Kindertransport

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For the play by Diane Samuels, see Kindertransport (play).

Young refugees of the first Kindertransport after their arrival at Harwich, Essex, in the early morning of 2 December 1938
Jewish refugee children on their arrival in London on the Warszawa
1939 issued Identity Document for travelling to the UK, used by a child on the Kindertransport
Hope Square plaque

The Kindertransport (German for "children's transport") was an organised rescue effort of children from

hostels, schools, and farms. Often they were the only members of their families who survived the Holocaust that was to come. The programme was supported, publicised, and encouraged by the British government, which waived the visa immigration requirements that were not within the ability of the British Jewish community to fulfil.[2][3]
The British government placed no numerical limit on the programme; it was the start of the Second World War that brought it to an end, by which time about 10,000 kindertransport children had been brought to the country.

Smaller numbers of children were taken in via the programme by the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Chateau de La Hille children who went to Belgium.[3][7]
However, most often the term is restricted to the organised programme of the United Kingdom.

The Central British Fund for German Jewry (now World Jewish Relief) was established in 1933 to support in whatever way possible the needs of Jews in Germany and Austria.

In the United States, the Wagner–Rogers Bill was introduced in Congress, which would have increased the quota of immigrants by bringing to the U.S. a total of 20,000 refugee children, but it did not pass.

Policy

On 15 November 1938, five days after the devastation of

Quaker leaders appealed, in person, to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Neville Chamberlain.[8]
Among other measures, they requested that the British government permit the temporary admission of unaccompanied Jewish children, without their parents.

The British Cabinet debated the issue the next day and subsequently prepared a bill to present to Parliament.[9] The bill stated that the government would waive certain immigration requirements so as to allow the entry into Great Britain of unaccompanied children ranging from infants up to the age of 17, under a number of conditions.

No limit upon the permitted number of refugees was ever publicly announced. Initially, the Jewish refugee agencies considered 5,000 as a realistic target goal. However, after the

British Colonial Office turned down the Jewish agencies' separate request to allow the admission of 10,000 children to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine, the Jewish agencies then increased their planned target number to 15,000 unaccompanied children to enter Great Britain in this way.[citation needed
]

During the morning of 21 November 1938, before a major House of Commons debate on refugees, the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare met a large delegation representing Jewish groups, as well as Quaker and other non-Jewish groups, working on behalf of refugees. The groups, though considering all refugees, were specifically allied under a non-denominational organisation called the "Movement for the Care of Children from Germany".[10] This organisation was considering only the rescue of children, who would need to leave their parents behind in Germany.

In that debate of 21 November 1938, Hoare paid particular attention to the plight of children.[11] Very importantly, he reported that enquiries in Germany had determined that, most remarkably, nearly every parent asked had said that they would be willing to send their child off unaccompanied to the United Kingdom, leaving their parents behind.[12][a]

Although Hoare declared that he and the Home Office "shall put no obstacle in the way of children coming here," the agencies involved had to find homes for the children and also fund the operation to ensure that none of the refugees would become a financial burden on the public. Every child had to have a guarantee of £50 sterling to finance his or her eventual re-emigration, as it was expected the children would stay in the country only temporarily.[13] Hoare made it clear that the monetary and housing and other aid required had been promised by the Jewish community and other communities.[11]

Organisation and management

Vienna, Westbahnhof Station
2008, a tribute to the British people for saving the lives of thousands of children from Nazi terror through the Kindertransports
Jewish children leave Prague for Britain by flight organised by the
Barbican Mission to the Jews, 11 January 1939[14]

Within a very short time, the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, later known as the Refugee Children's Movement (RCM), sent representatives to Germany and Austria to establish the systems for choosing, organising, and transporting the children. The

Central British Fund for German Jewry provided funding for the rescue operation.[15]

On 25 November, British citizens heard an appeal for foster homes on the BBC Home Service radio station from former Home Secretary Viscount Samuel. Soon there were 500 offers, and RCM volunteers started visiting possible foster homes and reporting on conditions. They did not insist that the homes for Jewish children should be Jewish homes. Nor did they probe too carefully into the motives and character of the families: it was sufficient for the houses to look clean and the families to seem respectable.[16]

