Bruno Lunenfeld was born in Vienna, Austria in 1927, the only child in a prominent family. But despite his privileged childhood, his early memories include having his tram ticket stolen and his shoelaces cut by Hitler Youth, as well as the ache of parting from his mother to join the Kindertransport to England.
A memorial tribute to the child refugees who came to Britain on the Kindertransport will be unveiled in the autumn in Harwich, the point of entry for most of the arrivals.
Award-winning Essex artist Ian Wolter has created a statue depicting five children descending a ship’s gang-plank.
Tim Locke’s mother, Ruth Neumeyer, grew up in the German town of Dachau with her parents and brother Raymond. Despite not following the Jewish faith, several of Ruth’s relatives were Jewish, meaning under the Nazi’s Nuremberg laws she and her family were classified as second-class citizens.
Ruth and Raymond escaped Germany to the UK on the Kindertransport (German for children’s transport), which was an organised rescue effort of children from Nazi-controlled territory during World War Two.
IF it hadn’t been for a mix-up over passports, Albert Waxman would never have made it to the safety of a house in Manningham.
Albert was 14 when he left Germany and came to the UK on the Kindertransport, the rescue system taking 10,000 Jewish children out of Nazi-occupied Europe from 1938-39.
Arriving at a holiday camp in Kent, after an exhausting journey, Albert was one of 24 boys chosen to stay in a hostel in Bradford set up by Oswald Stroud, founder of Drummonds Mill.
Wreaths are due to be laid as a town falls silent to remember others.
At the spot where hundreds of young Jewish refugees arrived in 1938, a special service of remembrance is to be held this week.
Commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day on Thursday, January 27, Lowestoft rail station will host a special ceremony.
A Nobel Prize medal in chemistry won in 1998 by late Jewish physicist Walter Kohn, who was among the roughly 10,000 children saved from Nazi-occupied territories during World War II by the Kindertransport, will be auctioned next week.
Learn from film producer and author Deborah Oppenheimer as she discusses the 2000 documentary film “Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport.” The film tells the story about the British rescue operation known as the Kindertransport, which saved the lives of over 10,000 Jewish and other children from Nazi-occupied Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Danzig by transporting them via train, boat and plane to Great Britain.
Members of the Kindertransport have urged the government to reopen safe routes for refugees in Europe, especially children, trying to reach the UK or risk more tragedies occurring in the Channel.
Alf Dubs, Stephanie Shirley and Erich Reich, who all arrived in the UK as child refugees on the Kindertransport, said the UK was losing its moral authority in the world and urged the government to change tack.
When Lord Dubs saw children being carried wrapped in blankets out of small boats in Kent he was instantly taken back to the moment he arrived in Britain on the Kindertransport having fled the Nazis at the age of six. “What it made me feel is terrible pain for the people who are fleeing,” says the 89-year-old Labour peer. “People must be pretty desperate, having traveled so far anyway, to risk their lives in this way. It made me feel dismayed that our government is not enabling them to be safe.”
The Watford Inter Faith Association gathered to plant an oak tree within the Peace Garden at Cassiobury Park on December 5.
Led by the Association of Jewish Refugees, it was to honour the people and places that symbolise the enormous contribution of Jewish refugees.
Among those honoured were Harold Meyer, former Chair and Honorary President of the Watford Inter Faith Association and also Victor Garston, who both arrived in England on the Kindertransport in 1939.
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.
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.
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.
“The Story is Here” exhibit ends with tributes to the present-day families and passed-down creative passions of the Minnesotan Kindertransport
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.