We are indeed committed, explains Fritzie Fritzshall, Holocaust survivor and president of the museum. “We are committed to educating the future generation. They must know about the Holocaust, as well as the recent atrocities in Darfur, Rwanda and Bosnia.” And the mission of the museum is succeeding. Since the opening of the museum, over 100,000 students have gone through, led by 140 docents who have undergone an 8-month training program. http://www.ilholocaustmuseum.org/
Ruth Stander, 87, who translated scientific articles in Russian and German into English and then summarized them for a National Library of Medicine publication, died June 6 at her home in Boynton Beach, Fla. She had pneumonia. Ruth Schlessinger was born near Stuttgart, Germany, to a Jewish family. In the late 1930s, she and two younger siblings were among thousands of Jewish children evacuated to England on Kindertransport trains.
The transportation of about 10,000 Jewish children to England aboard the Kindertransport is a well-known, if tragically short, episode in the years preceding the Holocaust. But what Miriam Keesing has discovered after three years of dogged research at The Hague is a story much less known — that of Holland’s brief role as a haven for Jewish children.
Born in 1926, Gustav Metzger has his first solo American exhibit, “Gustav Metzger: Historic Photographs,” at New York City’s New Museum, where his powerfully gritty assemblages can be seen until July 3. “Gustav Metzger: Decades 1959–2009,” a 2010 publication from Koenig Books, explains how Metzger was born in Nuremberg in 1926 to Polish-Jewish parents. In 1939, Metzger and his brother, Mendel, were brought to England on a Kindertransport, but their parents were murdered in Buchenwald.
“Gustav Metzger: Historic Photographs” is the first US solo museum exhibition of the influential eighty-six-year-old artist and activist Gustav Metzger, and highlights his long engagement with historical trauma and representation. A Kindertransport survivor of the Holocaust, Metzger’s first-hand experience of displacement and destruction shaped his subsequent outlook on the relationship between art and society.
One is an 86-year-old Jewish woman who escaped the Holocaust, the other a 22-year-old African. But their shared ordeal in fleeing terror and finding a safe haven in Scotland means there is a bond between Rosa Sacharin and Christian Kasubandi. They met for a new film – Courage:60 Years of the UN Refugee Convention -made to mark Refugee Week next month. Rosa, who fled Nazi Germany weeks after Hitler launched his onslaught against her people, met Christian in Glasgow where they both live.
These days I am thinking of two Holocaust survivors. I had met with one today: 86 year-old Hedy Epstein and I had lunch at a St. Louis café. The other is receiving an honorary doctorate tomorrow at Washington University: 82 year-old Elie Wiesel, who will give the commencement address. They have in common the central experience of their lives: their families destroyed by Nazi genocide. He survived Auschwitz, and she left Germany in 1939 on a Kindertransport to Great Britain.
Aged only 28, Sir Nicholas Winton helped save nearly 700 Jewish children from Nazi death camps, earning him the nickname the “English Schindler”. Thursday is his 102nd birthday, which he will be celebrating with family and friends in Maidenhead, Berkshire. One of the children he saved, 82-year-old Vera Gissing, said of his age: “It’s absolutely amazing, he’s been such a fantastic figure all through his life and so caring with everyone.
As a Jewish child in Nazi Germany, Wolfgang Grajonza saw his family torn apart by the Holocaust. His mother was taken to Auschwitz and gassed, his siblings were split — some were sent to an orphanage for safety, while others stayed behind and ended up in the camps. The young boy went to a series of orphanages and on the Kindertransport to France, eventually making his way to New York City. Grajonza would go on to become Bill Graham, perhaps the world’s most well known rock promoter.
Jake Wallis Simons’s 2005 first novel The Exiled Times of a Tibetan Jew was well received. His new one, chronicling Rosa Klein’s Berlin childhood in Nazi Germany and her escape to England on a Kindertransport, is an ambitious, courageous book. Ambitious in the way Simons’s subject matter has a touch of the surreal. Rosa riding her bicycle from early childhood through adolescence into adulthood becomes a symbol of physical as well as metaphysical release.
She is a most youthful 83, with starry blue eyes, a carefree nest of white hair and a light and musical Viennese accent. And she is still writing. Three years after “Shakespeare’s Kitchen” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, she is in the final revisions of a new novel, “And If They Have Not Died,” a fable of doctors and patients and age, but not her age, the next stage — extra-long life, the kind made possible by modern medicine.
WWII refugee tells his story for Holocaust Rembrance Month Kindertransport saved his life, but never saw his parents again. “After [my brother and I] left, [my parents] eventually were relocated to a Jewish ghetto in Slovakia where they stayed ‘til the early 1940s and … that’s when they were put on a train to Auschwitz and that was it,” stated a somber David Lux.
The work of a politician whose efforts saved thousands of lives during the war has been recognised in the city where he was a leading figure for more than half a century. A 10ft-high statue of Sir Leo Schultz was unveiled outside Hull’s Guildhall on Monday. Sir Leo and his wife Kitty adopted Bob Rosner – later a respected architect – who arrived in Hull with his sister on the Kindertransport.
Yom HaShoah and Holocaust Remembrance Week commemorations held in Chicago and Springfield Dr. Heini Halberstam (Champaign-Urbana) brought tears to the eyes of many in the audience when he talked about saying goodbye to his mother for the last time, though he didn’t know it was his last goodbye, as he joined a Kindertransport in Prague. He was one of nearly 10,000 children rescued from Nazi Germany, Austria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.
Czech-born Labour peer Lord [Alfred] Dubs, suggests his contribution would be a photograph of the Children of the Kindertransport memorial outside London’s Liverpool Street station. “It still brings memories of my own journey and arrival in the summer of 1939. A knapsack of uneaten food that my mother had packed for the journey, the midnight departure from Prague, and the interminably long train journey sitting on hard wooden seats, the night boat to Harwich, then London and a new beginning.”
Even 72 years later, Heini Halberstam vividly remembers his escape to Great Britain from the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia as a child in an operation known as the Kindertransport. Halberstam, speaking to the 30th annual Illinois Holocaust Observance at the Old State Capitol on Wendesday, said he and his mother left their home for Prague around the time the Munich agreement was signed between Hitler and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day but it is also a special day for a Hicksville woman who escaped Nazi Germany. Margarete Goldberger was aboard a mass humanitarian operation called Kindertransport, and her memories of fleeing the Nazis were captured on faded family photographs. Goldberger recalls that 23 of her close relatives were killed in the Holocaust. Goldberger, 85, is from Hicksville and was just 12 years old when her homeland of Germany turned into her prison.
Hal Myers was five in 1935 when Nazi Germany passed the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws that stripped Jews of their rights. Myers’ father, a salesman and World War I veteran, lost his job in Adolf Hitler’s first step in clearing Germany of all Jews, Myers said. He grew up in Karlsruhe, the capital of Baden, and remembers his family moving next to the Jewish community center, where Myers’ father got a job as a janitor and his mother as a cook.
Last month, in Berlin, some 40 people gathered outside a block of flats on Gieselerstrasse 12. They came to commemorate seven Jews who were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to their deaths in Auschwitz. Among the guests was 87-year old Ilse Newton of Golders Green. The last time she had set foot on this street was in 1939 with her parents, Hugo and Flora Philips, who took her to the train station where she joined other children as part of the Kindertransport that brought her to England.
The flash of a swastika on the arm of a German soldier. His mother’s anxious face peering back at him from the platform. Prague at night through the train window. These are the memories of Lord Alfred Dubs, 78, the life peer and former MP for Battersea now living in the village of High Lorton near Cockermouth. “It was a traumatic parting,” he recalls.