Join us at the UK National Holocaust Museum on Tuesday 12th August for the special opportunity to hear Kindertransportee John Fieldsend’s incredible testimony.
Born in Czechoslovakia in 1931 and raised in Germany, John experienced growing antisemitism under the Nazi regime before being sent to Britain on the Kindertransport. His parents, who remained behind, were later murdered in the Holocaust. After the war, John received a final letter from them, which he still treasures to this day.
John later became an Anglican minister, and his life story reflects a powerful journey of identity, faith and survival. His testimony is moving, thoughtful, and deeply human.
If you read one story today, let it be this one.
Hanus Jan Grosz and his brother Karel were just boys when they were hurried out of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia on a kindertransport organized by Sir Nicholas Winton.
When their steam engine chugged away from a crowded platform in Prague one morning in 1939, the youngsters, 14 and 13, both Jewish, escaped almost certain death.
It was a journey into the unknown — the last time they would see their parents Emil and Irma — but it was also a journey to safely in the United Kingdom.
A book detailing the remarkable true story of a group of children who were evacuated to Abbots Langley during the Second World War has been republished.
Wartime Evacuation to Abbots Langley, which was written by and follows the story of Clive Clark, was originally published in May 2004 by the Abbots Langley Local History Society (ALLHS). They have now republished it to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the war’s end.
Clive, along with 150 other children from his school in London, arrived in the village in early September 1939. They stayed for the duration of the war.
During my recent fellowship at Yad Vashem, I gained access to the Kindertransports lists from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. I also accessed the Austrian collection at the National Library of Israel which has Kindertransport lists to Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, America, Australia, Belgium, and France as well as many other files from the era. Other lists to Switzerland are available at the United States Holocaust Memorial and the Danzig/ Gdansk lists are at the Leo Baeck Institute, New York. Furthermore, I found some of the Kitchener Camp and post-war Kindertransport lists of children who survived the concentration camps in the archives at Yad Vashem and the National Library of Israel.
The World Jewish Relief (WJR) archive is a vital resource for helping me locate Kindertransport lists. Not all the families know their relatives’ Kindertransport number or the exact date of their travel. This information is found within the WJR files. The Kindertransport lists are yet to be made digitally searchable, so everything at the moment is done by hand, so I have to manually search through the material. However, if I know the name of the Kindertransport refugee, their Kindertransport number, and their date of departure or arrival I can find their lists within minutes.
Dr. Amy Williams
On 6th October 2024 I landed in Israel. I began my fellowship at Yad Vashem on the one-year anniversary of the largest loss of Jewish life in one day since the Holocaust.
Two weeks into my fellowship I found the Kindertransport lists. It would be the first time that former Kindertransport refugees and their families would see their lists in over 86 years.
Later in my trip I started to piece together how the Kindertransport was directly connected to the 7th October.
A few things I discovered include:
I became aware of how the Kindertransport has been placed within the context of present-day antisemitism. For example, online I’ve seen images of the Kindertransport memorial in London being used to make the point that the Kinder should not have been rescued because they and their descendants are responsible for the killings of Palestinians today. There has also been criticism that there has not been a Kindertransport for Palestinian children. Yet many seem to be unaware that the Kindertransport to Britain did not take place during a war. The comparison is not appropriate because during the Second World War few children were able to escape and were murdered in the Holocaust.
Woodmere Middle School eighth graders Romy Fruman and Harley Moritz presented to both Hewlett and Ogden Elementary schools students on the Kindertransport.
What started out as a social studies school project has evolved into a passion for learning and sharing information about the Holocaust, most specifically the Kindertransport, for the two middle school students.
The duo spoke to Mary Ann Rutter’s class at Hewlett Elementary, on May 19 and 150 fourth and fifth graders at Ogden, on June 3.
Fruman is a former student of Rutter and Assistant Principal Reina Hall.
“I feel that they spoke a little bit in generality about World War II and they talked a lot about compassion and what a lot of children have gone through,” Rutter said
A journalist whose great aunt was killed during the Holocaust has used a belated compensation payment from the German government to start a music label.