In Germany, a network of organisers was established, and these volunteers worked around the clock to make priority lists of those most in peril: teenagers who were in

concentration camps or in danger of arrest, Polish children or teenagers threatened with deportation, children in Jewish orphanages, children whose parents were too impoverished to keep them, or children with a parent in a concentration camp. Once the children were identified or grouped by list, their guardians or parents were issued a travel date and departure details. They could only take a small sealed suitcase with no valuables and only ten marks or less in money. Some children had nothing but a manila tag with a number on the front and their name on the back,[17] others were issued with a numbered identity card with a photo:[18]

Memorial plaque at Harwich, including a poem by Karen Gershon

The first party of 196 children arrived at

Parkeston Quay.[19][20] A plaque unveiled in 2011 at Harwich harbour marks this event.[20]

In the following nine months almost 10,000 unaccompanied children, mainly Jewish, travelled to England.[21]

There were also Kindertransports to other countries, such as France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark. Dutch humanitarian Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer arranged for 1,500 children to be admitted to the Netherlands; the children were supported by the Dutch Committee for Jewish Refugees, which was paid by the Dutch Jewish Community.[22] In Sweden, the Jewish Community of Stockholm negotiated with the government for an exception to the country's restrictive policy on Jewish refugees for a number of children. Eventually around 500 Jewish children from Germany aged between 1 and 15 were granted temporary residence permits on the condition that their parents would not try to enter the country. The children were selected by Jewish organisations in Germany and placed in foster homes and orphanages in Sweden.[23]

Initially the children came mainly from Germany and Austria (part of the Greater Reich after

Nazi-occupied Europe
continued until the declaration of war on 1 September 1939.

A smaller number of children flew to Croydon Airport, mainly from Prague.[24] Other ports in England receiving the children included Dover.[24][25]

Last transport

The SS Bodegraven carried the last group of Kindertransport children away from continental Europe during the Second World War. It left IJmuiden harbour on 14 May 1940 shortly before the invading German armies reached the port.

The last transport from the continent with 74 children left on the passenger-freighter SS Bodegraven [nl; de] on 14 May 1940, from IJmuiden, Netherlands. Their departure was organised by Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer, the Dutch organiser of the first transport from Vienna in December 1938. She had collected 66 of the children from the orphanage on the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam, part of which had been serving as a home for refugees.[26] She could have joined the children, but chose to remain behind.[27] This was a rescue action, as occupation of the Netherlands was imminent, with the country capitulating the next day. This ship was the last to leave the country freely.

As the Netherlands was under attack by German forces from 10 May and bombing had been going on, there was no opportunity to confer with the parents of the children. At the time of this evacuation, these parents knew nothing of the evacuation of their children: according to unnamed sources, some of the parents were initially even very upset about this action and told Wijsmuller-Meijer that she should not have done this.[citation needed] After 15 May, there was no more opportunity to leave the Netherlands as the country's borders were closed by the Nazis.

Trauma suffered by the children

Many children went through trauma during their extensive Kindertransport experience.[citation needed] Reports of this trauma is often presented in very personal terms, with trauma varying based on the child's experiences, including their age at separation from their parents, their experience during the wartime, and their experience after the war.

The primary trauma experienced by children in the Kindertransport was the separation from their parents. Depending on the child's age, the explanation for why they were leaving the country and their parents differed widely: for example, children might be told "you are going on an exciting adventure", or "you are going on a short trip and we will see you soon". Very young children, roughly six or younger, would generally not accept such an explanation and would demand to stay with their parents.

Older children, who were "more willing to accept the parents' explanation", would nevertheless realise that they would be separated from their parents for a long or indefinite period of time; younger children, in contrast, who had no developed sense of time, would not be able to comprehend that they may see their parents again, thus making the trauma of separation total from the very beginning. The actual leaving, via railway station, was also not a peaceful process, and there are many records[where?] of tears and screaming at the various railway stations where the actual parting took place.

