Bill Graham opened the Fillmore East in New York’s East Village on this day in 1968 with a concert that featured Big Brother and the Holding Company (Janis Joplin), Albert King, and Tim Buckley. Graham (Wolodia Grajonca) was given to a Berlin orphanage at age 8 by his Russian mother in Nazi Germany. He was spirited to France, and then to the U.S. in 1941 as part of HIAS’s “One Thousand Children” kindertransport (the only unaccompanied children rescued from the Holocaust by the U.S.).
65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, should the Holocaust’s place in Jewish literature change? A quick look at the programme for Jewish Book Week shows a diverse range of topics, from cookery to sport, mathematics to Hebrew, the global economic crisis to the one in Israel-Palestine. And then, of course, there’s the Holocaust: as embedded in contemporary Jewish literary culture as riffs on overbearing mothers and diasporic angst.
Our father, Peter Spiro, who has died aged 79, was a child Holocaust survivor. Born in Vienna, he came to Britain alone as an eight-year-old, on the kindertransport trains from Nazi-occupied Austria. Peter was later reunited with his father, a journalist, writer and radical, and then with his beloved mother. Peter was always grateful and loyal to the Britain that welcomed him and his family.
Henry Ehrenreich was born in Frankfurt on May 11, 1928, the only child of Frieda and Nathan—a prominent pianist, choral conductor, and music critic. It was not an auspicious time to be born a Jew in Germany. On June 20, 1939, Frieda entrusted 11-year-old Henry to the Kindertransport. The visa on which Henry traveled, and which saved his life, had been issued to a distant cousin whose family passed it on to Henry when they decided to stick together.
The exhibit, which features 600 of the altered pages, will be in San Francisco at the Contemporary Jewish Museum through June 8, 2010. “France is having a very difficult time with facing its history of the Holocaust,I am amazed that that quality of response and the deep emotionalism comes from France.” said Ralph Samuel, who was born in Dresden and survived the war as part of the Kinder Transport.
She turned to Heilbrunn and asked, “Am I giving you joy?” “Yes,” Heilbrunn replied. “The more I’m with Inge … I get good feelings about our meetings,” Glicksman said. “I remember sitting at breakfast and hearing a knock at the door,” Heilbrunn said. Her father was taken and imprisoned in Buchenwald for a time. On Dec. 1, 1938, Heilbrunn and her sister were placed in the Kindertransport. Heilbrunn was 14, her sister 11. For information about iVolunteer, go to ivolunteerny.com
Class 4 of St. Teilo’s School, Tenby, remembers Holocaust Memorial Day (January 27).
Class 4 of St. Teilo’s School, Tenby, remembered Holocaust Memorial Day (January 27) when Mrs. Annette Hollows gave the class a talk about Sir Nicholas Winton and the Kindertransport and the horrors of the Holocaust. The class responded by producing a book of prayers for all those who died during WW2.
“I was 11-years-old, came home from school and my father said I could not go back to school the next day,” said Anne Herrman, a resident of Greenspring Village in Springfield. “He said he and my mother could not go to work.” “At midnight in April 1939, my sister and I were taken to the train station by my parents,” Herrman said.“‘We will never see you again [her parents said].’” She and her sister had become part of Kindertransport, a program that transported Jewish children out of Germany.
Martin Maxwell, 85 accepts honorary degree.
A Toronto businessman who narrowly escaped the Holocaust as a teenager was awarded an honourary diploma from a Summerhill private school this morning. Orphaned at a young age in Austria, Mr. Maxwell left a Vienna orphange at 14 following Kristallnacht, and never received his high school diploma. He narrowly escaped being sent to a concentration camp, where his two younger sisters lost their lives, on a Kindertransport to England.
Vernon W. Fischer, a popular retired professor at St. Louis University School of Medicine, died Tuesday (Feb. 2, 2010)after a lengthy illness and a stroke last year. Colleagues said Professor Fischer could make a dry subject — anatomy — meaningful. Senior medical students recognized him as a top teacher, awarding him their Golden Apple award. Professor Fischer was born in Germany in 1923. In August 1939,he fled through the Kindertransport. He lived in England before moving to St. Louis.
