‘We can now confirm the children were on those trains’: Documents revealing how Jewish children fled the Nazis found by Nottingham experts
Posted on January 28, 2025
Surviving Kindertransportee Hanna Zack Miley, 92, who now lives Arizona in the USA, was contacted after being named in the new documents found by Nottingham researchers (Image: NTU)
Hundreds of documents detailing the personal stories of children who escaped the Nazis before the Second World War have been unearthed by Nottingham experts.
The remarkable finds relate to the Kindertransport programme – one of the largest organised rescue operations in history.
Between 1938 and 1940, thousands of Jewish children were transported to safety from parts of Nazi-controlled Europe ahead of the outbreak of war.
Many Jewish families already felt unsafe in the years before the conflict, due to a string of discriminatory laws implemented by the Nazi party in Germany that saw many people being murdered. The UK agreed to take thousands of Jewish children under 17 into temporary refuge.
Many families were separated and children were told there was a chance they would never see their parents again as they crossed the border into Holland after leaving Germany and other areas controlled by the Nazis.
Records collected by officials as the children caught trains to the UK were thought to have since been lost or thrown away, leaving many of the rescued with little information about how they reached safety.
A researcher from Nottingham Trent University has now found details of the journey. Dr Amy Williams discovered the documents in the archives at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Israel, while working on her second book.
The records are copies of original files held in Holland and list the names of almost all of the 9,000 children who fled to the UK and Holland on the Kindertransport.
“I essentially found them the second week I was there,” Dr Williams told Notts TV.
The ordinary suburban street with a long-hidden tale of daring rescue
Posted on January 28, 2025
Among the grand Victorian houses on Linnet Lane in Sefton Park is a building with a very special history. During the war, Number 19 Linnet Lane was used as a hostel to shelter 42 Jewish children who had fled the Nazi regime on the Kindertransport programme.
The Kindertransport was a rescue effort which took place between 1938 and 1939 in the lead-up to war with Nazi Germany. Around 10,000 children, most of them Jewish, arrived in the UK from Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia when it became clear Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies would endanger their lives.
UK Embassy holds event commemorating Int’l Holocaust Remembrance Day
Posted on January 28, 2025
Three Holocaust survivors – Walter Bingham, 101, George Shefi, 93, and Paul Alexander, 89 – attended along with the embassy staff, diplomats and their families (photo credit: Courtesy)
The British Embassy in Israel held an event to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day at the ambassador’s residence in Ramat Gan, with the March of the Living educational program.
Three Holocaust survivors – Walter Bingham, 101, George Shefi, 93, and Paul Alexander, 89 – attended along with the embassy staff, diplomats and their families.
The three survivors were sent by their families as children from Germany to Britain as part of the Kindertransport. The Kindertransport famously saved the lives of 12,000 children from Nazi Germany.
During the event, they played a documentary called “Journey of Hope: Retracing the Kindertransport 85 Years Later.” The documentary, produced by March of the Living, tells the stories of Alexander, Shefi, and Bingham.
In the documentary, the three spoke about what they remember from their former lives and their new ones.
I was 11 when my mum started crying at the TV then I learned her past
Posted on January 28, 2025
A Liverpool man only found out about his mum’s heartbreaking past when she “burst into tears” watching television. You knew it was a Sunday in the Winik household when Howard and his family where gathered around the TV to watch the 1970s BBC show That’s Life.
The 66-year-old, from Garston, along with his sister Cynthia, dad Arnold, and mum Mina, would tune in to see which pressing topic presenter Esther Rantzen would be covering. But one episode particularly resonated with Howard’s mum, as it delved into the Holocaust, prompting Howard to finally understand something that had long puzzled him.
He told the ECHO: “Esther had arranged for people who had come to the UK on the Kindertransport trains to be in the studio, and they stood up to thank the man who had organised the transport and saved their lives.
“My mum’s situation was similar to those children, and we were just sitting watching it when she burst out in tears. She was obviously quite upset about it. I remember still sitting in the front room in our family in Garston when it happened.”
At just 11 years old, Mina Hecht Winik had endured more than most could imagine. After Vienna fell to Nazi control and having lost her dad to Hitler’s regime, she was among the many children who escaped on the Kindertransport trains in March 1939, seeking a new life free from fear in Britain.
