The Jewish refugees that breathed cultural life into Glasgow

Among those refugees during the Second World War was Henry Wuga, who grew up in Nuremberg and, aged 15, was sent by his parents to Glasgow on the Kindertransport in 1939.

His story has been told in Homelands, Ramaswamy’s captivating meditation on his life, friendship and belonging. Not all of his tale, however, reflects well on how welcoming the United Kingdom were as hosts to those fleeing the Holocaust – for, in 1940, at only 16, Wuga was accused of “corresponding with the enemy” and interned on the Isle of Man.

Henry Wuga

It was one of six camps in which he would be held, one of which, at Warth Mills, Bury, was described as “the most brutal camp in Britain”.

Nevertheless, his story in Glasgow, is mostly one of welcome. For, when he returned to the city following his internment, this was where he found warmth and solidarity in the house on the hill. Ramaswamy says: “What I find really poignant about that place is that many of the refugees who went there, mostly men, had just returned from internment camps in Britain. Imagine how Henry returns, as a teenager, from having been interned in six camps across Britain. He has no community. I see his arrival at 358 Sauchiehall Street as a homecoming, in which despite all of the rejections and traumas he has experienced, both from Germany in which he was persecuted, and the host country which has offered him shelter, he now finally finds a home. It’s also where he met his wife, Ingrid. It was where his political sensibility was formed.”

The Scottish Refugee Centre was just one of a number of buildings in which those fleeing the Holocaust found refuge. Among them was the boys’ hostel in the grounds of Garnethill synagogue and the women’s hostel on Renfrew Street. The house on the hill, however, wasn’t a shelter – but something almost as important as that. Wuga has described it as a “hotbed of culture”. There, the refugees played chess, talked politics, sang for Mrs Churchill’s aid to Russia fund to raise money for a second front. They made their own costumes. They performed Czech and Austrian songs in the Usher Hall.

Jewish refugees from the Boys’ Hostel at 125 Hill Street, Glasgow, copyright Scotsman

In Homelands, he recalls: “It was very powerful youth club. Its members, I think there were around 60 of us, were from Austria, Czechoslovakia and Germany, though not all Jewish. The people there were a few years older than we were. We learned a lot from them. It was our first contact with music and art. One of the chaps was a chorus master and we sang Mozart.”

Activities there didn’t just revolve around culture – there were also walks in the hills and a canteen famous for its proper coffee and cheap meals of soup, rye bread and liver sausage, served by an Austrian chef.

Others like the journalist, Ernst Fettner, have described the vibrancy of the place. “We came to the centre to speak German to each other,” he wrote, “and because most of us felt lonely at first. The house was alive with left-wing ideas, there were lectures on Marxism in the canteen and we would stay up half the night discussing what was happening in Europe and planning for the future. But we also went there to meet Scots because it was one of the few places where we could.”

As a result, for a short while during that war period, Ramaswamy says, Glasgow was a cultural “melting pot”, a “very European city” and the house on the hill was its centre. Among those who have written about that moment, she notes, was the artist Bet Low, who was then a student at Glasgow School of Art, just above the house on the hill.

Henry Wuga and Ingrid neé Wolff

In Clinging to the Radiators, published in the Scottish Review, she described fire-watching on the roof of Glasgow School of Art during the war, just as Henry and Ingrid Wuga were fire watching on the roof of the house below. She also recalled visiting there and how “three great women of the kitchen, Ailsa, Rosa and Gita” would help her survive, giving out free bowls of soup.

Low also wrote about the break-up of the refugee centre a few years later. “For a brief period,” she observed, “Glasgow was cosmopolitan. It seemed to us that the city was alive. But in the bleak 1950s it was as if nothing had happened at all.”

Jewish refugees in Glasgow

The story of the house on the hill also illustrates how insecure life can be for a refugee, not yet naturalised. It was in that building that Wuga was politicised, where he wrote left-wing pamphlets, became involved in communist activities, attended lectures on Marxism and marched alongside the trade unions on May Day. The vibrancy of the centre’s politics however did not go unnoticed by the authorities. “What’s sad,” says Ramaswamy, “is that this place of refuge, solidarity and gratitude then became a cause for suspicion.”

The Wugas, she notes, said that Ingrid’s father had told her not to go to the Scottish Refugee Centre, saying: “You’re too political, you march on May Day, you’re too left-wing. It could get you into trouble.”

Later it did – for when Henry Wuga applied for naturalisation, one official noted that he had participated in so-called communist activities at the Scottish Refugee Centre and he was deemed not suitable to be given naturalisation. Fortunately, Wuga would ultimately get that certificate, but the suspicion brought delay and insecurity.

What’s clear is that the Scottish Refugee Centre meant a great deal to Wuga. Writing in Homelands, Ramaswamy eloquently reflects why: “When Henry enters the house on the hill he steps inside a world that to the rest of the city is foreign, but to him is home. A home, moreover, that does not reject, persecute and seek to obliterate him. A home that no longer exists for him in Germany, and never will again, but is somehow here, in a shabby Georgian mansion.”

Homelands: The History Of A Friendship by Chitra Ramaswamy is published by Canongate