Posted on December 18, 2024
Jewish News of Northern California,
Robin Herzog’s father, Steffen, was 8 when he and his brother boarded a train in Frankfurt headed to safety in England.
Jacqueline Shelton’s mother, Ilse, was 17 when her train left Berlin for the U.K.
Ralph Samuel was 7 when he took a flight on his own to England from Dresden.
They were among the 10,000 children, almost all of them Jewish, saved from Nazi-occupied Europe by the Kindertransport, a massive rescue operation that brought these children to the United Kingdom during the nine months before World War II broke out in September 1939.
The children said goodbye to their parents and other relatives at train stations and airfields in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Free City of Danzig, expecting to see them again as soon as it was safe. Most never again saw their families, who became caught up in the maelstrom of the Holocaust.
Herzog, Shelton and Samuel were among the lucky ones whose families survived.