News

Wells Maltings plan events for Holocaust Memorial Day

Posted on December 3, 2021

The centrepiece of the Maltings commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day is FÜR DAS KIND / For the Child, a major photographic exhibition by artists Rosie Potter and Patricia Ayre.

The pair asked survivors to share the personal belongings that accompanied them as children on the Kindertransport. Very often these objects were the last physical contact the children had with their parents. The exhibition opens in the Maltings Handa Gallery on January 18, until January 29.

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Pocket dictionary that opened new life chapter for Kindertransport girl

Posted on November 13, 2021

With its frayed leather cover and well-thumbed pages, it is an ordinary German-to-English dictionary.

But for one of the last Jewish children to flee Vienna after the Nazis took power, this was a vital tool for her new life in Britain. The book, on show in a new exhibition on the Kindertransport, belonged to Susanne Perl.

Born Susanne Spritzer, she carried it with a ticket onto the train that brought her safely out of Austria, before she found a temporary new home in Edinburgh.

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Kindertransport Which Saved Thousands Of Jewish Children Is Nearly Forgotten

Posted on November 11, 2021

It is particularly disappointing to find that the Kindertransport, an important historic chapter, that reflected the best of humanity and should serve of a beacon of hope in the darkest of times, is being forgotten. Now more than ever it is critical that we find new and innovative ways to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust through education. Not just for the memory of the six million who were murdered and the survivors still with us, but for the generations to come.

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Kindertransport news

Posted on October 29, 2021

“The Story is Here” exhibit ends with tributes to the present-day families and passed-down creative passions of the Minnesotan Kindertransport

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Stories of Kindertransport survivors brought to life in free school program

Posted on October 27, 2021

A FREE educational programme, which highlights Harwich’s pivotal role in the Kindertransport rescue, is being offered to schools across the country. The lesson plan, which was produced by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Harwich Kindertransport Memorial and Learning Trust, will encourage students to learn more about the mission which rescued 10,000 children from the Nazis. The port of Harwich was the main point of entry for most for the children who came to the UK.

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Britain rescued 10,000 Jewish children

Posted on October 24, 2021

Whenever I used to think of the kindertransport it was with gratitude to the organizers in Europe and Britain. I never gave much thought to the trauma the children and their parents must have gone through. I never stopped to imagine how my mother and her sisters felt having to leave their mother knowing that their father had already been arrested by the Nazis.

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The precious items that tell the real story of the Kindertransport children

Posted on October 23, 2021

An array of priceless belongings tell the story of the Kindertransport at the IWM’s new £30 million Second World War and the Holocaust Galleries in London. They are three times the size of the museum’s award-winning First World War Galleries, span two floors and see IWM become the first museum in the world to house comprehensive spaces dedicated to the Second World and Holocaust under the same roof.

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Benno Black

Posted on October 18, 2021

Black was one of 10,000 children evacuated to Britain and other countries during the “Kindertransport,” an effort to save Jewish children from what became the Holocaust. After fleeing Germany on a train in 1939, Black was taken in by a family in England. Later he joined the British Army and went on to fight the Germans in Holland. He never saw his parents again.

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‘Learning my father’s Shoah testimony years later was almost cathartic’

Posted on October 7, 2021

The problem of communicating between generations was tackled in a concluding discussion at the AJR conference. Danny Kalman, a trustee of the AJR, who chaired the session, is the son of a Kindertransport man from Frankfurt who arrived in Britain in 1939. But as he later made clear, for years he never spoke about his background or even his own Jewish identity. “I am able to be so much more open about things now”, he said.

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London Underground: The beautiful but tragic story behind the statue

Posted on September 28, 2021

Right within the forecourt of Liverpool Street station, parked in front of the entrance, stands a statue of five young children. Their expressions- pensive, confused, wonderstruck- are as immortalised in bronze as the teddy bear the youngest girl is clutching. The Arrival, by artist Frank Meisler, is a memorial to the 10,000 Jewish children that arrived in Britain, seeking refuge from Nazi tyranny across Europe.

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Exhibit honors humanity in the face of horror

Posted on September 24, 2021

The exhibit “Kindertransport — Rescuing Children on the Brink of War” (a project of the Yeshiva University Museum and the Leo Baeck Institute) tells the story. The American Swedish Institute (ASI) is hosting the exhibit through October in partnership with the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas and the Greenberg Family Fund for Holocaust Awareness at Beth El Synagogue.

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Teen refugees fleeing the Nazis found ‘real love story’ at Gwrych Castle

Posted on September 21, 2021

The children arrived at the castle in Abergele in 1939 as part of the 10,000 Jewish refugees who escaped to the UK from Nazi-occupied countries and at the time, only refugees aged 17 or under were allowed into Britain. Among those were teenagers Herthel and Gerhard, who met at the castle at age 14 before starting new lives in London and later getting married and having two children.

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Erika Schulhof Rybeck

Posted on September 21, 2021

Erika’s father was a decorated First World War veteran who, along with his wife, had converted from Judaism to Catholicism. Her parents shielded Erika from her Jewish ancestry and sent her to a convent school. Then, in May 1939, Erika’s parents told her the family were emigrating but that she would have to go in advance while they put their affairs in order. Erika, then 10, did not realise she was being placed in Kindertransport. Neither did she realise she would never see her parents again.

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Ein Karussell mit Widerstand

Posted on September 3, 2021

Article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine on the new Kindertransport memorial and exhibit opening in Frankfurt.

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Kindertransport – when Yorkshire banded together to bring child refugees to

Posted on September 1, 2021

In 1989, a couple of dozen people assembled at the Carlton Hotel in Bradford. Many had not seen each other for half a century. They had all been invited by Albert Waxman, a textile magnate. Exactly 50 years before their gathering, shortly before the Second World War, they had all met as child refugees in what was then called the Bradford Kindertransport Hostel.

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‘Kindertransport’ at the American Swedish Institute

Posted on August 27, 2021

An exhibition at the American Swedish Institute – actually two exhibitions, but related – asks us to look back more than 80 years to another time when children were separated from their parents, who believed they had no choice but to let them go.

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OPINION: Time to follow my dad’s example

Posted on August 27, 2021

Barbara Winton, daughter of the late Sir Nicholas Winton who organised the Kindertransport, draws parallels between the plight of Afghan refugees and those fleeing the Nazis

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From Kindertransport to the White House

Posted on August 25, 2021

For nearly four decades, Hella Pick, the doyenne of British diplomatic correspondents, had a front-row seat at the events that shaped the postwar age. But in her newly published memoirs, “Invisible Walls: A Journalist in Search of Her Life,” the pioneering female reporter reveals her constant and continuing struggle with feelings of insecurity about her identity. Pick traces that sense of herself as an outsider back to March 1939 when she arrived in London on the Kindertransport.

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Hi-de-Hi! fans display memorabilia for first time

Posted on August 25, 2021

The Hi-de-Hi! display is part of an exhibition showcasing the history of the Warners holiday camp at Dovercourt that hosted thousands of kindertransport children who fled the Nazis to Britain and was transformed into a military base during World War Two.

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Bid for Kindertransport memorial in Essex town

Posted on August 10, 2021

A Kindertransport memorial is set to be erected in the Essex port town of Harwich to commemorate the child refugees who came to the town. The planned statue, which is in construction by artist Ian Wolter, will show five children descending from a ship’s gangplank. Also planned is a town trail, audio bench and new information boards which will be strategically placed around the town. However, it will only be realised if £140,000 is raised – with around £70,000 already raised so far.

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