Having to learn a new language, in a country where the child's native German or Czech was not understood, was another cause of stress. To have to learn to live with strangers, who only spoke English, and accept them as "pseudo-parents", was a trauma. At school, the English children would often view the refugee children as "enemy Germans" instead of "Jewish refugees".

Before the war started on 1 September 1939, and even during the first part of the war, some parents were able to escape from Hitler and reach England and then reunite with their children. However, this became the exception, as most of the parents of the refugee children were murdered by the Nazis.[citation needed]

Older refugee children became fully aware of the war in Europe during the period of 1939–1945 and would become concerned for their parents. During the latter years of the war, they may have become aware of the Holocaust and the actual direct threat to their Jewish parents and extended family. After the war ended in 1945, nearly all the children learned, sooner or later, that their parents had been murdered.[28][29]

In November 2018, for the 80th anniversary of the Kindertransport programme, the German government announced that they would make a payment of €2,500 (about US$2,800 at the time) to each of the "Kinder" who was still alive.[30] This payment, although a token amount, represented an explicit recognition and acceptance of the immense damage that had been done to each child, both psychological and material.

Transportation and programme completion

Flor Kent's memorial at Liverpool Street station, relocated to the station's concourse in 2011[31]

The Nazis had decreed that the evacuations must not block ports in Germany, so most transport parties went by train to the Netherlands; then to a British port, generally Harwich, by ferry from the Hook of Holland near Rotterdam.[32] From the port, a train took some of the children to Liverpool Street station in London, where they were met by their volunteer foster parents. Children without prearranged foster families were sheltered at temporary holding centres at summer holiday camps such as Dovercourt and Pakefield. While most transports went via train, some also went by boat,[33] and others aeroplane.[14]

The first Kindertransport was organised and masterminded by Florence Nankivell. She spent a week in Berlin, hassled by the Nazi police, organising the children. The train left Berlin on 1 December 1938, and arrived in Harwich on 2 December with 196 children. Most were from a Berlin Jewish orphanage burned by the Nazis during the night of 9 November, and the others were from Hamburg.[27][34]

The first train from Vienna left on 10 December 1938 with 600 children. This was the result of the work of Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer, a Dutch organiser of Kindertransports, who had been active in this field since 1933. She went to Vienna with the purpose of negotiating with Adolf Eichmann directly, but was initially turned away. She persevered however, until finally, as she wrote in her biography, Eichmann suddenly "gave" her 600 children with the clear intent of overloading her and making a transport on such short notice impossible. Nevertheless, Wijsmuller-Meijer managed to send 500 of the children to Harwich, where they were accommodated in a nearby holiday camp at Dovercourt, while the remaining 100 found refuge in the Netherlands.[7][35]

Many representatives went with the parties from Germany to the Netherlands, or met the parties at Liverpool Street station in London and ensured that there was someone there to receive and care for each child.[36][37][38][39] Between 1939 and 1941, 160 children without foster families were sent to the Whittingehame Farm School in East Lothian, Scotland. The Whittingehame estate was the family home of Arthur Balfour, former UK prime minister and, in 1917, author of the Balfour Declaration.[40]

The RCM ran out of money at the end of August 1939, and decided it could take no more children. The last group of children left Germany on 1 September 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland, and two days later Britain, France, and other countries declared war on Germany. A party left Prague on 3 September 1939, but was sent back.[41]

Sculpture groups on the Kindertransport route

Marking the European route of the children's transport and created from personal experience,[42] Frank Meisler's sculpture groups show similarities but with different details.[43] The memorials show two groups of children and young people standing with their backs to each other waiting for a train. Depicted in different colours, the group of the rescued is outnumbered, as the majority of Jewish children (more than one million) perished in the Nazi death camps.