Alone and frightened, Mina navigated through Nazi-occupied territories before finding refuge in Liverpool. She spent several months residing in a Harwich hostel before a pivotal encounter at Liverpool Street Station with her future adoptive parents – a childless Jewish couple from Liverpool.
A family photo of the Winik’s taken in their home in Ryegate Road, Garston, in the mid 1960s -Credit:Howard Winik
Integrating into the city’s community under their care, Mina remained unaware of her family’s fate back in Vienna for many years. As she grew older, Mina tied the knot and, together with her husband Arnold, who she met at a local dance, had two children, Howard Winik and Cynthia Blake.
The traumatic experiences of her youth were left unspoken; however, her son Howard stumbled upon a startling revelation one summer while temping at the Greenbank Synagogue office.
Unearthing a letter sent to his mother’s maiden name, he said: “I found out everything by accident. I was working at the Greenbank Synagogue office one summer in a temporary position. I was looking through some files and found a letter addressed to my mum’s birth name.
Mina Winick, aged 27 in Liverpool -Credit:Cynthia Blake and Howard Winik
“At the time, I didn’t raise it with my mum; I was only a teenager, but I always wondered about it. It wasn’t discussed for a long time. I had a lot of questions, but I rationalised because I was afraid of what I might hear. I was curious for a long time because there were never any photos of my mum as a child.
“When we asked our adoptive grandmum, the question was always brushed off. We knew there was something strange, but we could never have guessed that she had come over from Austria because she didn’t have a strong accent.”
After Mina died, Howard and Cynthia embarked on an emotional journey to Vienna, where they discovered their granddad’s ashes were buried in the Jewish section of a cemetery. Mina’s mum, Taube, and three brothers, Abraham, Robert and Jacob, were interned in the camps during WW2.
Jewish group stage anti-Israel protest at Kindertransport monument on Holocaust Memorial Day
Posted on January 28, 2025
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The Kindertransport memorial at Liverpool Street Station was vandalised on Holocaust Memorial Day by a group called ‘Jews Against Genocide’. (Image: X)
Jewish demonstrators staged a protest against Israeli “genocide” at the Kindertransport memorial at Liverpool Street station in London on Holocaust Memorial Day.
They draped signs over the monument — which commemorates 10,000 children rescued from Nazi-controlled Europe before the War — and placed a wreath featuring the colours of the Palestinian flag next to another wreath made of yellow stars, referencing the badges Jews were forced to wear during the Shoah.
A post on X shared the picture of one sign, which carried the message: “Mourning the millions of Jewish children not on the Kindertransport slaughtered in the Holocaust, and the many thousands of Gazan children slaughtered by Israel in the genocide.”
The protesters wore signs describing themselves as “Jews Against Genocide” and calling for an arms ban on Israel.
The same group demonstrated at a second location on Monday, holding a short ceremony at the Cenotaph in Whitehall where they laid similar wreaths.
But the comparison between the Holocaust and the Israel-Gaza conflict was criticised by the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR).
AJR chief executive Michael Newman said, “The Kindertransport monument commemorates the lives of the mostly Jewish children who were given sanctuary in this country.”
“It honours the bravery of the parents who sent their children away and the families who took them in. As an organisation supporting victims of Nazism, the AJR is opposed to the use of Holocaust memorials for political purposes, as it creates a misleading comparison.”
Holocaust Memorial Day, observed each year on January 27, is dedicated to remembering those who perished in the Holocaust, including six million Jews, and raising awareness about the dangers of antisemitism and other forms of discrimination.
The Kindertransport memorial, located at a key arrival point for many of the Jewish children from the continent who were saved by the Kindertransport, serves as a symbol of efforts made to protect Jewish lives during the Holocaust.
The British Transport Police have been contacted for comment.
Author Carolyn Summer Quinn has received multiple accolades for her recent works, reinforcing her position as a notable writer in historical fiction and family drama. Her books Until the Stars Align and Vanished on the Vaudeville Circuit have earned recognition for their narrative depth and exploration of human resilience.
