When the Jewish people were in peril of being totally extinguished, Ireland — or ‘Eire’, as the 26 counties were then called — did not lift a finger to help out. The Irish National Archives have overflowing files of letters to the Irish authorities from European Jews in the period 1938-1940, begging for help from or asylum in this country. Mr de Valera even refused to participate in the ‘Kindertransport’ project.
The Kindertransport Association has announced that it will host its Biennial Conference in Arlington, Virginia October 15-17, 2010. The event is expected to draw hundreds of members from throughout the United States. “We are very excited to be convening again this year.” said Kurt Goldberger, President of the KTA. “First, second and third generation KTA members as well as others who attend will experience a rich, meaningful weekend.”
Despite the rain outside, the crowd inside the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County’s new museum walked and learned as they toured the galleries and learned from the Center’s docents about the experiences of children during the Holocaust. On this special day, the Center held its annual Memorial Walk to remember the children who were murdered during the Holocaust.
Felix Weil, 82, shared his first-hand experience of traveling on the first Kindertransport that departed Germany for England in 1938. He related a tale of being chosen from a lottery, leaving his sobbing parents at the station (never to see them again),and finding three sizes of pants – from child, adolescent, and adult – in his meager suitcase. In addition to his personal experience, Weil explained the political, social & religious climate of Poland, Russia and Germany during that time.
Four Onalaska eighth-graders began working on this year’s National History Day projects before the school year even began. Sam Chilsen, Ben Reimler, Mary Diermeier and Tori Charnetzki spent last summer investigating topics and looking at the competition’s guidelines. Their final projects,including “Kindertransport: Journey to Safety,” a documentary by Chilsen and Reimler, qualified May 1 for the national competition to be held June 13-17 at the University of Maryland-College Park.
Physicists study physical space. Geneticists study biological space. In Our Quest for Effective Living, author Fred Emil Katz studies social space. This isn’t the kind of social space we access through Facebook or an Internet chat room, but the interchanges between creatures and their surroundings. Katz, a sociologist and a Kindertransport survivor of the Holocaust, has previously published two books that present convincing explanations of how good people can do horrible things.
It’s 65 years since Hitler drafted his will before committing suicide. The men who translated it were Germans who fled to Britain to take up arms against their own country. Two new memoirs shed light on this little-known group. Among them was Herman Rothman, a Jew born in Berlin. He came to England aged 14 on the Kindertransport, fleeing Nazi persecution shortly before war broke out in 1939.
I feel very privileged to be here, said Hildegard “Hilde” Gernsheimer, Wyomissing, recently addressing about 150 students studying the Holocaust in elective courses taught by Jennifer Goss at Fleetwood High School. Goss, who was on a December 1, 1938 Kindertransport, was named one of Pennsylvania’s Best Practices in Holocaust Education teachers in 2008.
Atlanta architect and author of two memoirs Benjamin Hirsch’s mother secured passage on a Kindertransport to Paris for five of her children, including 6-year-old Ben. The train left Frankfurt on Dec. 5, 1938, less than a month after Kristallnacht when Hirsch watched his family’s Freidberger Anlage Synagogue torched and ransacked. That was the last time he saw his mother. Nazi police had already taken his father, a dentist, on Kristallnacht and sent him to Buchenwald.
Gerard Friedenfeld writes of his experiences as a Kind in England and with Lola Hahn-Warburg: I arrived at London’s Liverpool Street station from Prague in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia on June 2, 1939 at age 14. I and 135 other Jewish children had left our parents in Prague two days earlier, becoming instant orphans and heading into the unknown, among strangers.
David Zeehandelaar packed a lot of accomplishment in his short life. He was a partner in the law firm of Blank Rome LLP, served on the executive committee of the Mayor’s Airport Advisory Board, was a judge pro tempore in the Court of Common Pleas and was a strong supporter of Israel and Jewish causes. David’s mother escaped the Nazis aboard the famed “kindertransport” that took mostly Jewish children to England from Nazi Germany and other countries before the start of World War II.
The main gallery charts the history of the Jewish community in Britain from 1066, most effectively the 19th and 20th centuries. Individual exhibits include a tiny doll brought over by a child refugee on the Kindertransport and a bible which was the only object an anti-apartheid activist was allowed to take with him into solitary confinement in South Africa.
Long before Henry Lowenstein became known as Denver’s most prominent theater producer, he was a child of the kindertransport. Now the theater legend has has gifted his personal documents from World War II to the Mizel Museum at the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture. These documents detail his family’s struggle to survive the Holocaust.
One of the first objects you see in the newly expanded Jewish Museum London,is also one of the museum’s oldest: the remains of a 13th-century Jewish ritual bath uncovered during a 2001 construction project. We see a doll, letters and photos carried by some of the 10,000 Jewish children rescued from Nazi Germany by Britain in 1938 and 1939 in the Kindertransport. But we also learn that in 1940 some 27,000 Jewish refugees from Germany were treated as enemy aliens and held in detention camps.
REMEMBERING: Herbert Levy remembers his time as a 10-year-old Jewish boy in the internee camp at Bradda Glen, Port Erin
When Herbert Levy was 10 years old, he spent a summer in Bradda Glen holiday camp in Port Erin. It was 1939 and he was a Jewish internee sent to the Isle of Man with many other ‘alien enemies’ in Britain. He said: ‘We tried to leave Germany for a long time but other countries just wouldn’t have us. But after Kristallnacht, the night the synagogues were smashed, Britain agreed to take Jewish children on a kindertransport train and I was one of those children who came over.”
Dan Springer, chairman of the fine and performing arts department at Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School.
CAPE COD —In 1995, Springer was hired to teach at Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School where he has served as chairman of the school’s fine and performing arts department since 2007. Springer grew up in New York City, the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors.His father Max Springer survived thanks to the Kindertransport. At age 10, Max Springer was sent to England “to relatives he didn’t know and a language he didn’t speak.”
The Prime Minister has recognised 27 British men and women as “Heroes of the Holocaust”. Here are their stories of extraordinary bravery in the face of Nazi persecution. Sir Nicholas Winton and Bertha Bracey are among those recognized.
A British Quaker who worked against Nazism in the 1930s has been honoured by the UK government. Bertha Bracey has now been posthumously awarded a medal, inscribed “In the Service of Humanity”. After the Nazis came to power in Germany, she campaigned for a relaxation of immigration controls for the sake of Jews and other persecuted groups. As Secretary of the Friends Committee on Refugees and Aliens, Bracey’s work was central to the establishment of the Kindertransport.
The first ever recognition of Britons who saved the lives of Jews and other persecuted groups during the Holocaust will be bestowed by the Prime Minister. Mr Brown said: “It is right that we reflect and learn from the past as we go forward in the future. That is why I was pleased to create a new award to recognise those amazing British individuals who through extraordinary and selfless acts of bravery protected and rescued Jews and others in the Holocaust.”
Nicholas Winton, the man called the British Schindler
Two surviving recipients, Sir Nicholas Winton and Denis Avey, will be given their medals in person while another 25 will be recognised posthumously. Mr Brown said all were ”true British heroes and a source of national pride for all of us” and should inspire future generations. Sir Nicholas Winton, who is now 100, organised the rescue of 669 mainly Jewish children by train from Prague in 1939