In September 2022 a bronze memorial entitled Safe Haven was unveiled on Harwich Quay by Dame Steve Shirley, a former Kindertransport child.[44] The work by artist Ian Wolter is a life-size, bronze sculpture of five Kindertransport refugees descending a ship’s gangplank. Each child is portrayed with a different emotion representing the storm of emotions they must have felt at the end of their journey by train and then ship. The figures are also engraved with quotes of four of the refugees describing their first experience of the UK. The memorial is within sight of the landing place at Parkeston Quay of thousands of Kindertransport children.

Habonim hostels

A number of members of Habonim, a Jewish youth movement inclined to socialism and Zionism, were instrumental in running the country hostels of South West England. These members of Habonim were held back from going to live on kibbutz by the war.[45]

Records

Records for many of the children who arrived in the UK through the Kindertransports are maintained by World Jewish Relief through its Jewish Refugees Committee.[15]

Recovery

At the end of the war, there were great difficulties in Britain as children from the Kindertransport tried to reunite with their families. Agencies were flooded with requests from children seeking to find their parents, or any surviving member of their family. Some of the children were able to reunite with their families, often travelling to far-off countries in order to do so. Others discovered that their parents had not survived the war. In her novel about the Kindertransport titled The Children of Willesden Lane, Mona Golabek describes how often the children who had no families left were forced to leave the homes that they had gained during the war in boarding houses in order to make room for younger children flooding the country.[46]

Nicholas Winton

Before Christmas 1938,

Rotary Club and Rugby Refugee Committee.[41][50] Throughout the summer, he placed advertisements seeking British families to take them in. A total of 669 children were evacuated from Czechoslovakia to Britain in 1939 through the work of Chadwick, Warriner, Beatrice Wellington, Quaker volunteers, and others who worked in Czechoslovakia while Winton was in Britain. The last group of children, which left Prague on 3 September 1939, was turned back because the Nazis had invaded Poland – the beginning of the Second World War.[41][51]

The work of the BCRC in Czechoslovakia was little noted until 1988 when the refugee children held a reunion. By that time most of the people who had worked in the kindertransport in Czechoslovakia had died and Winton became the living symbol of British help to refugees fleeing the Nazis, especially Jewish refugees, before the Second World War.[52]

Wilfrid Israel

Quakers to visit Jewish communities all over Germany to prove to the British government that Jewish parents were indeed prepared to part with their children.[53]

Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld

Rabbi

Stranger's Cay, an island in the British Bahamas, assuming that he would be able to host there large number of refugees. After the war Rabbi Schonfeld went to the Continent to help destitude Jews and bring them comfort.[54]

Internment and war service

Memorial to Nicholas Winton at Prague Central Station

In June 1940,

enemy aliens'. A complete history of this internment episode is given in the book Collar the Lot!.[55]

Many of the children who had arrived in earlier years were now young men, and so they were also interned. Approximately 1,000 of these prior-kinder were interned in these internment camps, many on the Isle of Man. Around 400 were transported overseas to Canada and Australia (see HMT Dunera).

The fast, unescorted liner,

United States Committee for the Care of European Children to be protected by convoys.[citation needed
]

As the camp internees reached the age of 18, they were offered the chance to do war work or to enter the Army Auxiliary Pioneer Corps. About 1,000 German and Austrian prior-kinder who reached adulthood went on to serve in the British armed forces, including in combat units. Several dozen joined elite formations such as the Special Forces, where their language skills were put to good use during the Normandy landings, and afterwards as the Allies progressed into Germany. One of these was Peter Masters, who wrote a book which he proudly titled Striking Back.[56]

Nearly all the interned 'friendly enemy aliens' were refugees who had fled Hitler and Nazism, and nearly all were Jewish. When Churchill's internment policy became known, there was a debate in Parliament. Many speeches expressed horror at the idea of interning refugees, and a vote overwhelmingly instructed the Government to "undo" the internment.[55]