Until the Stars Align has been named a finalist for The Chrysalis BREW Project’s BREW Readers’ Choice Award 2024-2025. The novel, which focuses on the Kindertransport movement and the experiences of Jewish children fleeing Germany before World War II, highlights themes of family separation and survival amidst uncertainty.
Address:
Lowestoft Railway Station Parcels Office
Denmark Road
Lowestoft
Suffolk
NR32 2EG
United Kingdom
11:00am | Lowestoft Railway Station
Remembering Lowestoft’s connection to the Kindertransport, there will be a series of reflections and poetry given by Lowestoft Town Councillors and local academy schools. This event will also include the laying of wreathes.
Other organisation(s) involved
Wherry Lines Community Rail Partnership , Local Academy Schools
HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY: Lord Alf Dubs to speak on how his family escaped Nazi persecution
Posted on January 17, 2025
You’re invited to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day at our free event on Monday 27 January.
The event will be held at The Polish Social and Cultural Association (POSK) in King Street, Hammersmith. We’re marking the day with an in-person talk open to all residents. It runs from 11am to 1.30pm.
Lord Alf Dubs will be sharing his story on the day. He arrived in Britian aboard a Kindertransport train in 1939, aged six, as a refugee fleeing the Nazi occupation of Prague.
“The Germans occupied Prague in March 1939,” Lord Dubs said. “My father, who was Jewish, left immediately for the UK. In June, my mother, having been refused permission to leave, put me on a Kindertransport train with a knapsack of food for the journey.”
He travelled for three and a half days to get to London where his father was waiting for him. His mother later escaped and was able to join them in the UK.
“As we remember the terrible events of the Second World War it is my hope that we will also remember the humanity that was shown to children like me,” he said.
“And honour that humanity by standing together and once again welcoming those persecuted by war so they too can have hope for the future.”
Lord Dubs has spent his life campaigning for refugees and human rights and in 2016 sponsored an amendment – later known as the “Dubs Amendment” – to the Immigration Act 2016. This offered some unaccompanied refugee children stranded in camps in Europe safe passage to Britain.
He continues to campaign on behalf of refugees and currently serves on the British Irish Parliamentary Assembly and on the Justice and Home Affairs select committee.
Electric Palace and Essex University Kindertransport event
Posted on January 13, 2025
A FILM about a Kindertransport hero who helped save hundreds of youngsters from the Nazis will be shown in Harwich to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
The Electric Palace Theatre and Essex University have joined forces to organise a film screening and talk on Monday, January 27.
Royal Historical Society president Prof Lucy Noakes will introduce a screening of One Life, a 2023 film starring Anthony Hopkins which focuses on humanitarian British stockbroker Sir Nicholas Winton, also known as ‘Nicky’.
He rescued 669 children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia before the Second World War, bringing them to the UK via the rescue programme known as the Kindertransport.
They became known as ‘Nicky’s Children’.
The Kindertransport saw 10,000 mostly Jewish children sent to safety in Britain during 1938 to 1939.
Many arrived by ship in Harwich before being met at London Liverpool Street Station by Nicky and other helpers.
Focus – Professor Lucy Noakes has a particular interest in the experiences and memories of those who experienced the First and Second World Wars. (Image: University of Essex)
She will be introduced by Prof Sanja Bahun, who is an Electric Palace trustee and executive dean for the arts and humanities at the university.
Prof Bahun said: “The connection of this story with Harwich and the opportunity to learn about this significant part of local history makes this screening an ideal way to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
“Professor Noakes will offer a valuable introduction to the history of the Kindertransport and react on the significance of local social history in this context.”
The talk and screening will be on January 27 at 2.30pm.
There will also be a civic memorial service at 11am at the Kindertransport Memorial in Harwich.
Lowestoft Railway Station to host Kindertransport exhibition
Posted on January 12, 2025
The A Thousand Kisses exhibition will be on display at Lowestoft Railway Station from January 27 (Image: Lowestoft Central Project)
A railway station will host a Kindertransport exhibition to tell the story of 10,000 children who fled Nazi Germany.
The critically acclaimed exhibition, A Thousand Kisses, will be on display at Lowestoft Railway Station from January 27.
The exhibition tells the story of the Kindertransport through the experiences of eight children.
