She quietly found a new home for the school and received permission from the parents of her pupils, most of whom were Jewish, to bring them to safety in England.

The ceremonies to open the school were attended by Theodor Heuss and Otto Hirsch from Stuttgart, as well as the mayors of Göppingen and Ulm.

Academics were supplemented with a strong emphasis on the arts, as well as physical activity, including daily walks in the woods.

In May 1933, Essinger was informed that her oldest pupils would not be allowed to take the tests for the abitur, the school-leaving certificate needed to pursue a university education,[1] and most non-Jewish parents withdrew their children from the school.

[3] Essinger realized that Germany was no longer a hospitable place for her school and sought to relocate it in a more secure environment abroad.

She first sought a new location in Switzerland, then in the Netherlands and finally, in England,[10] where she found an old manor house dating from 1547 in Otterden, near Faversham in Kent.

[12] Essinger raised funds in England, primarily from Quakers,[13] initially to rent and later, to purchase Bunce Court.

[1] In autumn 1933, three different groups of children and staff set out on an educational trip for the Netherlands, leaving from the south, the north and the east of Germany.

[14] All three groups arrived on the ferry in Dover and were picked up in red buses and brought to Kent, where classes began the next day.

[12][16] The school maintained a large vegetable garden, two greenhouses, five hundred hens, beehives and several pigs, which were fed on kitchen waste, all primarily run by pupils.

[17] New Herrlingen was home, so that even after finishing their education, some pupils would stay on for a number of months, living at the school while working elsewhere, their wages largely going for their upkeep.

The number of pupils was constantly in flux, whether from having finished and passed the Cambridge school examination or because of the chaotic conditions of the era.

[8][19] The school made ends meet by putting everyone—children and staff—to work tending the gardens and animals, and maintaining the buildings and grounds.

When a school inspector asked a boy if he'd also done such manual labour back in Germany, he answered, "There, it was an educational method; here, it is a necessity.

[1] Essinger also accepted English children to the school, especially non-Jews to foster the non-denominational aspect, and bring in some financial and linguistic support, as well.

The Home Office then ruled that anyone born in Germany was classified as an enemy alien and all German males over age 16 were interned.

Maths was taught by an astronomer, the music teacher had been an assistant to Ludwig Karl Koch, the stoker, formerly a senior producer at Berlin's Deutsches Theater, directed school plays.

[1] With an enrolment of uprooted children whose parents were in unknown circumstances, coming from different social classes and cultures,[20] Essinger sometimes found it difficult to find British teachers who were up to the challenges and needs of the pupils.

A Quaker worker told...of parents' agony of mind who could only choose one of several children to go to England for safe education and which to select—the most brilliant, most fit, or one most vulnerable and unlikely to survive?

[34] Even so, there was terrible overcrowding and after a year, the chicken coop and the stables were converted into dormitories, creating enough room to allow the younger children to return.

The last children to come to Bunce Court were orphaned Nazi concentration camp survivors who no longer knew what normal life was like.

In his 2006 memoir, Sevek and the Holocaust: The Boy Who Refused to Die, he said his two years at Bunce Court "turned me back into a human being".

[38] After the war, Essinger hired Dr. Fridolin Friedmann to be headmaster of the school, but his tenure was brief, caused by her interference with his work.

[6] Bunce Court started out with a handful of teachers, two secretaries, a gardener, a driver and a cook, who had one (paid) helper.

Staff were given room and board and a monthly stipend of £9, regardless of marital status or position, as the egalitarian atmosphere placed no value on intellectual labour over manual.

[20] Alumnus Werner M. Loval made a list of staff in his book, We Were Europeans: A Personal History of a Turbulent Century.

[9] In 1940, Hans Meyer was interned at the camp in Huyot and volunteered to be deported to Australia on the Dunera, after learning that some of the Bunce Court boys would be sent there.

Martin Lubowski, who lost his family to Nazi concentration camps, said, "I feel I am walking on holy ground whenever I visit Bunce Court".

"[41] Michael Trede, a German who was not Jewish, said that Bunce Court was, "not a 'normal' school, not an institution, rather more of an emergency association, like an extended family.

[2][57] In July 2007, the original Bunce Court school bell was returned from California, where it had been stored by alumnus Ernst Weinberg.