United Kingdom and the United States

Main article: One Thousand Children

In contrast to the Kindertransport, where the British Government waived immigration visa requirements, these OTC children received no United States government visa immigration assistance. The U.S. government made it difficult for refugees to get entrance visas.[57] However, from 1933 to 1945, the United States accepted about 200,000 refugees fleeing Nazism, more than any other country. Most of the refugees were Jewish.[58]

In 1939 Senator

Robert Rice Reynolds, it never left the committee stage and failed to get Congressional approval.[59]

Notable people saved

Alf Dubs
Walter Kohn
Ruth Westheimer

A number of children saved by the Kindertransports went on to become prominent figures in public life, with two (Walter Kohn, Arno Penzias) becoming Nobel Prize winners. These include:

  • Benjamin Abeles (from Czechoslovakia), physicist
  • Yosef Alon (from Czechoslovakia), Israeli military officer and fighter pilot who served as air and naval attaché to the United States, assassinated under suspicious circumstances in Maryland in 1973.
  • Alfred Bader (from Austria), Canadian chemist, businessman, and philanthropist
  • MBE
    (from Germany), British writer
  • MBE
    (from Germany), British immunologist
  • Julius Carlebach (from Germany), British sociologist, historian and rabbi
  • Paul Moritz Cohn
    (from Germany), British mathematician, Fellow of the Royal Society
  • Rolf Decker (from Germany), American professional, Olympic, and international footballer
  • Alfred Dubs, Baron Dubs
    (from Czechoslovakia), British politician
  • Susan Einzig (from Germany), British book illustrator and art teacher
  • Hedy Epstein (from Germany), American political activist
  • Rose Evansky (from Germany), British hairdresser
  • Walter Feit (from Austria), American mathematician
  • John Grenville (from Germany), British historian
  • Hanus J. Grosz (from Czechoslovakia), American psychiatrist & neurologist
  • Karl W. Gruenberg (from Austria), British mathematician
  • Heini Halberstam (from Czechoslovakia), British mathematician
  • Geoffrey Hartman (from Germany), American literary critic
  • Eva Hesse (from Germany), American artist
  • HonFRMS FRS
    (from Germany), British metallurgist
  • David Hurst (from Germany), actor
  • Otto Hutter (from Austria), British physiologist
  • Robert L. Kahn (from Germany), American professor of German studies and poet
  • Helmut Kallmann (from Germany), Canadian musicologist and librarian
  • Walter Kaufmann (from Germany), Australian and German author
  • Peter Kinley (from Vienna), born Peter Schwarz in 1926, British artist
  • Walter Kohn (from Austria), American physicist and Nobel laureate
  • Renata Laxova (from Czechoslovakia), American geneticist
  • Gerda Mayer (from Czechoslovakia), British poet
  • Frank Meisler (from Danzig), Israeli architect and sculptor
  • Gustav Metzger (from Germany), artist and political activist resident in Britain and stateless by choice
  • OBE
    (from Germany), British architect
  • Annie Hall look
  • Otto Newman (from Austria), British sociologist
  • Arno Penzias (from Germany), American physicist and Nobel laureate
  • CBE
    (from Austria), British journalist
  • Sidney Pollard (from Austria), British economic and labour historian
  • Sir Erich Reich (from Austria), British entrepreneur
  • Karel Reisz (from Czechoslovakia), British film director
  • Lily Renée Wilhelm (from Austria), American comic book pioneer[60] (graphic novelist, illustrator)[61]
  • Wolfgang Rindler (from Austria), British/American physicist prominent in the field of general relativity
  • Paul Ritter (from Czechoslovakia), architect, planner and author
  • Michael Roemer (from Germany), film director, producer and writer
  • Dr. Fred Rosner (from Germany), Professor of medicine and medical ethicist
  • Joe Schlesinger, CM (from Czechoslovakia), Canadian journalist and author
  • Hans Schwarz (from Austria), artist
  • Lore Segal (from Austria), American novelist, translator, teacher, and author of children's books, whose adult book Other People's Houses describes her own knocked-from-house-to-house experiences
  • Robert A. Shaw (b. Schlesinger, Vienna) British, professor of chemistry
  • Dame Stephanie Steve Shirley CH, DBE, FREng (from Germany), British businesswoman and philanthropist
  • Michael Steinberg, (from Breslau, Germany—now Wrocław, Poland), American music critic
  • QC FBA
    (from Germany), British law scholar
  • Marion Walter (from Germany), American mathematics educator
  • Hanuš Weber
    (from Czechoslovakia), Swedish TV producer
  • Yitzchok Tuvia Weiss (from Czechoslovakia), Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem
  • Peter Wegner (from Austria), American computer scientist.[62]
  • Ruth Westheimer (born Karola Siegel, 1928; known as "Dr. Ruth") (from Germany), German-American sex therapist, talk show host, author, professor, and former Haganah sniper.[63][64][65]
  • Herbert Wise (from Austria), British theatre and television director.[66]
  • George Wolf (from Austria), American professor of physiological chemistry
  • MBE
    (from Germany), British sculptor