Between December 1938 and May 1940, almost 10,000 unaccompanied mostly Jewish children were brought to Britain from Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland in what became known as the Kindertransport.
Lowestoft Railway Station welcomed more than 500 children escaping Nazi persecution in Vienna in December 1938.
Yasmin Gledhill, digital engagement and community outreach officer at the Weiner Library, said: “We’re delighted to provide Lowestoft Railway Station with our A Thousand Kisses exhibition which tells the story of the Kindertransport through the experiences of eight children and the loved ones they left behind.
“Now more than ever, the story of persecution, migration and refuge must be shared.”
Martin Halliday, development officer at Community Rail Norfolk, added: “It is an honour to have secured this exhibition for Lowestoft, itself an arrival point of the Kindertransport.
“It will provide the public with a fascinating insight into this incredible initiative.”
Hosted by the Wherry Lines Community Rail Partnership and the Lowestoft Central Project, the free exhibition, staged as part of the National Railway 200th Anniversary, opens in the Parcels Office at Lowestoft Station at 1pm on Holocaust Memorial Day, Monday, January 27, 2025, and runs through on selected dates until February 8.
For many years, Lowestoft Station has hosted the annual Civic Service of Remembrance for Holocaust Memorial Day.
In 2023, a permanent interpretation panel retelling the events leading up to and arrival of the Kindertransport in Lowestoft was unveiled on the station concourse.
Holocaust survivor awarded Germany’s Federal Order of Merit for Holocaust education efforts
Posted on January 12, 2025
George Shefi meets with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. (photo credit: MARCH OF THE LIVING)
George Shefi, a Holocaust survivor who fled Nazi Germany as a child, was awarded the Federal Order of Merit by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The award was presented by the German Ambassador to Israel, Steffen Seibert, in an emotional ceremony at the Ambassador’s residence in Herzliya last Friday. The event, held ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, marking the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, was attended by four generations of Shefi’s family and Revital Yakin Krakovsky, Deputy CEO of the International March of the Living.
Ambassador Seibert praised Shefi’s decades-long dedication to Holocaust education in Germany, stating: “Germany wants to thank you for choosing, as a witness to history, despite the trauma you experienced as a child, to dedicate your life to telling your story in schools, sports clubs, and parliaments to create reconciliation and understanding for a better world. Anyone who has heard George will be able to stand up to Holocaust deniers.”
‘A great honor for Holocaust education’
Accepting the honor, Shefi remarked: “It is a great honor for me to receive the Federal Order of Merit from Germany for my long-standing work for Holocaust education in Germany. Holocaust survivors must tell their story because we are the last generation that can testify to things firsthand.”
The Federal Order of Merit recipient emphasized the importance of Holocaust education for younger generations: “During my life, I have done this with thousands of German students to whom I said that they are not to blame for what happened to us, but they are responsible for it never happening again. This award demonstrates the Germans’ understanding of what happened and their commitment that such a thing will not happen again.”
Born in Berlin in 1931, Shefi (born Spiegelglas) was sent to Britain on a Kindertransport at the age of seven to escape Nazi persecution following Kristallnacht. His mother, who stayed behind, was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and murdered there. Shefi later immigrated to Israel in 1949, where he built his life and family.
Details of their journey through Holland were not thought to have survived but have now been uncovered by a researcher from Nottingham Trent University.
Surviving Kindertransportee Hanna Zack Miley, 92, said: “I’m embracing more deeply both the losses and the deliverance, the saving of my life”.
The records were discovered in Israel by researcher Dr Amy Williams
Used by border officials in the Netherlands, the records contain the names of almost all the children who fled to the UK and Holland on the Kindertransport – up to 9,000 children – on more than 90 trains between December 1938 and August 1939.
They include details of the children’s names, home addresses, dates of birth, parents’ names, chaperones’ names, transport numbers and departure dates.
The documents were discovered in the archives at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, by Dr Amy Williams, a freelance research fellow who studied at Nottingham Trent University.
Adam Gidwitz: “Most people just want a good protagonist”
Posted on January 7, 2025
At the Neev Literature Festival, 2024, the American author of children’s books spoke about his love for espionage novels, honouring his ancestors in his work, why he included an Indian character in his latest book, and holding the attention of young readers
Let us begin with your latest novel, Max in the House of Spies. How did you end up creating this character called Max and the kind of fictional universe that he is part of?
