by Lichtenstein, Jonathan (2020); Published by Scribnner UK
A formally audacious and deeply moving memoir in three timeframes that confronts the defining trauma of the twentieth century, and its effects on a father and son. In 1939, Jonathan Lichtenstein’s father Hans escaped Nazi-occupied Berlin as a child refugee on the Kindertransport. Almost every member of his family died after Kristallnacht, and, arriving in England to make his way in the world alone, Hans turned his back on his German Jewish culture.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-berlin-shadow-living-with-the-ghosts-of-the-kindertransport-jonathan-lichtenstein/e062a657c8a2be7c?aid=56539&ean=9780316541015&listref=kindertransport-memoir&next=t(2018) Published by The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide
A cache of 40 letters discovered recently in a UK loft and digitized for The Wiener Library archive, documents the prelude to this more unusual experience from a child’s perspective. The letters were written by a boy in Vienna to his mother, who was already in the UK, over the course of an agonizing four-month separation. During this time each worked frantically towards a reunion that they could not be certain would happen as war clouds gathered. May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Reich, Erich (2017); Published by i2i Publishing
The true story of a Jewish refugee boy, Erich, who arrived in this country from Nazi-occupied Europe three days before the start of the war. He was just four, and would never see his parents again. May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Elizabeth Anthony (2021); Published by Wayne State University Press
The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews after the Holocaust explores the motivations and expectations that inspired Viennese Jews to reestablish lives in their hometown after the devastation and trauma of the Holocaust. Elizabeth Anthony investigates their personal, political, and professional endeavors, revealing the contours of their experiences of returning to a post-Nazi society, with full awareness that most of their fellow Austrians had embraced the Nazi takeover and their country’s unification with Germany, clinging to a collective national identity myth as “first victim” of the Nazis. Anthony weaves together archival documentation with oral histories, interviews, memoirs, and personal correspondence to craft a multilayered, multivoiced narrative of return focused on the immediate postwar years.
The Compromise of Return is the first such social history to depict how survivors, individually and collectively, navigated postwar Vienna’s political and social setting. This book will be of special interest to scholars, students, and readers of Holocaust and European studies.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-compromise-of-return-viennese-jews-after-the-holocaust-elizabeth-anthony/15134062?ean=9780814348383&next=t&next=tby Locke, Tim (2014)
Perspectives on family stories of Görlitz, Dachau, the Kindertransport and the Holocaust. Tim Locke, whose mother Ruth(nee Ruth Neumeyer) and uncle Raimund escaped Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport to England, investigates and shares his family history from the 18th century forward.
by Williams, Frances (2014); Published by Bloomsbury Academic
Introduction: The Forgotten Kindertransportees: A Scottish Experience 1. Protecting the Status Quo: The Reception of the Trans-migrants 2. The Making of an Invisible Trans-migrant: Kindertransportee Care 3. Scottish Care for the Jewish Minor: Kindertransportees’ Adaptation to a New Jewish Life 4. Creating New Olim in Scotland: The Limitations of a Zionist Endeavour 5. Narrating Life Stories: The Long-term Impact of a Residential Upbringing 6. Imagining Scotland: The Scottish Legacy after Migration Appendices Glossary Bibliography Index. May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center
(2018) Published by Girl Museum
A lovely online resource, showcasing photographs, documents, and videotaped oral histories, with a robust study guide that meets common core educational goals.
by Guske, Iris, Dr (2007); Published by Centre for German Jewish Studies, University of Sussex
Unpublished doctoral thesis featuring several members of the KTA.
