Nicholas Winton’s 111th Birthday
The Google Doodle on 19 May marks what would have been the 111th birthday of Sir Nicholas Winton, who single-handedly saved 669 Jewish children from the Holocaust. Five years after his death in 2015, Google marked Sir Winton’s 19 May birthday with a Doodle showing children at a train station to represent the escape of primarily Jewish children from German-occupied Czechoslovakia in the lead up to World War II.
The 75th anniversary of VE Day was made extra special for 250 older residents of Leeds Jewish Housing Association (LJHA) when they received bumper gift boxes to mark the occasion. One recipient was 94-year-old Gilly Rawson, a Holocaust survivor. At the age of 13, she was one of the Kindertransport children taken from Vienna to Liverpool to escape Nazi persecution. Her late husband also travelled on the Kindertransport scheme from Gdansk, and later served with the Royal Air Force in Burma.
Ruth David was 10 when the Kindertransport — which helped 10,000 children escape from Nazi-controlled parts of Europe just before the outbreak of World War II — saved her from what likely would have been death in a concentration camp. She would go on to translate the tragedies of the Holocaust into two books. She fashioned a life of teaching and speaking internationally on what it meant to survive the reign of terror that left millions, including her parents, dead.
Nuremberg, where Henry grew up, was the epicentre of Nazi power. Henry fled Nuremberg in May 1939 after his mum managed to secure him a place on the Kindertransport. “When we got on the train to head for the Dutch border with all those young children, it was one huge howl from 150 children. I have never forgotten it. “It’s so important we remember what happened then and celebrate the outstanding occasion of VE Day and think about the sacrifices people made.
Mr. Toren, who died of the coronavirus, was a patent lawyer who recovered a relative’s stolen painting amid a large cache of works discovered in Germany. David’s father managed to squeeze his son, now 14, onto what would prove to be the last Kindertransport evacuation to Sweden before World War II broke out.
Kindertransport refugee Bernd Koschland recalls learning that his father Jacob managed to sneak a set of tzitzit into Dachau Concentration Camp, which was liberated 75 years ago today.
L.A. Theatre Works has made the acclaimed plays “Judgement at Nuremberg” and “Kindertransport” available for free via the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust website. Both audio plays will be accessible until June 1, 2020.
The family of Lore Gordon, who was among the German Jewish children evacuated to Britain on the Kindertransport, have paid tribute to her following her death at the age of 96 after contracting Covid-19. The virus, said her family, had achieved what Hitler and the Blitz failed to do – “to quench an adventurous, positive and generous loving spirit”. Lore first came to Britain with her sister in 1939 at the age of 16 as one of 10,000 German Jewish children sent through the Kindertranspor
Siegfried Fred Singer was born on Sept. 27, 1924, in Vienna to Joseph Singer, a jeweler, and his wife, Anna, according to the 2004 book “Shapers of the Great Debate on Conservation: A Biographical Dictionary.” His family fled the Nazis, sending him to England through the kindertransport program. He made his way to the United States in 1940 and was reunited with his family in Ohio.
Peer and refugee rights campaigner Lord Alf Dubs is to tell how he fled the Nazis when he issues the secular Easter message to atheist and humanist prisoners in the UK on Friday. Czech-born Dubs, who came to Britain on the Kindertransport, will tell the prisoners how he escaped the Holocaust when he addresses inmates via National Prison Radio on Good Friday in an initiative organised by Humanists UK.
Several books and films have told the story of the 10,000 Jewish children who were spirited out of Europe during World War II on Kindertransport trains to safety in Great Britain. Lesser known is the smaller post-war British mission to rescue Jewish orphans who had survived concentration camps and help them reclaim their lives. The story is the subject of the PBS drama “The Windermere Children.”
At the end of February, the refugee crisis in Europe boiled over. Thousands flocked to the border between Turkey and Greece, which remained closed to them. The Greek authorities, overwhelmed by the numbers, responded with tear gas, including against families with children. Now coronavirus threatens to overwhelm the camps and the border between the two countries where refugees are amassing.This is the latest chapter in our continent’s shameful treatment of those fleeing war.
Wolf Kahn, a landscape painter who applied a vibrant, adventurous palette to studies of tangled forests and fog-shrouded mornings, died on March 15 at his home in Manhattan. Hans Wolfgang Kahn was born on Oct. 4, 1927, in Stuttgart, Germany. His father was Jewish, and the rise of Hitler put the family in jeopardy; in 1939 his grandmother arranged for him to be sent to England via Kindertransport. http://www.wolfkahn.com/
Kind Ruth Barnett, 85, was collecting an MBE for services to Holocaust education and awareness. Holocaust education campaigner Ruth Barnett described her heartbreak at recent “awful” scenes of hostility towards migrants in Greece, and hit out at the UK government for “going back on their word” to take in more child refugees. Ruth, who was made an MBE for services to Holocaust education and awareness, described politics as “absolutely toxic” in relation to the global refugee crisis.
The daughter of the Kindertransport founder Sir Nicholas Winton, Barbara, and Lord Eric Pickles are on the lineup at a Holocaust remembrance conference for second generation families. The conference “Remembering and Rethinking: The international forum on the Second Generation” will run from 21 to 22 April at Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge stadium, aimed at second generation families, Holocaust educators and academics. You can buy tickets online.
A POIGNANT statue remembering the children saved from Nazi Germany by the Kindertransport could go on display in Harwich, if a project is successful. The sculpture, which could cost £500,000, would commemorate the child refugees who escaped Adolph Hitler’s reign of terror in parts of Europe ahead of the Second World War.
Seven years ago, Jennifer Craig-Norton uncovered a cache of original correspondence about a group of Kindertransport children. A Ph.D. candidate in England at the time, she had no idea that voices of child refugees from the past would end up shining a light on the global child refugee situation of today. But that’s exactly what happened when the stories of World War II’s “kinder children” became the inspiration for “The Kindertransport: Contesting Memory,” published last summer.
Kindertransport” will debut at Ensemble Theatre on March 6. The show focuses on a British rescue mission during World War II which saw 10,000 Jewish children placed into foster homes in the U.K. Helga and Werner Schlesinger are parents faced with the difficult choice of keeping their beloved daughter Eva in Germany with them, or letting her become one of the Kindertransport children. The show stars Cleveland’s own Dorothy Silver. Katia Schwarz will direct the play.
A children’s carousel of the kind installed in British playgrounds in the 1930s has been selected by the city of Frankfurt to commemorate the unaccompanied children on the Kindertransport from Nazi Germany and other occupied territories before the outbreak of the Second World War. The Orphan Carousel, conceived by the Israeli artist Yael Bartana, features texts that could be quotations from the children who were saved and from their parents, most of whom were killed in Nazi death camps.
Bring your tissues. As described aptly in the College of Entertainment and the Arts emails, “Kindertransport depicts the agony of separating a child from her parents and wrestles with the consequences of that choice, an act of sacrifice that also wreaks devastating results.”