Post-war organisations

In 1989, Bertha Leverton [de], who escaped Germany via Kindertransport, organised the Reunion of Kindertransport, a 50th-anniversary gathering of kindertransportees in London in June 1989. This was a first, with over 1,200 people, kindertransportees and their families, attending from all over the world. Several came from the east coast of the US and wondered whether they could organise something similar in the U.S. They founded the Kindertransport Association in 1991.[67]

The Kindertransport Association is a national American not-for-profit organisation whose goal is to unite these child Holocaust refugees and their descendants. The association shares their stories, honours those who made the Kindertransport possible, and supports charitable work that aids children in need. The Kindertransport Association declared 2 December 2013, the 75th anniversary of the day the first Kindertransport arrived in England, as World Kindertransport Day.

In the United Kingdom, the Association of Jewish Refugees houses a special interest group called the Kindertransport Organisation.[68]

The Kindertransport programme in media

Documentary films

  • The Hostel (1990), a two-part BBC documentary, narrated by Andrew Sachs. It documented the lives of 25 people who fled the Nazi regime, 50 years on from when they met for the first time as children in 1939, at the Carlton Hotel in Manningham, Bradford.[69]
  • My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports (1996; released theatrically in 1998), narrated by Joanne Woodward.[70] It was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.[71] It was directed by Melissa Hacker, daughter of costume designer Ruth Morley, who was a Kindertransport child. Melissa Hacker has been very influential in organizing the kinder who now live in America. She was also involved in working to arrange the award of 2,500 euros from the German Government to each of the kinder.
  • Academy Award for best feature documentary. It was produced by Deborah Oppenheimer, daughter of a Kindertransport child,[72] and written and directed by three-time Oscar winner Mark Jonathan Harris. This film shows the Kindertransport in very personal terms by presenting the actual stories through in-depth interviews with several individual kinder, rescuers Norbert Wollheim and Nicholas Winton, a foster mother who took in a child, a Dunera survivor and later British Army sergeant Abrascha Gorbulski and later Alexander Gordon, and a mother who lived to be reunited with daughter Lore Segal. It was shown in cinemas around the world, including in Britain, the United States, Austria, Germany, and Israel, at the United Nations, and on HBO and PBS
    . A companion book with the same title expands upon the film.
  • The Children Who Cheated the Nazis (2000), a Channel 4 documentary film. It was narrated by Richard Attenborough, directed by Sue Read, and produced by Jim Goulding. Attenborough's parents were among those who responded to the appeal for families to foster the refugee children; they took in two girls.
  • Nicky's Family (2011), a Czech documentary film. It includes an appearance by Nicholas Winton.
  • The Essential Link: The Story of Wilfrid Israel (2017), an Israeli documentary film by Yonatan Nir. It proposes that Wilfrid Israel played a significant part in the launching and initiation of the Kindertransport. Seven men and women from very different countries and backgrounds tell the stories, of the days before and when they boarded the Kindertransport trains in Germany.