I have known for a long time that I wanted to write about Kindertransport, which was an effort to get Jewish children out of Nazi Germany in 1938 and 1939. A close friend of my family — a brilliant music critic named Michael Steinberg — was one of the children on the Kindertransport. He was taken away from his mother in 1938 to England, where he lived for eight years not knowing whether she had survived the war. I knew the story and what an amazing thing it was but didn’t know how to tell it in a way that was fun for children. Engaging with a serious subject in a fun way is crucial. If children do not want to turn the pages, what is the point of me writing anything difficult or complex? They will never see it.
Unrelated to this, I was also reading the spy novels of John Le Carré and fell in love with them. They are beautiful works of literature set in the world of espionage. I was really inspired by them but did not make the connection with my own writing until COVID-19 hit. I was in quarantine in March, April and May of 2020, observing how the discourse in the United States was dominated by lies. Our President — Donald Trump — told people to inject bleach into their veins. People died. I wanted to explore the question, “How could a country become devoted to lies?” And the most obvious place to start was Nazi Germany.
That’s how Michael Steinberg, John Le Carré and the lies being spread during the pandemic came together for me. I had a story, a reason, and a method, so I sat and wrote the book.
“I have known for a long time that I wanted to write about Kindertransport, which was an effort to get Jewish children out of Nazi Germany in 1938 and 1939… I knew the story and what an amazing thing it was but didn’t know how to tell it in a way that was fun for children. Engaging with a serious subject in a fun way is crucial. If children do not want to turn the pages, what is the point of me writing anything difficult or complex? They will never see it.”
Did it feel like you were also honouring your ancestors by writing this book?
Yes, absolutely! Many people from my extended family were killed in the Holocaust. While that was on my mind, I also thought about the fact that there are so many books about non-Jewish heroes saving Jewish people, or about Jewish people who just are victims. I really wanted to write a novel about a Jewish boy who was a hero — a strong, resourceful person who figured things out. There are millions of true stories about Jewish people being heroes during World War II and the Holocaust but they do not tend to be told.
One memory of Hanukkah as a child lasts a lifetime for Holocaust survivor
Posted on December 25, 2024
Henry Baum, 97, doesn’t remember much about Germany being he was only a boy when his mother put him on the Kindertransport in order to escape the atrocities Jewish people were facing during the Holocaust.
However, there is one memory that he loves to recall.
“No matter what happens in your life, all of the good things you learn from your parents or remember as a child, will come back to you,” said Baum, who is among the people who have shared their stories during talks at The Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills that help to foster empathy, tolerance and understanding today.
A New Historical Finding: Kindertransport Lists (a blog post)
Posted on December 19, 2024
Dr Amy Williams is currently working with Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Yale University Press, and Camden House to produce new books on the history and memory of the Kindertransport. Dr Amy Williams is a current fellow at Yad Vashem.
It has been repeatedly claimed by scholars that the lists of mainly Jewish children who escaped from Nazism to Britain and many other countries between 1938-1940 no longer exist or that only remnants of the lists survived. However, I have accessed Kindertransport lists to Britain and the Netherlands from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in Yad Vashem’s extensive archive. Thanks to the support I’ve received from the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem, and The Baron Friedrich Carl von Oppenheim Chair for the Study of Racism, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust (founded by the von Oppenheim Family of Cologne), I have also been able to spend time working at the new National Library of Israel which hold the lists from Austria to Australia, Belgium, Britain, Sweden, and many other nations. While I was in America last year during my fellowship at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, The New School (thanks also to Ilse Melamid, former Kindertransportee and the Kindertransport Association) I was able to access lists from Gdansk, Poland to Britain at the Leo Baeck Institute, New York. I was also able to find out more about the children who fled into Switzerland at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. For the first time we are able to see these lists in relation to one another which provides important new historical and present day insights into the Kindertransport.
