team which formed part of the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany. Initially they were based in Friends House but this was overcrowded and so the Palace Hotel in Bloomsbury Street was bought to become Bloomsbury House – a centre for all the refugee organisations to work together. Bracey became secretary of the Inter-Church Council for German Refugees and led a team of 80 Quaker case-workers on the third floor.[7]

Awards and memorials

In 2010, she was recognised as a British Hero of the Holocaust by Prime Minister Gordon Brown.[8]

References

Citations

  1. 1 2 Smith 2013, p. 31.
  2. ↑ Smith 2013, pp. 31-34.
  3. 1 2 Smith 2013, p. 34.
  4. ↑ ESP 2012.
  5. ↑ SRS 2004.
  6. ↑ Smith 2013, p. 37.
  7. ↑ Smith 2013, p. 45.
  8. ↑ Blake 2010.

Sources


Publications

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