Feature films

Plays

  • Kindertransport: The Play (1993), a play by Diane Samuels. It examines the life, during the war and afterwards, of a Kindertransport child. It presents the confusions and traumas that arose for many kinder, before and after they were fully integrated into their British foster homes. And, as importantly, their confusion and trauma when their real parents reappeared in their lives; or more likely and tragically, when they learned that their real parents were dead. There is also a companion book by the same name.
  • The End Of Everything Ever (2005), a play for children by the New International Encounter group, which follows the story of a child sent from Czechoslovakia to London by train.[73]

Books

  • I Came Alone: the Stories of the Kindertransports (1990, The Book Guild Ltd) edited by Bertha Leverton and Shmuel Lowensohn, a collective non-fiction description by 180 of the children of their journey fleeing to England from December 1938 to September 1939 unaccompanied by their parents, to find refuge from Nazi persecution.
  • And the Policeman Smiled: 10,000 children escape from Nazi Europe (1990, Bloomsbury Publishing) by
    Barry Turner
    , relates the tales of those who organised the Kindertransporte, the families who took them in and the experiences of the children.
  • Austerlitz (2001), by the German-British novelist W. G. Sebald, is an odyssey of a Kindertransport boy brought up in a Welsh manse who later traces his origins to Prague and then goes back there. He finds someone who knew his mother, and he retraces his journey by train.
  • Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000, Bloomsbury Publishing), by
    Oscar-winning documentary, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport
    with expanded stories from the film and additional interviews not included in the film.
  • Sisterland (2004), a young adult novel by Linda Newbery, concerns a Kindertransport child, Sarah Reubens, who is now a grandmother; sixteen-year-old Hilly uncovers the secret her grandmother has kept hidden for years. This novel was shortlisted for the 2003 Carnegie Medal.[74]
  • My Family for the War (2013), a young adult novel by Anne C. Voorhoeve, recounts the story of Franziska Mangold, a ten-year-old Christian girl of Jewish ancestry who goes on the Kindertransport to live with an Orthodox British family.
  • Far to Go (2012), a novel by Alison Pick, a Canadian writer and descendant of European Jews, is the story of a Sudetenland Jewish family who flee to Prague and use bribery to secure a place for their six-year-old son aboard one of Nicholas Winton's transports.
  • The English German Girl (2011), a novel by British writer Jake Wallis Simons, a fictional account of a 15-year-old Jewish girl from Berlin who is brought to England via the Kindertransport operation.
  • The Children of Willesden Lane (2017), a historical novel for young adults by Mona Golabek and Lee Cohen, about the Kindertransport, told through the perspective of Lisa Jura, mother of Mona Golabek.
  • The Last Train to London (2020), a fictionalised account of the activities of Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer by Meg Waite Clayton, also published in Dutch as De laatste trein naar de vrijheid.
  • Escape from Berlin (2013), a novel by Irene N. Watts, is a fictional account of two Jewish girls, Marianne Kohn and Sophie Mandel, who fled Berlin through the Kindertransport.

Personal accounts

Winton train

Main article: Winton Train

On 1 September 2009, a special Winton train set off from the Prague Main railway station. The train, consisting of an original locomotive and carriages used in the 1930s, headed to London via the original Kindertransport route. On board the train were several surviving Winton children and their descendants, who were to be welcomed by the then hundred-year-old Sir Nicholas Winton in London. The occasion marked the 70th anniversary of the intended last Kindertransport, which was due to set off on 3 September 1939 but did not because of the outbreak of the war. At the train's departure, Sir Nicholas Winton's statue was unveiled at the railway station.[75]

Controversy

Jessica Reinisch notes how the British media and politicians alike allude to the Kindertransport in contemporary debates on refugee and migration crises. She argues that "the Kindertransport" is used as evidence of Britain's "proud tradition" of taking in refugees; but that such allusions are problematic as the Kinderstransport model is taken out of context and thus subject to nostalgia. She points out that countries such as Britain and the United States did much to prevent immigration by turning desperate people away; at the Évian Conference in 1938, participant nations failed to reach agreement about accepting Jewish refugees who were fleeing Nazi Germany.[76]

