Posted on January 12, 2025
New insights into one of the most remarkable stories from the years before World War Two have been discovered in ‘lost’ records.
The Kindertransport saw thousands of Jewish children fleeing the rise of facism in Europe before the borders were sealed.
Details of their journey through Holland were not thought to have survived but have now been uncovered by a researcher from Nottingham Trent University.
Surviving Kindertransportee Hanna Zack Miley, 92, said: “I’m embracing more deeply both the losses and the deliverance, the saving of my life”.
Used by border officials in the Netherlands, the records contain the names of almost all the children who fled to the UK and Holland on the Kindertransport – up to 9,000 children – on more than 90 trains between December 1938 and August 1939.
They include details of the children’s names, home addresses, dates of birth, parents’ names, chaperones’ names, transport numbers and departure dates.
The documents were discovered in the archives at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, by Dr Amy Williams, a freelance research fellow who studied at Nottingham Trent University.