From the BBC, coverage of the Nicky Winton train. More than 100 people will travel between Prague and London; among them 20 of Winton’s children, now with children and grandchildren of their own. They are part of an extraordinary worldwide family which owes its existence to the man who, at the age of 100, will once again stand on the platform at Liverpool Street to welcome them.
KURT Gutmann was only a boy when he was spirited away from the horrors of Sobibor to seek refuge among kind strangers in Scotland. But more than seven decades after his escape aboard the Kindertransport, Mr Gutmann is to realise his life’s ambition by testifying in one of the last Nazi war criminal trials.
KTA member Celia Lee is featured in article about the the exhibition Outbreak 1939 at the Imperial War Museum in London. The exhibit looks at the mass evacuation of 2 million children from London and other British cities days before the war started in early September, 1939.
German Jewish Celia Horwitz was part of the Kindertransport and was evacuated when in England. “Oh, it was so many moves at first and you know people said it must have been traumatic. And I thought: ‘Traumatic?’ I didn’t have time to think about it… You know when I think about the war and Hitler in particular, it just shouldn’t happen. Religion should never be the main cause of a war. I mean, how can you kill people for being one religion, one color, where does it stop?”
When Celia Lee was evacuated from London to Norfolk at the outbreak of war, it was the second time in less than a year that she had been uprooted. The previous winter she was among the 10,000 Jewish children evacuated from Germany and surrounding countries as part of the Kindertransport, an attempt to get as many of them as possible out of the Nazis’ reach. Then, she was Cilly-Jutta Horwitz, a 12-year-old from Hamburg. She would never see her father again.
Hesse was born in Hamburg in 1936 to a family of observant Jews. At two, she was put on a Kindertransport, first to Holland, then England and finally, in 1939, to America. Thirty years later, in New York, she was diagnosed with the brain tumour from which she died, aged 34. Her career as an artist had lasted 10 years.
Craig A. Spiegel writes, in the Cleveland Jewish News, of his trip with his mother, Cleveland resident Thea Lange Spiegel, to a reunion of Kindertransport Kinder in Gdansk (formerly Danzig), Poland.
A tribute to KT2 member David Fischer. There are no words to describe the sadness we feel at the death of David, the man behind (among many other projects and passions) Blog About Town, who was a friend of mine. I could never match his generosity or his ingenuity in getting fellow New Yorkers to ditch their work-crazed ruts and get together, out to dinner, out to a play.
Quentin Tarantino’s Nazi revenge movie may have plenty of drama but the real story is even better. Kim Masters on the heroic band of Jewish commandos known as X Troop. My father was an Inglourious Basterd. Actually, he was the opposite of that. But he was a Jewish commando in the British Army during World War II. A native of Vienna, he belonged to a secret unit made up of refugees from the Nazis. They went on reconnaissance missions in enemy territory and much more.
Curtis L. Mann, a lawyer and Holocaust survivor, died Saturday (July 25, 2009) at Brooking Park in Chesterfield. He was 83. Mr. Mann was born in Frankfurt, Germany. At 13, he boarded a Kindertransport which would take him to England. “The children were of school age, from about 6 to 17, and they had one thing in common: They were the lucky ones… This was an escape from almost certain death in the extermination camps of the Holocaust,” Mr. Mann wrote in a 1989 article.
Michael Steinberg, widely recognized as one of the most important writers on classical music of our time passed away this morning at age 80. Born in Germany in 1928, he spent part of his childhood in England via the Kindertransport. It was in England that he first discovered his love of music. In his book “For the love of Music: Invitations to Listening” co-authored with Larry Rothe, Steinberg revealed it was not in a concert hall, but in an alley behind a movie theater.
Born in Breslau in 1928, Michael was one of 10,000 Jewish children saved from Nazi Germany in the Kindertransport. After immigrating to the U.S., he trained as a musicologist and became a renowned music writer.
More than 75 students listened to Holocaust survivor Walter Kammerling talk about his personal experiences as part of a visit organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust. Mr Kammerling was among thousands of Jewish children evacuated from Austria under the Kindertransport scheme. He was born in 1923 in Vienna and was 14 when Nazi Germany occupied Austria. Mr Kammerling’s parents sent him to Britain on the Kindertransport. He was 15, but his sisters, 17 and 18, could not join him.
PUPILS at a Birmingham school learned first hand about the horrors of the Holocaust when they were visited by a survivor of the Nazis’ efforts to exterminate all Jews during the 1930s and 40s. Susi told the pupils how she escaped to London with her twin sister on the Kindertransport taking Jewish children out of Germany, and how her identity was changed by the childless Welsh minister and his wife who adopted them.
Retired Sheffield teacher Inge Joseph, who came to Britain as a 12-year-old refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, has had a third volume of her memoirs – My Darling Diary – Vol III – published. The honesty and frankness of her diary-keeping (using the pen name Ingrid Jacoby) has already caught widespread attention through Radio 4 programmes Message to Myself and Woman’s Hour.
When he was 14, Alfred Bader was sent out of Austria on a kindertransport. He ended up interned in Canada. By 1941, he had applied to Canadian universities. Toronto and McGill rejected him, having decided that they had enough Jews already. Queen’s, however, accepted the young man, who eventually completed degrees in history and chemistry. At the party in his honour Bader said he still appreciated what the university had done to help him get his start decades ago.
Henry Lowenstein was born July 4, 1925, and grew up in Berlin, where his parents hosted nightly parties for artists of all kinds. One of his father’s best friends was composer Kurt Weill, who worked out his masterpiece “The Three penny Opera” on the Lowenstein family piano. Lowenstein’s war stories are harrowing. At 13, he was part of an illegal scout troop that met in secret to swap tips on staying alive. “We were naïve as hell,” he said. But we were doomed if we stayed.”
Joe Wohlfarth is affably modest for someone who has represented Great Britain in the Maccabiah games – a quality that is magnified when you discover that he played on the British soccer team twice, in 1950 and 1957, and that he is preparing to represent Israel in the tennis masters, at the age of 77, having made aliya from the UK nine years ago. Wohlfarth distinctly recalls playing soccer with older children when he arrived in England from Frankfurt on the Kindertransport, aged seven.
Simon Wessely is an internationally renowned expert on Gulf War illnesses.Director of the King’s Centre for Military Health Research, his team’s work has influenced policy on the health of British armed forces. “I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I greatly admire our armed services and feel we don’t value them enough.Those feelings have no doubt been influenced by my father’s background.”As a teenager his dad travelled on the Kindertransport from Prague to Britain to escape the Nazis.