See also

References

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  5. ^ Thompson, Simon (20 December 2018). "Kindertransport survivor sees German payments as history acknowledged". Reuters.
  6. ^ Marcia W. Posner (2014). Zachor: Not Only to Remember; The Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County... Its First Twenty Years
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  15. ^ a b "Kindertransport | About Us | World Jewish Relief Charity". www.worldjewishrelief.org. Retrieved 29 March 2019.
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  18. ^ Oppenheimer. Into the Arms of Strangers. p. 76.
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  20. ^ a b Williams, Amy (January 2020). Memory of the Kindertransport in National and Transnational Perspective (Doctor of Philosophy). Nottingham Trent University. At 5.30 AM on 2 December 1938 the SS Prague docked at Parkeston Quay. On board were 196 children, the first arrivals of what would become known as the 'Kindertransport'... None were accompanied by their parents.
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  26. ^ Keesing, Miriam (21 August 2010). "The children of tante Truus". het Parool. Retrieved 28 January 2015.
  27. ^ a b "Kindertransport and KTA History". The Kindertransport Association. Archived from the original on 4 November 2012. Retrieved 2 February 2014.
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  29. ^ Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution. Encyclopedia.ushmm.org. Retrieved 2019-01-29
  30. ^ Conference, Claims (17 December 2018). "80th Anniversary of Kindertransport Marked with Compensation Payment to Survivors". Claims Conference. Retrieved 29 March 2019.
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  42. ^ He was born into a Jewish family in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), and was evacuated by the Kindertransport in August 1939, travelling with other Jewish children via Berlin to the Netherlands and then to Liverpool Street station in London.
  43. ^ Craig A. Spiegel: Returning ‘home’ after fleeing on the Kindertransport. In: Cleveland Jewish News. 14. August 2009.
  44. ^ "Kindertransport statue to mark WWII refugees' arrival in Harwich". BBC News. 1 September 2022. Retrieved 27 February 2023.
  45. ^ Cohen, Melvin (1999). Habonim in Britain 1929-1955. Israel: Irgun Vatikei Habonim. pp. 155, 196–203.
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  49. ^ "UK's 'Schindler' awaits Nobel vote". BBC News. 1 February 2008. Retrieved 2 February 2014.
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  51. S2CID 159631013
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  53. ^ Naomi Shepherd: A Refuge from Darkness Pantheon books, New York, 1984. Published as Wilfrid Israel, German Jewry's Secret Ambassador by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, in 1984; in German translation by Siedler Verlag, Berlin; and in Hebrew as שגריר ללא ארץ, the Bialik Institute in 1989. This biography won the Wingate Prize for the best book on Jewish subjects for 1984.
  54. ^ See the entry Solomon Schonfeld, and the book Holocaust Hero: Solomon Schonfeld, by Dr. Kranzler (Ktav Publishing House, New Jersey, 2004).
  55. ^ a b "Collar the Lot," by Peter and Leni Gillman, Quartet Books Limited, London (1980)
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  63. ^ Fabulous Finds; How Expert Appraiser Lee Drexler Sold Wall Street's "Charging Bull," Found Hidden Treasures and Mingled with the Rich & Famous
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  65. ^ "Sex therapist, researcher Dr. Ruth given honorary doctorate by BGU; Born in Germany into a religious Jewish household in 1928, Dr. Ruth Westheimer was sent to Switzerland on the Kindertransport at age 10. Her parents were murdered in the Holocaust.," The Jerusalem Post, April 28, 2021.
  66. ^ Holmes, Mannie (14 August 2015). "Herbert Wise, 'I, Claudius' Director, Dies at 90". Variety.
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  70. ^ "League of Professional Theatre Women biography". Archived from the original on 5 August 2009.
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  1. ^ Whilst this was somewhat of an exaggeration – it was traumatic for the parents to send their children away into the "unknown" and for an uncertain time; and traumatic for at least the younger children to be separated from their parents – the actual parting was managed well.

Further reading

External links

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