NHS 75 — Isca Wittenburg’s story
Today marks the 75th anniversary of the National Health Service. To mark the day, hear the inspiring story of 100-year-old Isca Wittenberg and her journey from child refugee to the NHS.
Born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923, Isca and her family fled to England to escape the war and start a new life. Arriving with a small suitcase and 10 shillings, she worked her way up from the wards to become Vice-Chair at the Tavistock Clinic.
“My story is one of beginnings and endings. My father was a Rabbi and one of the liberal Jewish intelligentsia. I grew up in quite a cosmopolitan home, often hosting notable philosophers and thinkers.
“When I was nine, Hitler came to power and everything changed. All Jewish books were burned, Jewish people lost their jobs and Jewish children were excluded from schools. My best friend was a Christian girl who lived in the flat upstairs but they had to leave because they were not allowed to live in a Jewish home. They never spoke to us again.
“After Kristalnacht in November 1938, things got much worse. They smashed windows of all Jewish businesses. My father, like all men over 16, was taken to Dachau concentration camp. It was terrifying, but at that time the Germans only wanted to be rid of us.
“When my father came home, he was almost unrecognisable. He had been tortured, forced to stand throughout the night in November in just a thin pyjama shirt and had contracted double pneumonia.
“There were issues with our paperwork and for four months my father had to report to the SS every week. We never knew whether he would come home. It was dangerous for us to be on the streets, but finally we got to come to England in 1939.
“England was a new beginning and was so different. The English police were so nice, they would see you home if you got lost, I was shocked. At that time people thought the Germans were just ‘nice and efficient’.
“The Jewish Refugee Committee came to see us and asked us what we wanted to do. I said that I would do anything to stay here, but that my real interest was babies and young children. I trained to be a baby nurse, but the matron said I had to work doubly hard because they weren’t paid the full fee for my training. I really didn’t like it at first. The worst thing was that we weren’t allowed to hold the children except at feeding time. I wanted to go home, but my mother told me to give it a month. By the end of the month I was looking after a three year-old boy with a lung condition, so I decided I couldn’t leave him.
“I had quite a career as a nurse, looking after babies and young children who were sent to ‘wartime nurseries’. We provided childcare while mothers went to work in the factories to support the war effort.
“I still wanted to know how people could change from being a friend to being an enemy one day to the next. So after World War 2, in the mid-fifties, I joined the Tavistock Clinic to train as a child psychotherapist.”
Founded in 1920, the Tavistock Clinic provided civilians with pioneering treatments developed while working with shell-shocked soldiers during World War 1. It was one of the first organisations to join the NHS, in July of 1948 along with 1,143 voluntary hospitals and 1,545 municipal hospitals.
“I joined the Children’s Department and took the infant observation course provided by Esther Bick. Nowadays, her approach to infant observation has a worldwide influence. As part of my training I attended one of Anna Freud’s seminars. I was very impressed by her intellectual understanding, but I couldn’t understand how she thought that babies didn’t have a relationship with their mothers until they were six-months old.
“The Tavistock approach had far more emphasis on the social environment and concentrated on the earliest relationships between mother and baby from birth. The relationship with the mother was seen as much more important. John Bowlby at the Tavistock Clinic went on to develop Attachment Theory, which is now internationally recognised as central to how the relationship between children and parents is understood.”
Looking after children was a theme that ran through Isca’s whole life. When her elder sister died of cancer aged 44, Isca looked after her children and made sure that they got to do all the things that their mother had wanted them to do. She continued to pioneer new approaches to healthcare by working with other institutions, which led to her becoming the Head of the Adolescent Department at the Tavistock Clinic.
“In the health department at the University of Sussex we allowed young people to make an appointment for themselves and be seen for three sessions. I was very surprised how effectively you could understand the problems of students in such a short time. This developed into the Young People’s Counselling Service and became a permanent part of the work of the Tavistock.
“We applied the learning of infant observation to older children, to help families understand the changing nature of their relationships. Infant observation is a very thorough training that can be used in many ways, from looking at how a child behaves when they first enter a nursery to how old people at care homes experience communication. The principle is that ‘the child creates the adult’. Many problems are based in earliest childhood and understanding younger children is vitally important. If you can catch issues in those first steps of life it is much better than trying to repair them later.”
Isca thoroughly enjoyed her time working in the NHS, seeing so much change and development, particularly in the Young People’s Counselling Service. She would remain at the Tavistock Clinic for 25 years, ultimately rising to become Vice-Chair.
Talking about her 100th birthday, she said: “I got so many cards, including one from the new King. I don’t know why people make such a fuss about being 100 – it’s just a day more in one’s life.”
Isca Wittenburg worked at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust for over 50 years.
