Lily Renée Phillips, photo by Jo Ann Toy for Newsweek
You can see in her work flashes of Klimt, Schiele, Dix, and other painters she studied as a wealthy young girl in prewar Austria. You can also see the influence of what happened next: World War II.Phillips spent two years as a Jewish war refugee in England, wondering if her parents were still alive, and ultimately escaped to the U.S. with the kind of derring-do you might find in Señorita Rio, an immigrant turned spy who became Phillips’s most celebrated comic creation.
Papakura Museum is organizing the first-ever nationwide tour of the Anne Frank exhibition. For Papakura District Council’s community development manager Leora Hirsh the exhibition holds special significance. Ms Hirsh’s immediate family escaped Nazi Germany in 1938 and were accepted into New Zealand as refugees while others in the family made it to England through the “kinder transport” system. Many of her extended family did not survive the holocaust.
Ellen J. Kennedy, Ph.D., the founder and Executive Director of World Without Genocide, a nonprofit organization committed to protecting innocent people around the world; preventing genocide by combating racism and prejudice; advocating for the prosecution of perpetrators; and remembering those whose lives and cultures have been destroyed by violence writes of her recent trip to the UK and her visit to kindertransport exhibits.
Local councillors and residents visited Leeds’ Brodetsky Jewish Primary to officially open three new building projects. A specially constructed nature teaching area known as the Outdoor School was dedicated to Sam Gitlic by his family, who had funded the £10,000 facility in his memory. Mr Gitlic came to Britain as a refugee on the Kindertransport, aged 13. He was taken under the wing of the Lawrence family of Leeds.
Former pupils of a temporary wartime Ort school in Leeds were reunited, 70 years after its relocation from Berlin. More than 100 boys aged 15-to-17 fled to Britain from Nazi Germany in 1939, along with seven teachers and their spouses. From the following year until 1942, it operated as the Ort Technical Engineering School. Eight old boys, who keep in regular contact, were at the anniversary celebration with family members and Ort officials at London’s Jewish Museum in Camden.
A FAMILY who founded the UK’s first Holocaust memorial centre are to receive a rare triple honour. Marina Smith and sons James and Stephen will receive honorary degrees from Nottingham Trent University. Much of the award-winning exhibition focuses on the Kindertransport. Also based at the centre is the Aegis Trust, a genocide prevention organisation the Smiths founded in 2000.
Otto was 17 years old when his father Karl and his mother Bertha put him on a train bound for Holland. It was August 18, 1939. He was the youngest in his family. His brothers and sisters were too old to be included in the Kindertransport.
The former Assistant Director of ITS Berkeley and the author of a widely used textbook on traffic engineering, died June 9,2010. Homburger was born in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1926. In 1939, at age 12, he was sent to England on a Kindertransport. He was a committed supporter of Neve Shalom-Wahat al-Salam, a village in Israel where Jewish and Arab families live together in a peace-building effort.
When the Jewish people were in peril of being totally extinguished, Ireland — or ‘Eire’, as the 26 counties were then called — did not lift a finger to help out. The Irish National Archives have overflowing files of letters to the Irish authorities from European Jews in the period 1938-1940, begging for help from or asylum in this country. Mr de Valera even refused to participate in the ‘Kindertransport’ project.
The Kindertransport Association has announced that it will host its Biennial Conference in Arlington, Virginia October 15-17, 2010. The event is expected to draw hundreds of members from throughout the United States. “We are very excited to be convening again this year.” said Kurt Goldberger, President of the KTA. “First, second and third generation KTA members as well as others who attend will experience a rich, meaningful weekend.”
Despite the rain outside, the crowd inside the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County’s new museum walked and learned as they toured the galleries and learned from the Center’s docents about the experiences of children during the Holocaust. On this special day, the Center held its annual Memorial Walk to remember the children who were murdered during the Holocaust.
Physicists study physical space. Geneticists study biological space. In Our Quest for Effective Living, author Fred Emil Katz studies social space. This isn’t the kind of social space we access through Facebook or an Internet chat room, but the interchanges between creatures and their surroundings. Katz, a sociologist and a Kindertransport survivor of the Holocaust, has previously published two books that present convincing explanations of how good people can do horrible things.
Four Onalaska eighth-graders began working on this year’s National History Day projects before the school year even began. Sam Chilsen, Ben Reimler, Mary Diermeier and Tori Charnetzki spent last summer investigating topics and looking at the competition’s guidelines. Their final projects,including “Kindertransport: Journey to Safety,” a documentary by Chilsen and Reimler, qualified May 1 for the national competition to be held June 13-17 at the University of Maryland-College Park.
Felix Weil, 82, shared his first-hand experience of traveling on the first Kindertransport that departed Germany for England in 1938. He related a tale of being chosen from a lottery, leaving his sobbing parents at the station (never to see them again),and finding three sizes of pants – from child, adolescent, and adult – in his meager suitcase. In addition to his personal experience, Weil explained the political, social & religious climate of Poland, Russia and Germany during that time.
It’s 65 years since Hitler drafted his will before committing suicide. The men who translated it were Germans who fled to Britain to take up arms against their own country. Two new memoirs shed light on this little-known group. Among them was Herman Rothman, a Jew born in Berlin. He came to England aged 14 on the Kindertransport, fleeing Nazi persecution shortly before war broke out in 1939.
I feel very privileged to be here, said Hildegard “Hilde” Gernsheimer, Wyomissing, recently addressing about 150 students studying the Holocaust in elective courses taught by Jennifer Goss at Fleetwood High School. Goss, who was on a December 1, 1938 Kindertransport, was named one of Pennsylvania’s Best Practices in Holocaust Education teachers in 2008.
Atlanta architect and author of two memoirs Benjamin Hirsch’s mother secured passage on a Kindertransport to Paris for five of her children, including 6-year-old Ben. The train left Frankfurt on Dec. 5, 1938, less than a month after Kristallnacht when Hirsch watched his family’s Freidberger Anlage Synagogue torched and ransacked. That was the last time he saw his mother. Nazi police had already taken his father, a dentist, on Kristallnacht and sent him to Buchenwald.
Gerard Friedenfeld writes of his experiences as a Kind in England and with Lola Hahn-Warburg: I arrived at London’s Liverpool Street station from Prague in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia on June 2, 1939 at age 14. I and 135 other Jewish children had left our parents in Prague two days earlier, becoming instant orphans and heading into the unknown, among strangers.
David Zeehandelaar packed a lot of accomplishment in his short life. He was a partner in the law firm of Blank Rome LLP, served on the executive committee of the Mayor’s Airport Advisory Board, was a judge pro tempore in the Court of Common Pleas and was a strong supporter of Israel and Jewish causes. David’s mother escaped the Nazis aboard the famed “kindertransport” that took mostly Jewish children to England from Nazi Germany and other countries before the start of World War II.
The main gallery charts the history of the Jewish community in Britain from 1066, most effectively the 19th and 20th centuries. Individual exhibits include a tiny doll brought over by a child refugee on the Kindertransport and a bible which was the only object an anti-apartheid activist was allowed to take with him into solitary confinement in South Africa.