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The lists are not just names on a sheet as they tell thousands of stories. I know many Kindertransport families and I’ve received so many moving messages along the lines of “I did not think we would ever see the lists”. But there are so many Kinder who I do not know. In the Austrian archives you often come across application forms and letters next to the lists. They sometimes have small passport photos of the children stapled to the paperwork. I cannot put into words how I feel when I come across these documents. Every time I see the little photos I am stopped in my tracks. I cannot help but wonder if the children made it out alive. In one recent particular case I had found the three Kindertransport lists which connected to one family and then I received a message from them to ask if I could find another Kind who they knew. I actually managed to find their list. When I return to Britain from Israel I will finally get to meet them.
I and my co-author Bill Niven will now begin to fully analyze the lists in our new book on the transnational history of the Kindertransport for Yale University Press. Until the book is published if anyone would like to check whether they or their ancestors are named are lists please email amy.williams2011@my.ntu.ac.uk.
Guest speaker Brenda Dinsdale, honorary life president of Newcastle Reform Synagogue will explore the extraordinary story of the Kindertransport, a rescue effort which brought thousands of mostly Jewish children to Britain during the Second World War. Brenda will examine the stories of those who travelled and then settled in the North East.
Robin Herzog’s father, Steffen, was 8 when he and his brother boarded a train in Frankfurt headed to safety in England.
Jacqueline Shelton’s mother, Ilse, was 17 when her train left Berlin for the U.K.
Ralph Samuel was 7 when he took a flight on his own to England from Dresden.
They were among the 10,000 children, almost all of them Jewish, saved from Nazi-occupied Europe by the Kindertransport, a massive rescue operation that brought these children to the United Kingdom during the nine months before World War II broke out in September 1939.
The children said goodbye to their parents and other relatives at train stations and airfields in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Free City of Danzig, expecting to see them again as soon as it was safe. Most never again saw their families, who became caught up in the maelstrom of the Holocaust.
Herzog, Shelton and Samuel were among the lucky ones whose families survived.
I have vivid memories of my own departure from Germany with the Kindertransport on July 25, 1929, almost one month before the outbreak of World War II.
THE WRITER, at the age of three, walks with his parents. (photo credit: Courtesy Walter Bingham)
Last month, we commemorated Kristallnacht, “the night of the broken glass,” which took place during November 9-10, 1938. It was the major Nazi pogrom targeting Jews, which marked the beginning of the Holocaust.
The pogrom targeted all synagogues in Germany, Austria, and the already Nazi-occupied western Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland), which were burned down. The holy Torah scrolls were desecrated and were valuables stolen. Some 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps and thousands of Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed or damaged.
The fire brigade was there, not to douse the flames, but to cool down and protect neighboring German-owned property. Crowds of Germans stood by and watched it happen. At about 8 a.m., I arrived at my classroom, which was in the destroyed synagogue building. I saw it all.
Fast forward: Immediately following this “sign of things to come,” Jewish community leaders appealed to Jewish charitable organizations in the UK with the urgent call: “Please do something to save our children (kinder).”
Miraculously, the British government responded positively to the British Jewish leadership’s request. With the help of Jewish philanthropists, they arranged for 10,000 children to be admitted to the UK. At that time, the Nazi policy was to expel the Jews, as the “Final Solution” had yet to be formulated and implemented. The British immediately agreed to take the youngsters and the necessary arrangements were put in motion.
During the next eight months, regular transports, originating in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland, took place. Unfortunately, on September 1, 1939, World War II broke out and everything came to an abrupt stop. The last group of children who left Prague on September 3 were turned back and never heard from again.
I owe Nicholas Winton my life – today I’ll be thinking of him
Posted on December 3, 2024
It was 2008 and my family and I were at the premiere of the film The Power of Good: Nicholas Winton.
The documentary is about the young English stockbroker who, between March and August 1939, rescued 669 refugee children, mostly Jewish, whose families had fled persecution by Nazi Germany in Czechoslovakia.
The director, Matej Minac, had previously spent a day interviewing my mother, Liesl Silverstone (née Fischmann), my brother Rob, and myself – because my mother was one of the 669 children Sir Nicholas Winton had saved.
She’d told him abouther journey from Prague to London and her early months in the UK – and now, watching the film with my mum was incredibly moving, particularly the scenes where the children depart from the station, leaving their families behind.