by Craig-Norton, Jennifer (2019); Published by Indiana University Press
Jennifer Craig-Norton sets out to challenge celebratory narratives of the Kindertransport that have dominated popular memory and literature. According to these accounts, the Kindertransport was a straightforward act of rescue and salvation, with little room for a deeper, more complex analysis. Craig-Norton emphasizes the use of archival sources, many of them newly discovered testimonial accounts and letters. This evidence allows compelling insights into interactions between children and parents and caregivers and shows readers a more nuanced and complete picture of the Kindertransport.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-kindertransport-contesting-memory-british-academy-postdoctoral-fellow-jennifer-craig-norton/3dadf50862e07ccd?ean=9780253042217&next=t&aid=56539&listref=kindertransport-history&next=tby Fry, Helen (2007); Published by Sutton Publishing
This book tells the compelling story of the 10,000 German and Austrian nationals who, fleeing Nazi persecution, arrived in Britain between 1933 and 1939, and at the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939 became ‘enemy aliens’. Many volunteered to serve in the British forces, swore allegiance to George VI and became known as ‘the King’s most loyal enemy aliens’. Interviews with several KTA members are featured, as well as an impressive selection of archive photographs, many of which are reproduced for the first time. May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Shmuel, Naomi Anne (2024); Published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing
In a variety of genres and narrative styles, author and poet Karen Gershon chronicled her European childhood, rescue on the Kindertransport, and life in the aftermath of the Holocaust, with unmatched candor and stunning insight. Based on Gershon’s private archives and letters to her sister, this biography presents a fascinating portrait of a child survivor whose talent for writing crowned her the voice of a whole generation. The major events of Gershon’s life are presented with great perspicacity alongside her development as a writer forced to change languages.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-legacy-of-karen-gershon-child-survivor-to-author-and-poet-naomi-anne-shmuel/5aa31747b5b9036f?aid=56539&ean=9781036406134&listref=kindertransport-memoir&next=tby Schindler, Meriel (2024); Published by W. W. Norton & Company
Meriel Schindler spent her adult life trying to keep her father, Kurt, at bay. But when he died in 2017, he left behind piles of Nazi-era documents related to her family’s fate in Innsbruck, Austria, and a treasure trove of family albums reaching back to before World War I. Meriel was forced to confront not only their fractured relationship, but also the truth behind their family history.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-lost-caf-schindler-one-family-two-wars-and-the-search-for-truth-meriel-schindler/0728eca3be537c1e?aid=56539&ean=9781324074571&listref=if-you-are-interested-in-the-kindertransports-you-might-be-interested-in&next=tPublished by Down County Museum
Jewish children, who escaped on Kindertransports, and other refugees from Nazi terror found refuge in a remote farm on the Ards peninsula in the late 1930s. The Belfast Jewish community had leased the farm to provide a home and living for these refugees. In Millisle and Donaghadee the local communities, including Millisle Primary School, proved to be firm friends of the farm, providing help with whatever was needed.
by Chadwick, W.R. (2010); Published by Matador
May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Deborah Cadbury (2022); Published by PublicAffairs
In 1933, the same year Hitler came to power, schoolteacher Anna Essinger saved her small, progressive school from Nazi Germany. Anna had read Mein Kampf and knew the terrible danger that Hitler’s hate-fueled ideologies posed to her pupils, so she hatched a courageous and daring plan: to smuggle her school to the safety of England.
As the school she established in Kent, England, flourished despite the many challenges it faced, the news from her home country continued to darken. Anna watched as Europe slid toward war, with devastating consequences for the Jewish children left behind. In time, Anna would take in orphans who had given up all hope: the survivors of unimaginable horrors. Anna’s school offered these scarred children the love and security they needed to rebuild their lives.
Featuring moving firsthand testimony from surviving pupils, and drawing from letters, diaries, and present-day interviews, The School that Escaped the Nazis is a dramatic human tale that offers a unique perspective on Nazi persecution and the Holocaust. It is also the story of one woman’s refusal to allow her belief in a better world to be overtaken by hatred and violence.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-school-that-escaped-the-nazis-the-true-story-of-the-schoolteacher-who-defied-hitler-deborah-cadbury/17442655?ean=9781541751187&next=t&next=tby Whiteman, Dorit Bader (1993); Published by New York: Insight Books
Dorit Bader Whiteman has woven together the stories of 190 escapees, including several who left via the Kindertransports.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-uprooted-a-hitler-legacy-voices-of-those-who-escaped-before-the-final-solution-dorit-bader-whiteman/a76f09b76b4773ac?aid=56539&ean=9780738205793&listref=kindertransport-history&next=tby Bentwich, Norman (1956); Published by London: Cresset Press
Norman Bentwich writes of his involvement with the Kindertransport movement.
by Guske, Iris (2009); Published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing
The present volume is the result of an interdisciplinary oral history research project, which was carried out at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex. While each Holocaust survivor’s developmental story is unique, it is, however, linked to the others’ by the common experience of negotiating an identity between two countries, cultures, and religions against the background of unparalleled political upheavals, and as such also sheds light on, and offers ways out of, the traumata suffered in present-day contexts of enforced migration and displacement.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/trauma-and-attachment-in-the-kindertransport-context-german-jewish-child-refugees-accounts-of-displacement-and-acculturation-in-britain-iris-guske/158ab50e8bc48cca?aid=56539&ean=9781443805032&listref=kindertransport-history&next=tby Baumel, Judith Tydor (1990); Published by Juneau, AK: Denali Press
A scholarly book by the author of two theses on the Kindertransport movement. May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Curio, Claudia (2006); Published by The Zentrum fuer Antisemitismusforschung of the Technische Universitaet Berlin
In this book, her doctoral dissertation, Claudia Curio delves into the question of why for so long pre-WWII emigration studies tended to overlook the Kindertransport experience in contrast to the attention given to the Youth Alijah. Through use of well documented case studies and extensive analysis Curio provides raises many issues of intimate concern to Kinder, and which, as she skillfully shows, had lasting influence on their lives. May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.