Posted on December 19, 2024
Dr Amy Williams is currently working with Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Yale University Press, and Camden House to produce new books on the history and memory of the Kindertransport. Dr Amy Williams is a current fellow at Yad Vashem.
It has been repeatedly claimed by scholars that the lists of mainly Jewish children who escaped from Nazism to Britain and many other countries between 1938-1940 no longer exist or that only remnants of the lists survived. However, I have accessed Kindertransport lists to Britain and the Netherlands from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in Yad Vashem’s extensive archive. Thanks to the support I’ve received from the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem, and The Baron Friedrich Carl von Oppenheim Chair for the Study of Racism, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust (founded by the von Oppenheim Family of Cologne), I have also been able to spend time working at the new National Library of Israel which hold the lists from Austria to Australia, Belgium, Britain, Sweden, and many other nations. While I was in America last year during my fellowship at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, The New School (thanks also to Ilse Melamid, former Kindertransportee and the Kindertransport Association) I was able to access lists from Gdansk, Poland to Britain at the Leo Baeck Institute, New York. I was also able to find out more about the children who fled into Switzerland at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. For the first time we are able to see these lists in relation to one another which provides important new historical and present day insights into the Kindertransport.
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The lists are not just names on a sheet as they tell thousands of stories. I know many Kindertransport families and I’ve received so many moving messages along the lines of “I did not think we would ever see the lists”. But there are so many Kinder who I do not know. In the Austrian archives you often come across application forms and letters next to the lists. They sometimes have small passport photos of the children stapled to the paperwork. I cannot put into words how I feel when I come across these documents. Every time I see the little photos I am stopped in my tracks. I cannot help but wonder if the children made it out alive. In one recent particular case I had found the three Kindertransport lists which connected to one family and then I received a message from them to ask if I could find another Kind who they knew. I actually managed to find their list. When I return to Britain from Israel I will finally get to meet them.
I and my co-author Bill Niven will now begin to fully analyze the lists in our new book on the transnational history of the Kindertransport for Yale University Press. Until the book is published if anyone would like to check whether they or their ancestors are named are lists please email amy.williams2011@my.ntu.ac.uk.