A Kindertransport boy and his loving wife have celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary. Hermi Rothman arrived in England as a Kindertransport refugee in 1939 and was placed at Gwrych Castle in North Wales, which made headlines this year when ITV’s I’m A Celebrity was filmed at the location. As soon as he was old enough, Mr Rothman joined the British Army out of gratitude to the country that had taken him in.
Her ordeal began on December 1st, 1938, the day that ten year old Sessy was separated from her beloved mother. It was also the last day that she would ever see her, as her train slowly departed Berlin toward the groups trek to England. This was the first train of the Kindertransport, a rescue mission undertaken by British Jewish leaders on November 15th a few days after Kristallnacht. The first train had some 260 Jewish children, sixty of them from religious homes.
Walter Kammerling was among 10,000 Jewish children who fled occupied Europe through the Kindertransport scheme. His sister, mother and father all died at Auschwitz. Over years of speaking at local schools, Mr Kammerling told thousands of children how he was put on a Kindertransport train in his native Vienna in December 1938, at the age of 15.
Heartfelt tributes have been paid to two Kindertransport refugees, Walter Kammerling and Marc Schatzberger, who have died in their mid-90s. Holocaust educators remembered the Vienna-born survivors, reflecting on their contributions to teaching about the Shoah and the trauma they went through, escaping after Kristallnacht.
Heartfelt tributes have been paid to two Kindertransport refugees, Walter Kammerling and Marc Schatzberger, who have died in their mid-90s. Holocaust educators remembered the Vienna-born survivors, reflecting on their contributions to teaching about the Shoah and the trauma they went through, escaping after Kristallnacht.
NPR Morning Edition: How old should kids be when they start learning about the Holocaust? While many educators believe the appropriate age is 10, a new book by Caldecott honoree and MacArthur fellow Peter Sís is recommended for children ages 6 to 9. Nicky & Vera: A Quiet Hero of the Holocaust and the Children He Rescued tells the true story of the Englishman Nicholas “Nicky” Winton, who rescued 669 children from the Nazis, including Vera Gissing.
The widow of a Holocaust survivor sobs on The Repair Shop as the Kindertransport box belonging to her now late husband is restored.
Uncle Richard’s arrest changed everything. A Viennese banker, he had been deported to the Dachau concentration camp in 1938, for the crime of being a Jew. Three weeks after Richard’s arrest, his niece, my grandmother, a nine-year-old girl named Inge Rubner, boarded a Kindertransport west-bound to London, a journey that would save her life. She was one of the lucky few. Millions of others also boarded trains — cattle carts, at gunpoint — bound for the death camps of the east.
Designer of Kindertransport memorial at Liverpool Street Station died in 2018, and now his daughter Marit looks to the challenge of bringing ‘a young, new vision’ to his legacy
Book by Jonathan Lichtenstein (Little, Brown Spark, nonfiction, on sale Dec. 15) What it’s about: A father and son reconnect and repair their relationship by reliving the elder’s traumatizing experience as a child refugee on the Kindertransport.
The 92-year-old Bolsterstone man was born in 1928 into a family of wealthy German Jewish horse breeders. Then, as the continent of Europe hurtled towards the horrors of World War Two, he survived Kristallnacht to escape Germany on the Kindertransport, arriving in Sheffield in 1939. Later he was evacuated to a Nottinghamshire farm where he learned English, eventually meeting an English girl and living happily ever after in a South Yorkshire ‘log cabin’ for the next 70 years.
Plans are in the pipeline to create a bronze statue which would commemorate the child refugees who escaped Adolph Hitler’s reign of terror in parts of Europe ahead of the Second World War. Hundreds of the children, most of whom were Jewish, arrived in Harwich on December 2, 1938. To remember the town’s efforts in the rescue The Harwich Kindertransport Memorial and Learning Trust is working to create a memorial statue and education programme.
Sue Pearson, who has died aged 92, came to Sheffield from Prague on the Kindertransport in 1939 at the age of 11. Her childhood experiences bred a lifelong commitment to improving the lives of all children. In March 1939, Hitler occupied the remainder of what was then Czechoslovakia. Sue’s secular Jewish parents took the brave decision to send her on a Kindertransport in June 1939, thinking it would be a temporary measure, but Sue never saw them again.
To mark the anniversary of the Kindertransport project, in which Britain agreed to accept ten thousand unaccompanied refugee children, the vast majority of whom were Jewish, from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939, the AJR (Association of Jewish Refugees) recently held a special zoom meeting. This was hosted by British celebrity Dame Esther Rantzen and one of the main speakers was Sir David Attenborough, whose family had hosted two girls from Germany.
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