After the screening was over, Nicholas Winton was introduced by journalist and presenter Esther Rantzen,to great acclaim.
As Nicholas stepped out on stage, I felt hugely indebted to him.
Rantzen then asked for all the Kindertransport people present to stand. Around 20 – including my mother – stood up, most of them now elderly, to a tremendous round of applause.
Rantzen then asked all the people who wouldn’t have been there without Winton to stand. Half of us in the audience got to our feet.
It was incredibly moving for me to share that experience with my mother, brother, children and grandchildren, who were all there with me.
I realised then that Nicholas Winton had saved us all. I wouldn’t be here had it not been for him. That image of half the room – including my family – standing is one I will never forget.
(L-R) Danny, his mother Liesl and his brother Rob (Picture: Danny Silverstone)
My mother, Liesl, was born in Teplice, Czechoslovakia, in 1927 to an upper-middle class Jewish family. Her father and grandfather had established a large glass factory in and around that town.
While her mother, Friedl, came from a rural Jewish background, my mum grew up in a very bourgeois lifestyle. It seems she had a happy childhood together with her brother Heinz.
When the Germans invaded the Sudetenland in 1938, my mother’s parents decided to move to Prague, where the kids were enrolled in a school and my grandfather retrained as a watchmaker following their relocation.
My grandparents had numerous appointments with embassies seeking visas, but any attempts to secure visas out of Czechoslovakia for the whole family were unsuccessful – and once war was declared, their focus shifted to surviving as a family unit.
A telegram from Danny’s grandmother to his mother (Picture: Danny Silverstone)
This followed the complete annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, when Czech Jews were subject to growing restrictions on what they could do, with whom they could associate and where they could live.
Living conditions in Prague became increasingly bad – but, until their forced arrival at Terezin, a concentration camp 30 miles north of Prague, in 1942, my grandparents had no idea what awaited them.
For now, they just knew they had to get the children out if they possibly could – and this is how my grandparents came across Nicholas Winton.
I have no idea how they actually met him, but it was most likely through word of mouth via the Jewish community in Prague.
The Kindertransport scheme covered the evacuation of 10,000 child refugees from Nazi-controlled Europe to Britain. Nicholas’ focus was on saving Jewish children in Czechoslovakia.
Nicholas Winton Street – Czech Street Named After British Hero
Posted on October 22, 2024
Philanthropist, humanitarian and British hero, Sir Nicholas Winton, has been recognised for his honourable actions during the Holocaust through the naming of a new Czech street, along with a sizeable mural.
The street has been unveiled as a memorial for Winton to remember his transportation of 669 Jewish Czech children to Britain, saving them from the horrors of concentration camps.
The liberal-minded, British stockbroker was determined to help Jewish children after receiving a letter from fellow labour socialist, Martin Blake. The letter urged Winton to help refuge children from Prague to spare them from the concentration camps.
By writing to the British embassy and organising asylum shelters, Winton arranged eight trains to transport children to Britain to live with either their family members or, for the majority, complete strangers. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Winton saved 669 children through this initiative, known as Kindertransport, sending Jewish children from Czechoslovakia to Britain.
Winton was knighted in 2003 and passed away in 2015.
On September 3rd 2024, a ceremony was held in honour of the new street, coinciding with the 85th anniversary of the final Kindertransport journey. The location of the street is next to Bubny Station, where 50,000 Jews were victims to the passage leading to concentration camps. This street serves as a memorial to those who mandatorily boarded these trains and perished under Nazi rule.
The new street now links the East and West districts together. The British Ambassador to the Czech Republic commented on this, saying the connections of the two districts is a ‘beautiful symbolic aspect.’
Four of the children, who were saved by Winton, attended the ceremony. Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines is a 94-year-old survivor who speaks out about Winton’s work. She told the BBC that ‘there is a big generation- thanks to him- alive today.’
Lady Baines further mentions the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), who attended the ceremony to ‘pay tribute to our saviour and a great sadness for those we had to leave behind.’
AJR is a welfare service providing support to the survivors of the Holocaust. AJR worked in support of Prague 7 municipal district and many other charities (specifically Memorial of Silence and The Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic) to name the street and to honour Sir Nicholas Winton.
