Reunion with the past - and what might have been

Murray Lynn was sent to Auschwitz with his family in 1944 when he was 13 years old. His three brothers and his parents were gassed in the Nazi concentration camp.

Murray survived and returned to Hungary on a freight train after being liberated in 1945. He spent almost a month in hospital, recovering from his time in the camp and moved to the Czech Republic shortly afterwards. From there he was evacuated to London and soon afterwards to Ireland.

There he met Alfred Kahan, who had fled from the Communist regime in Romania. The two boys formed a lifelong friendship, and this month they returned to Ireland more than 50 years later.

Murray and Alfred were evacuated by a Jewish organisation in the UK. "They wanted to take us to a neutral country that would be a springboard for us, for our dreams and aspirations wherever we wanted to go from there," Murray said in his hotel room in Dublin yesterday. "We came first to London but England could not absorb us. The Irish Government was good enough to give us temporary status as refugees."

Murray Lynn - then Alfred Murray Leicht - knew nothing at the time of the reluctance of the Government to let him into the State. A representative of the Jewish organisation, Religious Emergency Council, had contacted the Department of Justice in 1946, two years before the children arrived, asking the Department of Justice to admit 100 orphans who survived the concentration camps.

With the help of money from the UK, a Jewish organising group here had bought Clonyn Castle and 100 acres of land in Delvin, Co Westmeath. They promised the Government that if it wished, they would "undertake to make arrangements for [the children's] emigration after a specified period".

Nevertheless, the Department of Justice refused to let the holocaust survivors into the State in August 1946 on the instruction of the Minister at the time, Mr Gerald Boland. A Department of Justice memorandum noted that the Minister feared "any substantial increase in our Jewish population might give rise to an anti-Semitic problem".

Two months later, the then Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, ordered that the children be let in on condition that there was a guarantee from a responsible organisation that their stay would be for a short period only. Then - a month before the children came to Ireland in May 1948 - a local person attempted to set fire to Clonyn Castle.

The Department of Justice noted that while "numbers of the local people do not like the proposal to house Jewish children in the castle", as far as the Garda was aware there was not "any local organised agitation against the admission of the children". The organising secretary of the project concluded it must be "the work of some silly ass in the village".

Alfred Kahan learned of the Irish resistance to his arrival only earlier this year, when he read Dermot Keogh's Jews in Twentieth Century Ireland. He said the book was "an eye-opener" for him, but he doesn't feel any less grateful to the Irish.

"We have very happy memories of Ireland. It was different from the turmoil of Eastern Europe. It was a very beautiful country that was in peace. We were able to relax without fear of either Nazism or Communism. It was a turning point in our lives."

Alfred stayed in Ireland for 15 months, first living in Clonyn Castle with 100 other children from Eastern Europe, then moving to a house in Dun Laoghaire. He recalls getting up before dawn to watch the sun rising over Dun Laoghaire harbour, because he had never lived near the sea before. Fifty-one years later, he still drives for more than an hour from his home in Massachusetts to perform the same ritual at Cape Cod.

Alfred left Ireland for the United States, where he put himself through school in the evenings, eventually graduating from Harvard University with a postgraduate degree in physics. He went to work in the US Airforce's research laboratories.

He has not visited Ireland since he left in August 1949, but has always wanted to come back to as an act of remembrance. "I wanted to thank the Irish for providing us with a haven that helped us in the transition from a fearful past to a promising future."

He also wanted to explore what might have been. "If we had been allowed to stay here, I think we would have stayed. But the conditions obviously weren't very good at the time. Maybe Ireland lost out. There was a lot of initiative among the refugees. It could have been a very positive development for the country, both economically and educationally."

While he has read about the current controversy over immigration here in the newspapers, he is reluctant to comment on asylum policy here. Murray Lynn, who went on from his troubled childhood to become chief executive of a company in Atlanta, Georgia, has no such reticence.

"The policy should be more liberal. What has made the United States a great country is a relatively open door policy for immigrants from the world over. The US became a great nation because we have tapped into the resources of a lot of other countries' skills. The immigrants helped make America what it is. Ireland ought to prise the doors open a little bit and encourage skilled people in particular to come to this country," he said.

"But we didn't come here to campaign. We came here for a reunion. It's a sort of closure for us. As we get older, we get more and more sentimental about our time here. Ireland was our turning point and this visit has been our rendezvous with a fading past."

roddyosullivan@ireland.com