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.”
ARTWORK created by the 1st Redditch Girls’ Brigade was recently displayed at a special exhibition…’The Kindertransport Memorial Flame’ – created by the group – was displayed at a central London venue next to Westminster Abbey.
Margot Lobree, a Holocaust survivor who was rescued as part of Kindertransport, will visit the North Hills Christian School and speak to students. Kindertransport, German for children’s transport, took about 10,000 children from Nazi territory to the United Kingdom before the war started. Many of the children were the only members of their families to survive the Holocaust.
Surrender and Sanctuary was a National Lottery-funded project to celebrate and commemorate the anniversaries of the town’s hugely-significant moments in history which were the surrender of the German U-boat fleet in 1918 and the arrival of the first Jewish refugee children, known as the Kindertransport, in December 1938.
Albert Wachsman was the only child from his town, Saarbrucken in Germany, chosen for the Kindertransport. His two older brothers were in Palestine and his younger brother was hidden on a farm in France when Albert’s mother put him on a train to Cologne in February 1939. He joined youngsters travelling to Harwich, Essex, then to a holiday camp in Dovercourt, Kent, housing 2,000 children. Most would never see their families again.
Renate Collins was five years old when she boarded a train to the UK – the last so-called Kindertransport to leave Prague in 1939, before the outbreak of the Second World War. A NEWPORT MP welcomed 86-year-old Collins to Westminster this week and shared with the House of Commons her remarkable story of how she narrowly escaped the horrors of the Nazis.
I think we need some refreshment from the likes of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Let’s forget about them for a few minutes and think about Nicholas Winton instead.
(Milwaukee) Dr. Sue Bernstein will share the courageous story of survival of her mother Ruth Wasserman Segal who was born in 1926 in Nuremberg, Germany. She survived the Holocaust by embarking on the Kindertransport from Germany en-route to England on April 18, 1939.
Profiles of five prominent Kindertransport successes
A caller made a moving appeal to listeners to help him locate his father who was on the Kindertransport in 1939.
At the age of six, Elga Kitchener came to Wales as a Kindertransport refugee to escape Nazi Germany, in June 1939. On the same day, her mother gave birth to her only sibling. Elga’s aunt Dinah would be caring for her in Abercynon until the family could be reunited in Wales. But Elga never met her sister Judis and she never saw her mother, great-grandmother or uncle again.