This month marks the 82nd anniversary of the Kindertransport’s arrival into Harwich. The historic train carried 200 children from a Jewish orphanage near Berlin to Harwich. Overall, the huge rescue saw about 10,000 children travel to the safety of Britain to save them from the Holocaust.
Alongtime Madison professor who as an 8-year-old escaped the Nazis’ tightening grip on Czechoslovakia by way of a program known as Kindertransport is being remembered this week as a groundbreaking scientist with a love of opera who shared the story of her early life with thousands of students. Renata Laxova died early Monday after a brief illness, according to her older daughter, Daniela Lax. She was 89.
Founder of Reunion of Kindertransport group dedicated her life to bringing families of Jewish refugees back together.
(another castle story!) For a group of pampered celebrities, it is a place of torture created for our entertainment; there are rats, creepy crawlies, a plumbing system that barely works, no electricity and stone hard beds. But 80 years ago, for 200 Jewish children, Gwrych Castle in Wales was a salvation from almost certain death in Nazi occupied Europe.
The last time that Gisela Adamski shared her story of loss and survival in the Holocaust was this past June, on a virtual call with Newtown High School history students. Addressing a class that included some students who had been second graders during the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, Adamski spoke about how to survive trauma over the course of a lifetime — and urged students to have the courage to advocate for justice, peace and equality.
The estate in Abergele, north Wales, features in the new series of the ITV reality show, but in 1939 it was also a safe haven for 96-year-old Henry Glanz and 200 other children
When Abraham Grossman was a teenager, he fled his native Germany on what came to be known as the kindertransport, a rescue effort that brought about 10,000 Jewish children fleeing the Nazis to England. He returned just a few years later, but by then he was as a proud fighter in the British Army’s Jewish Brigade. Grossman, who died from the coronavirus in Israel this month at the age of 95, described his pride in participating in the fight against Nazism in his memoir.
Ruth Zimbler, a Kristallnacht Holocaust Survivor reflection on how that day changed her life forever. On December 10th (a month after Kristallnacht), Ruth and her 6-year-old brother were sent on the kindertransport to Holland…Her message is,”We have to support one another and ensure that we teach the message of the Holocaust and motivate people to follow this dictum ‘Let there be peace on earth and it let it begin with you.’ We cannot remain bystanders, we need to be upstanders.”
The House of Lords demanded on Monday a series of changes to the Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill, including to ensure continued help for unaccompanied child refugees.
Survivor Ingrid Wuga, who escaped Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport at 15 and was honoured by the Queen last year for her services to Shoah education, died in Glasgow at 96. The Dortmund-born survivor fled in June 1939 and was later joined in England by her parents. Mrs Wuga met her husband Henry, a fellow Kindertransport evacuee, at a refugee club in Glasgow and the two married in 1944. The couple founded a kosher caterer which they ran together for 30 years.
KTA member Josef Eisinger writes: The pandemic that engulfs us has dislocated all of our lives dramatically, often tragically—but for some among us, the obligatory isolation has been a boon for musing. Among the weighty matters I muse upon is my complicated bond to the city of Vienna, a place that I last visited just a year ago, but that owing to the coronavirus, now seems out of reach.
Born in 1925 in Danzig, Frank Meisler was rescued from Nazi-occupied Europe country and taken on the Kindertransport to England where he was raised by his aunt. Some of Meisler’s most famous European monuments (“The Departure,” Trains to Life – Trains to Death,” “The Final Parting,” and “Channel Crossing to Life”) are life-size tributes to the 10,000 children who were rescued by the Kindertransport.
Nussbaum was born Ruth Rozanski in Offenbach, Germany on Sept. 30, 1920. Following the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938, her mother managed to get her sister out of Germany on the Kindertransport to England. However, Nussbaum was past the 17-year age limit for the Kindertransport, so with the aid of HIAS( (founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), she made her escape from Nazi German on her own in 1940, with only the clothes on her back.
My mother, Anita Heufeld, was one of 10,000 rescued by the Central British Fund for German Jewry. Just short of her 14th birthday, she became an unaccompanied minor, fleeing for safe haven in England. Her parents and most of her extended family remained behind and were killed. My trip to Fischach was instigated when the Jewish Museum of Augsburg launched an exhibition on what had happened to the Kindertransport children after they escaped. The curators wanted to include my mother’s story.
A bronze statue honouring children saved from Nazi Europe could be displayed in Harwich if plans are approved.
In the town hall of Fischach, a village in southern Germany, I am staring at a glass display case holding the detritus of the Jews who once lived here. It is July 2019, eight decades after my mother fled this place as a child. And right in front of me, neatly labeled, are the remains of my family: one of my Great Aunt Mina’s books on home economics and a section of curtain from the house on the village square. The house from the old photograph. The house my mother once called home.
Book for young readers by artist Peter Sis will be published January 2021. “This is really a story about people who are leaving home,” Sís said. “We all leave home. And we realize that we can never go back to the same home we left as a child. And it’s also about someone who is a reluctant hero, a reluctant rescuer. We’re all trying to pay tribute to this man—this generous, quiet, wonderful man.”
The Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) said its ‘Kindertransport: Remembering and Rethinking’ looks at the legacy and contemporary relevance of the trains that carried Jewish children in Nazi-occupied lands to safety. AJR’s documentary podcast series uses its ‘Refugee Voices’ testimony archive, consisting of the recorded life stories of more than 250 Holocaust survivors and refugees, their first-person accounts weaved together.
The life of Sir Nicholas Winton, the Kindertransport hero who oversaw the rescue of hundreds of Jewish children, is set to be dramatised in a new Holocaust biopic. One Life will star 82-year-old actor Anthony Hopkins in the leading role alongside Johnny Flynn, 37, who will play the “British Schindler” at an earlier phase of his life. The film is reportedly set to arrive in UK cinemas next year.
Sir David Attenborough has spoken about the sisters from Berlin his family took in after they had fled Nazi Germany through the Kindertransport. The sisters, Irene and Helga Bejach, arrived in the UK just before war broke out. Their father was head of public health for a Berlin district – he was killed in Auschwitz in 1944. Their mother had died of tuberculosis. The girls spent the next seven years with the Attenboroughs, leaving after the war to join an uncle in New York.