The 92-year-old Bolsterstone man was born in 1928 into a family of wealthy German Jewish horse breeders. Then, as the continent of Europe hurtled towards the horrors of World War Two, he survived Kristallnacht to escape Germany on the Kindertransport, arriving in Sheffield in 1939. Later he was evacuated to a Nottinghamshire farm where he learned English, eventually meeting an English girl and living happily ever after in a South Yorkshire ‘log cabin’ for the next 70 years.
Plans are in the pipeline to create a bronze statue which would commemorate the child refugees who escaped Adolph Hitler’s reign of terror in parts of Europe ahead of the Second World War. Hundreds of the children, most of whom were Jewish, arrived in Harwich on December 2, 1938. To remember the town’s efforts in the rescue The Harwich Kindertransport Memorial and Learning Trust is working to create a memorial statue and education programme.
Sue Pearson, who has died aged 92, came to Sheffield from Prague on the Kindertransport in 1939 at the age of 11. Her childhood experiences bred a lifelong commitment to improving the lives of all children. In March 1939, Hitler occupied the remainder of what was then Czechoslovakia. Sue’s secular Jewish parents took the brave decision to send her on a Kindertransport in June 1939, thinking it would be a temporary measure, but Sue never saw them again.
To mark the anniversary of the Kindertransport project, in which Britain agreed to accept ten thousand unaccompanied refugee children, the vast majority of whom were Jewish, from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939, the AJR (Association of Jewish Refugees) recently held a special zoom meeting. This was hosted by British celebrity Dame Esther Rantzen and one of the main speakers was Sir David Attenborough, whose family had hosted two girls from Germany.
This month marks the 82nd anniversary of the Kindertransport’s arrival into Harwich. The historic train carried 200 children from a Jewish orphanage near Berlin to Harwich. Overall, the huge rescue saw about 10,000 children travel to the safety of Britain to save them from the Holocaust.
Alongtime Madison professor who as an 8-year-old escaped the Nazis’ tightening grip on Czechoslovakia by way of a program known as Kindertransport is being remembered this week as a groundbreaking scientist with a love of opera who shared the story of her early life with thousands of students. Renata Laxova died early Monday after a brief illness, according to her older daughter, Daniela Lax. She was 89.
Founder of Reunion of Kindertransport group dedicated her life to bringing families of Jewish refugees back together.
(another castle story!) For a group of pampered celebrities, it is a place of torture created for our entertainment; there are rats, creepy crawlies, a plumbing system that barely works, no electricity and stone hard beds. But 80 years ago, for 200 Jewish children, Gwrych Castle in Wales was a salvation from almost certain death in Nazi occupied Europe.
The last time that Gisela Adamski shared her story of loss and survival in the Holocaust was this past June, on a virtual call with Newtown High School history students. Addressing a class that included some students who had been second graders during the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, Adamski spoke about how to survive trauma over the course of a lifetime — and urged students to have the courage to advocate for justice, peace and equality.
The estate in Abergele, north Wales, features in the new series of the ITV reality show, but in 1939 it was also a safe haven for 96-year-old Henry Glanz and 200 other children
Ruth Zimbler, a Kristallnacht Holocaust Survivor reflection on how that day changed her life forever. On December 10th (a month after Kristallnacht), Ruth and her 6-year-old brother were sent on the kindertransport to Holland…Her message is,”We have to support one another and ensure that we teach the message of the Holocaust and motivate people to follow this dictum ‘Let there be peace on earth and it let it begin with you.’ We cannot remain bystanders, we need to be upstanders.”
When Abraham Grossman was a teenager, he fled his native Germany on what came to be known as the kindertransport, a rescue effort that brought about 10,000 Jewish children fleeing the Nazis to England. He returned just a few years later, but by then he was as a proud fighter in the British Army’s Jewish Brigade. Grossman, who died from the coronavirus in Israel this month at the age of 95, described his pride in participating in the fight against Nazism in his memoir.
The House of Lords demanded on Monday a series of changes to the Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill, including to ensure continued help for unaccompanied child refugees.
Survivor Ingrid Wuga, who escaped Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport at 15 and was honoured by the Queen last year for her services to Shoah education, died in Glasgow at 96. The Dortmund-born survivor fled in June 1939 and was later joined in England by her parents. Mrs Wuga met her husband Henry, a fellow Kindertransport evacuee, at a refugee club in Glasgow and the two married in 1944. The couple founded a kosher caterer which they ran together for 30 years.
KTA member Josef Eisinger writes: The pandemic that engulfs us has dislocated all of our lives dramatically, often tragically—but for some among us, the obligatory isolation has been a boon for musing. Among the weighty matters I muse upon is my complicated bond to the city of Vienna, a place that I last visited just a year ago, but that owing to the coronavirus, now seems out of reach.
Born in 1925 in Danzig, Frank Meisler was rescued from Nazi-occupied Europe country and taken on the Kindertransport to England where he was raised by his aunt. Some of Meisler’s most famous European monuments (“The Departure,” Trains to Life – Trains to Death,” “The Final Parting,” and “Channel Crossing to Life”) are life-size tributes to the 10,000 children who were rescued by the Kindertransport.
Nussbaum was born Ruth Rozanski in Offenbach, Germany on Sept. 30, 1920. Following the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938, her mother managed to get her sister out of Germany on the Kindertransport to England. However, Nussbaum was past the 17-year age limit for the Kindertransport, so with the aid of HIAS( (founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), she made her escape from Nazi German on her own in 1940, with only the clothes on her back.
A bronze statue honouring children saved from Nazi Europe could be displayed in Harwich if plans are approved.
My mother, Anita Heufeld, was one of 10,000 rescued by the Central British Fund for German Jewry. Just short of her 14th birthday, she became an unaccompanied minor, fleeing for safe haven in England. Her parents and most of her extended family remained behind and were killed. My trip to Fischach was instigated when the Jewish Museum of Augsburg launched an exhibition on what had happened to the Kindertransport children after they escaped. The curators wanted to include my mother’s story.
In the town hall of Fischach, a village in southern Germany, I am staring at a glass display case holding the detritus of the Jews who once lived here. It is July 2019, eight decades after my mother fled this place as a child. And right in front of me, neatly labeled, are the remains of my family: one of my Great Aunt Mina’s books on home economics and a section of curtain from the house on the village square. The house from the old photograph. The house my mother once called home.