Long before Henry Lowenstein became known as Denver’s most prominent theater producer, he was a child of the kindertransport. Now the theater legend has has gifted his personal documents from World War II to the Mizel Museum at the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture. These documents detail his family’s struggle to survive the Holocaust.
One of the first objects you see in the newly expanded Jewish Museum London,is also one of the museum’s oldest: the remains of a 13th-century Jewish ritual bath uncovered during a 2001 construction project. We see a doll, letters and photos carried by some of the 10,000 Jewish children rescued from Nazi Germany by Britain in 1938 and 1939 in the Kindertransport. But we also learn that in 1940 some 27,000 Jewish refugees from Germany were treated as enemy aliens and held in detention camps.
REMEMBERING: Herbert Levy remembers his time as a 10-year-old Jewish boy in the internee camp at Bradda Glen, Port Erin
When Herbert Levy was 10 years old, he spent a summer in Bradda Glen holiday camp in Port Erin. It was 1939 and he was a Jewish internee sent to the Isle of Man with many other ‘alien enemies’ in Britain. He said: ‘We tried to leave Germany for a long time but other countries just wouldn’t have us. But after Kristallnacht, the night the synagogues were smashed, Britain agreed to take Jewish children on a kindertransport train and I was one of those children who came over.”
Dan Springer, chairman of the fine and performing arts department at Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School.
CAPE COD —In 1995, Springer was hired to teach at Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School where he has served as chairman of the school’s fine and performing arts department since 2007. Springer grew up in New York City, the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors.His father Max Springer survived thanks to the Kindertransport. At age 10, Max Springer was sent to England “to relatives he didn’t know and a language he didn’t speak.”
The Prime Minister has recognised 27 British men and women as “Heroes of the Holocaust”. Here are their stories of extraordinary bravery in the face of Nazi persecution. Sir Nicholas Winton and Bertha Bracey are among those recognized.
A British Quaker who worked against Nazism in the 1930s has been honoured by the UK government. Bertha Bracey has now been posthumously awarded a medal, inscribed “In the Service of Humanity”. After the Nazis came to power in Germany, she campaigned for a relaxation of immigration controls for the sake of Jews and other persecuted groups. As Secretary of the Friends Committee on Refugees and Aliens, Bracey’s work was central to the establishment of the Kindertransport.
Nicholas Winton, the man called the British Schindler
Two surviving recipients, Sir Nicholas Winton and Denis Avey, will be given their medals in person while another 25 will be recognised posthumously. Mr Brown said all were ”true British heroes and a source of national pride for all of us” and should inspire future generations. Sir Nicholas Winton, who is now 100, organised the rescue of 669 mainly Jewish children by train from Prague in 1939
The first ever recognition of Britons who saved the lives of Jews and other persecuted groups during the Holocaust will be bestowed by the Prime Minister. Mr Brown said: “It is right that we reflect and learn from the past as we go forward in the future. That is why I was pleased to create a new award to recognise those amazing British individuals who through extraordinary and selfless acts of bravery protected and rescued Jews and others in the Holocaust.”
Bill Graham opened the Fillmore East in New York’s East Village on this day in 1968 with a concert that featured Big Brother and the Holding Company (Janis Joplin), Albert King, and Tim Buckley. Graham (Wolodia Grajonca) was given to a Berlin orphanage at age 8 by his Russian mother in Nazi Germany. He was spirited to France, and then to the U.S. in 1941 as part of HIAS’s “One Thousand Children” kindertransport (the only unaccompanied children rescued from the Holocaust by the U.S.).
65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, should the Holocaust’s place in Jewish literature change? A quick look at the programme for Jewish Book Week shows a diverse range of topics, from cookery to sport, mathematics to Hebrew, the global economic crisis to the one in Israel-Palestine. And then, of course, there’s the Holocaust: as embedded in contemporary Jewish literary culture as riffs on overbearing mothers and diasporic angst.
