A MEMORIAL to commemorate Harwich’s role in the Kindertransport will be unveiled next week. The bench and information plaque, located on Harbour Crescent, will remember the 10,000 Jewish children who passed through the seaside town in 1938 escaping persecution from Nazi Germany.
Miriam Goldfarb holds a photo of her mother Elizabeth Goldfarb in 2nd grade, she’s 3rd from the left.
Elizabeth Goldfarb was 17 when her parents put her on a train and sent her far away from Nuremberg, Germany. She spent the next year and a half in England, working for a London family and trying to get visas for her parents so they could flee the looming genocide of the Holocaust. The year was 1939.
Bern, who lives in Los Angeles, is a Jew from Iowa, where he and his sister were the only Jewish kids in their school. His parents were Jews from Europe. His mother left Germany on the kindertransport; his father fled Lithuania in 1939, one of two survivors of his family; the rest were massacred with the other Jews of Lithuania in 1941.
This is a remarkable book about a most remarkable man. Gerard Gould is a teacher and director of amateur drama with a uniquely charismatic personality, and those gifts are rare enough to merit attention; but the life of the man behind the work is truly fascinating. He was born Günter Goldstein in Germany in 1922, the youngest child of a prosperous Jewish family. He was a witness (and a perceptive, profoundly intelligent witness) to the gathering horror that was Nazi Germany.
Ralph Samuel
Rita Goldhor, Leo Mark Horovitz and Ralph Samuel all have extraordinary tales about how they escaped the Holocaust in 1939 via the Kindertransport. The trio will be talking in a roundtable discussion titled “Holocaust Survivors Reclaim Their Mother Tongue and Cultural Heritage.” Open to the public, the talk is being organized by the Oakland-based Gerlind Institute for Cultural Studies, which teaches and promotes German cultural studies throughout the Bay Area.
CARLA KING reviews Children’s Exodus: A History of the Kindertransport By Vera K Fast IN THE GRIM years before the second World War one beacon of courage and kindness was the Kindertransport , a voluntary effort that saw the movement of more than 10,000 Jewish children from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to the relative safety of Britain.
It’s not every day a Holocaust victim comes and speaks to us, said Rabbi Noam Silverman, head of Jewish studies at the Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School, as he introduced 82-year-old Ellen Fletcher. “And it’s not every day a Holocaust victim comes to us on a bike, especially in the rain.” With that, more than 100 middle-school students grinned and welcomed the former “kindertransport kid,” one of 10,000 Jewish children rescued from Nazi Germany just before World War II broke out.