Adrian Goldberg, from Birmingham, said he wanted to use the money for something positive after getting an email “out of the blue” that said he was entitled to a small payment. Germany’s government has run programmes for several decades that pay compensation to Holocaust survivors.
Mr Goldberg was surprised to learn his father Rudolph, who died in 2012, had launched a legal case in 1990 with his brother Werner to seek compensation on behalf of their aunt Jenny, whose belongings were seized by the Nazis. Rudolph and Werner fled Nazi Germany for the UK in 1939 via the Kindertransport refugee scheme but most of their family died in the Holocaust.
Mr Goldberg’s label is called Jenny’s Feather Factory in memory of his aunt, who ran a feather factory in Berlin.
The Kindertransport was a unique act of rescue. 10,000 children, mostly Jewish, were brought over from Nazi Europe in the months leading up to the war. Mike Levy talks about his book which uncovers the unsung heroes who helped save the lives of so many youngsters.
Mike Levy was chair of the Harwich Kindertransport Memorial and Learning Trust which placed a new memorial to the rescued children on Harwich quayside.
Come along to Broadway House in Orwell Road on Wednesday 9 July 2025 at 1900 for a 1930 start. Raffle and refreshments after the speaker has given their talk. For further information about the society, see: https://felixstowefhs.onesuffolk.net
Children of the original Kindertransport refugees visited Swanage in Dorset, to give thanks to the town – and to the Swanage man who rescued their parents, Trevor Chadwick.
A teacher and a volunteer lifeboat crew member Trevor Chadwick risked his life to help children in Czechoslovakia escape the growing Nazi storm as World War Two loomed, and 669 youngsters owe their lives to Trevor and his collaborators in the rescue operation.
What started out as a social studies school project has evolved into a passion for learning and sharing information about the Holocaust, most specifically the Kindertransport.
Harley Moritz and Romy Fruman, Woodmere Middle School eighth graders, created a documentary for their National History Day project at school. They interviewed Manfred Korman, 93, about his experience during the Kindertransport — a rescue effort, transporting nearly 10,000 mostly Jewish refugee children to Great Britain from Nazi Germany between December 1938 and May 1940 — according to the Holocaust encyclopedia.
The girls had the opportunity to speak at the unveiling of the first Kindertransport dedication bench at the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center, in Glen Cove on May 4.
AN EVENT to commemorate Swanage’s efforts to save almost 700 children during the Second World War is taking place in this Thursday.
The event will commemorate the efforts of the Kindertransport, an organised rescue effort that evacuated around 10,000 children from Europe in the late 1930s.
Elaine Waterfield, 63, from Upton, organised the event. She said: “We want this day to be a day of thanksgiving and say thank you to Swanage for their support and kindness during the time it was visited by many Kindertransport children.
Ruth Hughes was one of hundreds of children rescued from Hamburg in the winter of 1938, after her parents managed to arrange for her and her brother to be put on one of the last trains out of the city.
With only a small number of belongings from home, she waved goodbye to her parents from the train, not knowing she would never see them again as war broke out only a few months later.
Arriving in England, she was put in a Billy Butlins holiday camp in October, which Ruth remembers being “bitterly cold”.
She was picked out by visiting a visiting family and was bounced around to another before landing at the Williams family in Bath with four sisters who she remained close to for the rest of their lives.
When Ruth turned 18 in 1943, she immediately signed up to serve in the Auxiliary Territorial Service – “I wanted to do my bit to beat Hitler, he didn’t do me any favours”.
In the summer of 1942, the British military decided to create a special unit of German-speaking commandos trained in counterintelligence and what would now be called special operations. The young men they recruited for the new unit, dubbed X Troop, were almost entirely Jewish refugees.
Most had arrived in the UK as teenagers on transit visas or Kindertransport from Germany and Austria. When the war broke out, they were interned as enemy aliens, often in horrific conditions in Australia and Canada.After being released, they volunteered for this new hazardous duty.
Brought to London and interviewed by MI5, the nascent X Troopers were told that they would be taking the fight directly to the Nazis, and that their work would be extremely dangerous. They understood the risks but felt that they had nothing more to lose.