Our father, Peter Spiro, who has died aged 79, was a child Holocaust survivor. Born in Vienna, he came to Britain alone as an eight-year-old, on the kindertransport trains from Nazi-occupied Austria. Peter was later reunited with his father, a journalist, writer and radical, and then with his beloved mother. Peter was always grateful and loyal to the Britain that welcomed him and his family.
Henry Ehrenreich was born in Frankfurt on May 11, 1928, the only child of Frieda and Nathan—a prominent pianist, choral conductor, and music critic. It was not an auspicious time to be born a Jew in Germany. On June 20, 1939, Frieda entrusted 11-year-old Henry to the Kindertransport. The visa on which Henry traveled, and which saved his life, had been issued to a distant cousin whose family passed it on to Henry when they decided to stick together.
The exhibit, which features 600 of the altered pages, will be in San Francisco at the Contemporary Jewish Museum through June 8, 2010. “France is having a very difficult time with facing its history of the Holocaust,I am amazed that that quality of response and the deep emotionalism comes from France.” said Ralph Samuel, who was born in Dresden and survived the war as part of the Kinder Transport.
She turned to Heilbrunn and asked, “Am I giving you joy?” “Yes,” Heilbrunn replied. “The more I’m with Inge … I get good feelings about our meetings,” Glicksman said. “I remember sitting at breakfast and hearing a knock at the door,” Heilbrunn said. Her father was taken and imprisoned in Buchenwald for a time. On Dec. 1, 1938, Heilbrunn and her sister were placed in the Kindertransport. Heilbrunn was 14, her sister 11. For information about iVolunteer, go to ivolunteerny.com
“I was 11-years-old, came home from school and my father said I could not go back to school the next day,” said Anne Herrman, a resident of Greenspring Village in Springfield. “He said he and my mother could not go to work.” “At midnight in April 1939, my sister and I were taken to the train station by my parents,” Herrman said.“‘We will never see you again [her parents said].’” She and her sister had become part of Kindertransport, a program that transported Jewish children out of Germany.
Class 4 of St. Teilo’s School, Tenby, remembers Holocaust Memorial Day (January 27).
Class 4 of St. Teilo’s School, Tenby, remembered Holocaust Memorial Day (January 27) when Mrs. Annette Hollows gave the class a talk about Sir Nicholas Winton and the Kindertransport and the horrors of the Holocaust. The class responded by producing a book of prayers for all those who died during WW2.
Martin Maxwell, 85, was 14 years old and about three months shy of earning a high school diploma when he fled Vienna in 1939. Maxwell escaped to England, joined the British armed forces, became a glider pilot, was captured behind enemy lines and later freed. Despite the horrors he has witnessed he maintains a cheerful demeanour and sense of humour. As he prepared to receive his diploma, Maxwell joked: “I hope they don’t expect me to go to university next.”
Vernon W. Fischer, a popular retired professor at St. Louis University School of Medicine, died Tuesday (Feb. 2, 2010)after a lengthy illness and a stroke last year. Colleagues said Professor Fischer could make a dry subject — anatomy — meaningful. Senior medical students recognized him as a top teacher, awarding him their Golden Apple award. Professor Fischer was born in Germany in 1923. In August 1939,he fled through the Kindertransport. He lived in England before moving to St. Louis.
Martin Maxwell, 85 accepts honorary degree.
A Toronto businessman who narrowly escaped the Holocaust as a teenager was awarded an honourary diploma from a Summerhill private school this morning. Orphaned at a young age in Austria, Mr. Maxwell left a Vienna orphange at 14 following Kristallnacht, and never received his high school diploma. He narrowly escaped being sent to a concentration camp, where his two younger sisters lost their lives, on a Kindertransport to England.
Susi Bechhofer visited a school as part of a week of events marking the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Susi Bechhofer, who escaped Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport in 1939, visited Barr Beacon Language College, and spoke to over 100 pupils about the atrocities and her journey in finding her true identity. For over 50 years Susi did not know her identity, having been sent to an orphanage as a child and brought up as a baptist in Wales.