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.
The author, her husband, and Pricila, photo by Rachel Rubin Green
In July 2019, my husband Norm and I joined several members of the KTA on a commemorative tour of Europe for the 80th anniversary of Kindertransport… One indelible lesson from the trip was that many more European Jews, children and adults could have been saved had more countries allowed them entry.
Hannah Lessing, secretary general of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism, lobbied to include more descendants – for example, of those who left Austria after the war. She applauded the law, while recognising its limits. “This law is an important step that says Austrian society is finally ready to welcome the families that it drove away,” she said. ‘However, like other gestures, it can never truly make amends for the Holocaust.”
Between 1939 and 1941 up to 200 young Jewish refugees were accommodated at the castle trying to cope with dilapidated buildings, inclement weather and first and foremost with their new lives as refugees. The story of the Kindertransport 1938/39 is often portrayed as a bit of a feelgood story. It is true that over 10,000 underage refugees escaped from Nazi Central Europe to the relative safety of the UK via the scheme. But they suffered trauma, hardship and heartbreak along the way.
After her father’s business was appropriated by the authorities, her parents made the heart-wrenching decision to send her on the Kindertransport to England where families had offered their homes to Jewish children fleeing the persecution. She was seven years old. Charlotte never saw her parents again…Only in 2018 did she learn the awful truth that her mother was killed in the gas chambers at Chelmo, in April 1942.
Playwright Jonathan Lichtenstein talks to us about his new book, The Berlin Shadow, which describes how he accompanied his father on a journey back to Berlin, retracing the steps he took in 1939 on the Kindertransport
The Labour peer, who fled the Nazis on the Kindertransport, called on home secretary to adopt a more welcoming stance towards migrants
This story is built around 50 delicate letters, most written on the back of German period piece postcards: including garden scenes of fairy tales gnomes, elfs, leprechauns, and teddy bears designed for children. The letters were by Max Lichtwitz, a Berlin lawyer, to his six-year-old son Heinz or Heini Lichtwitz, the future Henry Foner. They evoke love, longing, and irreparable loss. Max, a widower, sent his six-year son Heinz to England to live in Swansea, Wales with Morris and Winifred Foner.
A new book which sheds light on the experiences of children of Kindertransport and their families has been published.The book, called the Berlin Shadow, reveals how Hans Lichtenstein’s experience deeply affected his son, the author’s, own childhood and behaviour and shows how the journey helped both process the trauma which was ever-present in their lives.
Her father was a devout chasid in Vienna who somehow made a lot of money. On a December evening in 1938, weeks after the Kristallnacht torching of Jewish homes and synagogues, her father put her and her two sisters on a bus to catch a train, then a boat that took them to England to live with a host family. She was 9.