For a nation which often prides itself on being the “only” nation which acted to rescue mainly Jewish children on the Kindertransport, it treats its foremost Kindertransport memorial at Liverpool Street Station, where many of these children arrived, with such disrespect. You often see people sitting on it, leaving their rubbish on it, eating their McDonald’s on it, or putting out their cigarettes on it.
Britain’s national narrative of the Kindertransport is self-congratulatory and often focuses only on the more positive accepts of the rescue such as arrival, adaptation, and survival compared to the more complex and negative aspects such as internment, abuse, further dislocation, separation from parents. You might think then that a memorial to the Kindertransport would be treated with such respect and honour because it symbolises British hospitality, welcome, and generosity. You would be very wrong.
A Watford interfaith group has hosted its annual memorial lecture in honour of one its founding members.
The lecture series is a tribute to Harold Meyer, a child refugee from Nazi Germany who arrived on the Kindertransport and was cared for by the Jesuits in London.
On Yom HaShoah, the JEC Middle School launched its Holocaust education curriculum with a moving program. Dr. Steven Singfer spoke to students, sharing the inspiring story of his father, Aryeh Leib Leo Singfer—a Kindertransport survivor, British paratrooper and proud builder of a Torah-centered life. Today, his legacy lives on through 32 great-grandchildren.
Stories of the Kindertransport service, which saved the lives of hundreds of children at the beginning of World War Two, are to be told at a special event at Swanage bandstand in Dorset.
At 11 am on Thursday May 15th 2025, children and grandchildren of Kindertransport evacuees will be in Swanage to give their thanks for the town’s kindness almost 90 years ago. Among them will be Paul Walder to give a talk about his father Peter, who came to the town on Kindertransport with wartime hero Trevor Chadwick, whose statue now looks over the bandstand.
Trevor Chadwick, who moved to Swanage in 1928 when his father set up Forres School in Northbrook Road, became one of a handful of mainly British volunteers in 1938 who rescued children in Prague most threatened by an impending German Nazi occupation.
Rep. Grace Meng visited 100-year-old Shoah survivor Hanna Slome at Sloane’s home in Flushing, New York, bringing with her a proclamation declaring Slome’s birthday “Hanna Slome Day” in the Sixth Congressional District.
Slome, a Czechoslovakia native, was whisked from Nazi persecution to a new home in England aboard the Kindertransport in 1939. Nick Winton, the son of Kindertransport organizer Sir Nicholas Winton, visited Slome with Meng.
Slome immigrated to the United States at 19, settled in New York City and later married, becoming a mother to two, grandmother of seven and great-grandmother to 10 children.
Written by Diane Samuels, “Kindertransport” is a powerful, emotional drama that tells the story of a young Jewish girl, Eva, who is separated from her family and sent from Nazi-occupied Germany to safety in England during World War II as part of the Kindertransport rescue operation.
The story of families being separated because of the horrors of war and brutal regimes continues in our time. As part of the cast’s preparation to tell this story based on real historical events, they had the opportunity to speak with a representative of an organization that works closely with modern-day refugees from around the world.
‘Kindertransport’ explores themes of identity, trauma, and memory, as adult Eva grapples with the emotional scars of her past while navigating the complexities of being a mother. The story also illuminates the profound impact of war and displacement on personal and family dynamics, the cost of survival, and the difficulty of reconciling one’s past with the present.
Cassandra Clare is a New York Times bestselling author known for The Mortal Instruments, The Infernal Devices, and the upcoming Wicked Powers series — but, if she were to step away from her traditional fantasy genre for a project, she happens to know exactly what she’d be writing about… and it’s a piece of real life history that she has a personal connection with.
“During World War II, England accepted 10,000 Jewish children as refugees on what they called the Kindertransport. One of my ancestors was a Kindertransport kid, and so I have relatives in England because of that,” Clare told the Emerald City Comic Con 2025 crowd during her spotlight panel at the show.
She continued, “I wanted to do was tell the story of three different children, very different people, on the Kindertransport who were brought from their homes without their parents into these completely different lives. The one thing that they have in common is this fantasy story that they tell to each other, and I wanted to write a story about how sort of the power of stories can propel us in really dark times.”