A Jewish boy, Siegfried Franz Spira arrived via the Kindertransport arrangement and spent a year at Percy Jackson’s Grammar School. He then went on with his father to join his mother in the States where he was to become well-known as Fred Spira with his successful photographic business ‘Spiratone’.
Perhaps its legacy is best remembered in the words of one of the Kindertransport children writing from America in 1998: ”My stay at Macaulay House College was a crucial part of my life. It gave me temporary security, a classic English education and a sense of stability and order. The English people treated me with dignity and respect, they gave me life and liberty and I shall always love them for it.”
My mother went into action and managed to get us older kids on the last Kindertransport to France. I was only six. My older siblings knew what was happening, but my mother was afraid I would cry, and said we were going on vacation… I was excited to get on a train, and I said goodbye without even knowing it was goodbye. I never saw Mama or the babies again.
The focus was on how World War II events dramatically altered the lives of a generation of children. Five panelists described the profound effects of dislocation on European children who participated in Kindertransport and other evacuation plans. As a result of being separated from their homes, and, sometimes, their families, thousands of young Austrian, British, Canadian, French, German and Hungarian, children had to adjust to new languages and cultures.
It is our traditional High Holiday dessert, Lewin told me. “We make two, one to serve for dinner before services on the evening of Rosh Hashanah and another to break the fast for Yom Kippur.” Naomi Lewin’s mother, Elsbeth, born in Mainz, was 15 in 1939 when the family saw the proverbial handwriting on the wall and applied for exit visas. Then came Kristallnacht, and Elsbeth, one of 10,000 Jewish children saved from the Nazis by the British, was hastily dispatched on the Kindertransport.
Maya Zack recreates a 1930s Berlin living room, complete with portents of doom. Zack is interested in the fallibility of memory: of how even the most vivid images we have in our heads are distorted, misremembered and rendered nearly impossible to replicate. “Maya Zack: Living Room” opens at The Jewish Museum on July 31, 2011. It runs through Oct. 30. The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Ave. (212) 423-3200.
A novel about a Jewish family during the Holocaust by an author who only recently discovered her Jewish heritage could take home this year’s Man Booker prize. The book follows the antisemitism of the time and the family’s personal struggles, as well as the experience of a child’s escape to England on the Kindertransport.
The 1st Cockley Cley Guide Company in Norfolk was made up of Jewish refugee girls who arrived from Germany and Austria on the Kindertransport trains. Through Guiding they found friendship in a country where they knew nobody, could not speak the language and were considered ‘enemy aliens’.
Dealing with a child’s questions about the Shoah demands sensitivity and patience. Judith Vandervelde, an educator at London’s Jewish Museum, runs a seminar entitled, “How do we talk to our children about the Holocaust?” The museum runs workshops for schoolchildren in year six – both Jewish and non-Jewish. The focus is on stories of bravery and rescue – children often meet Kindertransport refugees.
At the Imperial War Museum I came across examples of Kindertransport clothing. From October 1938 until August 1939, the British government accepted almost 10,000 unaccompanied refugee Jewish children, escaping Nazi persecution. What the children wore became for many the only tangible evidence of their past life.
We are indeed committed, explains Fritzie Fritzshall, Holocaust survivor and president of the museum. “We are committed to educating the future generation. They must know about the Holocaust, as well as the recent atrocities in Darfur, Rwanda and Bosnia.” And the mission of the museum is succeeding. Since the opening of the museum, over 100,000 students have gone through, led by 140 docents who have undergone an 8-month training program. http://www.ilholocaustmuseum.org/
Ruth Stander, 87, who translated scientific articles in Russian and German into English and then summarized them for a National Library of Medicine publication, died June 6 at her home in Boynton Beach, Fla. She had pneumonia. Ruth Schlessinger was born near Stuttgart, Germany, to a Jewish family. In the late 1930s, she and two younger siblings were among thousands of Jewish children evacuated to England on Kindertransport trains.
The transportation of about 10,000 Jewish children to England aboard the Kindertransport is a well-known, if tragically short, episode in the years preceding the Holocaust. But what Miriam Keesing has discovered after three years of dogged research at The Hague is a story much less known — that of Holland’s brief role as a haven for Jewish children.
Born in 1926, Gustav Metzger has his first solo American exhibit, “Gustav Metzger: Historic Photographs,” at New York City’s New Museum, where his powerfully gritty assemblages can be seen until July 3. “Gustav Metzger: Decades 1959–2009,” a 2010 publication from Koenig Books, explains how Metzger was born in Nuremberg in 1926 to Polish-Jewish parents. In 1939, Metzger and his brother, Mendel, were brought to England on a Kindertransport, but their parents were murdered in Buchenwald.
One is an 86-year-old Jewish woman who escaped the Holocaust, the other a 22-year-old African. But their shared ordeal in fleeing terror and finding a safe haven in Scotland means there is a bond between Rosa Sacharin and Christian Kasubandi. They met for a new film – Courage:60 Years of the UN Refugee Convention -made to mark Refugee Week next month. Rosa, who fled Nazi Germany weeks after Hitler launched his onslaught against her people, met Christian in Glasgow where they both live.
“Gustav Metzger: Historic Photographs” is the first US solo museum exhibition of the influential eighty-six-year-old artist and activist Gustav Metzger, and highlights his long engagement with historical trauma and representation. A Kindertransport survivor of the Holocaust, Metzger’s first-hand experience of displacement and destruction shaped his subsequent outlook on the relationship between art and society.
These days I am thinking of two Holocaust survivors. I had met with one today: 86 year-old Hedy Epstein and I had lunch at a St. Louis café. The other is receiving an honorary doctorate tomorrow at Washington University: 82 year-old Elie Wiesel, who will give the commencement address. They have in common the central experience of their lives: their families destroyed by Nazi genocide. He survived Auschwitz, and she left Germany in 1939 on a Kindertransport to Great Britain.
Aged only 28, Sir Nicholas Winton helped save nearly 700 Jewish children from Nazi death camps, earning him the nickname the “English Schindler”. Thursday is his 102nd birthday, which he will be celebrating with family and friends in Maidenhead, Berkshire. One of the children he saved, 82-year-old Vera Gissing, said of his age: “It’s absolutely amazing, he’s been such a fantastic figure all through his life and so caring with everyone.
As a Jewish child in Nazi Germany, Wolfgang Grajonza saw his family torn apart by the Holocaust. His mother was taken to Auschwitz and gassed, his siblings were split — some were sent to an orphanage for safety, while others stayed behind and ended up in the camps. The young boy went to a series of orphanages and on the Kindertransport to France, eventually making his way to New York City. Grajonza would go on to become Bill Graham, perhaps the world’s most well known rock promoter.
WWII refugee tells his story for Holocaust Rembrance Month Kindertransport saved his life, but never saw his parents again. “After [my brother and I] left, [my parents] eventually were relocated to a Jewish ghetto in Slovakia where they stayed ‘til the early 1940s and … that’s when they were put on a train to Auschwitz and that was it,” stated a somber David Lux.