Martin Maxwell, 85, was 14 years old and about three months shy of earning a high school diploma when he fled Vienna in 1939. Maxwell escaped to England, joined the British armed forces, became a glider pilot, was captured behind enemy lines and later freed. Despite the horrors he has witnessed he maintains a cheerful demeanour and sense of humour. As he prepared to receive his diploma, Maxwell joked: “I hope they don’t expect me to go to university next.”
Susi Bechhofer visited a school as part of a week of events marking the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Susi Bechhofer, who escaped Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport in 1939, visited Barr Beacon Language College, and spoke to over 100 pupils about the atrocities and her journey in finding her true identity. For over 50 years Susi did not know her identity, having been sent to an orphanage as a child and brought up as a baptist in Wales.
About 60 pupils from Lothingland and Gisleham Middle Schools caught a train to travel from Beccles to Lowestoft yesterday morning to recreate part of a journey made by Jewish refugee children as part of Holocaust Memorial Day. The children, who carried handmade replica suitcases on the trip, arrived at the station in time for the unveiling of a memorial plaque which commemorates the arrival of a kindertransport train carrying Jewish refugees at Lowestoft railway station in December 1938.
Harry Bibring, a Holocaust survivor, is visiting The Helena Romanes School and Sixth Form Centre, in Great Dunmow. He will be talking to Year 10 students about his experiences during an event organised to mark the international Holocaust Memorial Day. Mr Bibring was born in Austria in 1925. His family suffered from persecution following Germany’s annexing of Austria in 1938 and the family planned their escape. He was sent by his parents to the UK with his sister on a Kindertransport.
His parents and sister perished at Auschwitz concentration camp. Sixty-five years later, Walter Kammerling ensured their memories lived on during moving Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations in Bournemouth. As a youth, Walter witnessed Nazi persecution in Vienna before his parents sent him to Britain; a decision that would ultimately save his life.
A woman who lost more than 65 members of her family in the Nazi Holocaust spoke of her devastating experiences, as part of a national commemoration. Mrs Collins was just five when she was bundled onto a train by her mother and family doctor with no idea where she was going on June 30, 1939. She had no idea that she would never see her mother, Hilda Altschul, or father, Otto Heinz, again. Both were to die in Poland’s concentration camps.
From the Uxbridge Gazette: 2,000 children from 33 schools will commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day in Northwood – the largest in the UK. Ann Kirk, 81, was just 10 when she left her parents in Germany in 1938 and escaped to England on a Kindertransport. “The Holocaust has become part of history but it’s so important that the world never forgets what happened and never underestimates the danger of racial prejudice and discrimination – that’s exactly why we share our experiences.”
Primary school children from across Liverpool will unite at the Town Hall tomorrow to hear the stories of people affected by the Holocaust. They will meet three women who fled to the UK to escape the Holocaust and will take part in questions and discussions. Speaking to the young people will be Inge Goldrein, a retired circuit judge, who escaped to the UK in 1939, aged eight, on a Kindertransport from Vienna.
On Thursday 21, the psychosexual therapist speaks at Planned Parenthood of Illinois’s annual Roe v. Wade event,“The Future of Choice.” You were very young when your family sent you from Frankfurt to Switzerland on a Kindertransport. “On January 5, 1939, I was on that train. If my parents hadn’t put me on that train, I wouldn’t be alive. Every January 5, some of my friends and I who were on the train, we talk to each other.”
A woman who lost 60 members of her family in the Nazi holocaust and escaped from Prague on the last children’s train from the city in 1939 will tell her story at Bridgend’s Holocaust Memorial Day. Renate Collins, who went on to grow up in the South Wales Valleys, lost approximately 60 members of her family in the Holocaust, including her parents Otto and Hilda Kress. She still wears her mother and grandmother’s rings which were smuggled out of a concentration camp in a loaf of bread.