In 1939, a refugee ban kept 20,000 Jewish children out of the U.S. Our rejection of refugees is an inextricable part of the American story, and Trump’s ban hews to that narrative more than we’d prefer to recall. One such black spot on our history mirrors the present moment particularly closely. In the late 1930s, the United States had a chance to save 20,000 Jewish children fleeing Nazi persecution, by means of a program that would have mirrored the British Kindertransport.
The life story of a woman who escaped the Nazis on one of the last Kindertransport trains has been published six months after her death. Sylvia’s first book, Laugh or Cry about her childhood growing up in Nazi Germany was published in 2015 and she died as her second book Cry or Laugh was being completed.
At the age of four, Mrs Barnett and her seven-year-old brother travelled across Germany and Holland by train with hundreds of other children from Berlin and arrived in the British port of Harwich. Having been moved several times around South-East England between various foster families, she was finally able to settle in London after the end of the Second World War.
On February 13, over 200 Kindertransport survivors and descendants sent a letter to President Trump, urging him to keep America’s doors open to today’s refugees. Noting that “more than 10 million of today’s 21 million refugees are children,” the letter urges President Trump to keep America’s doors open to refugees. It reads, in part:
Theresa May’s Conservative government has reneged on any commitment to provide asylum in the UK to lone child refugees languishing in desperate conditions near the port of Calais in France.
Herta Stanton, from Windlesham Manor in Crowborough, has turned 100.
A Crowborough woman who fled the Nazis as the escort of a young boy on the Kindertransport before the start of the Second World War has celebrated her 100th birthday.
Several times a week for the past decade, as I have left Liverpool Street Station from the Ipswich train, I walk past a bronze statue of an anxious-looking boy and girl with their suitcases. The statues, part of a series in the station commemorating the Kindertransport and its leader, Sir Nicholas Winton, are a reminder of the heroes who faced down fascism.
Lord Dubs, who was a Kindertransport refugee himself, is launching a fund to help bring children fleeing war and persecution to Britain, the JC can reveal. The Jewish Labour peer and 10 of his fellow Kinder have set up the Alf Dubs Children’s Fund and donated between £500 and £1,000 each. They say they were inspired Sir Nicholas Winton, the man who rescued them.
A refugee rights campaigner has said he is ‘bitterly disappointed’ by the government’s decision to stop providing sanctuary for lone child refugees. Lord Dubs, who came to the UK shortly before the Second World War as part of the Kindertransport organised by Maidenhead’s Sir Nicholas Winton, blasted the announcement from the Home Office on Wednesday, February 8, that the scheme is to end.
Jewish Holocaust survivors who fled Nazi Germany and other countries as children have a request for President Donald Trump: “Keep the doors open to refugees.” In a letter to Trump released Monday, more than 200 family members and survivors of the Kindertransport a program that sent around 10,000 Jewish child refugees to Britain from Nazi Germany and other European nations urged Trump to continue to resettle refugees, especially children, in America.
I think often about the refugees that we in the UK aren’t helping, especially the unaccompanied children wandering about Europe. I probably feel so strongly because at the age of eight (I am now 86), I acquired a big sister who was a refugee.
In the summer of 2011, I was sent to interview a Jewish couple at their home in Giffnock, just south of Glasgow. Henry and Ingrid Wuga: Holocaust survivors in their late 80s who had come to the UK on the Kindertransport when they were 15 and 14. Henry and Ingrid’s capacity for remembering is inexhaustible, their humanity intoxicating and their willingness to see good unshakeable. They are my inspiration
In the summer of 2011, I was sent to interview a Jewish couple at their home in Giffnock, just south of Glasgow. Henry and Ingrid Wuga: Holocaust survivors in their late 80s who had come to the UK on the Kindertransport when they were 15 and 14. They had already told their story once that day to a group of teachers in Ayr but they told it again, with grace, generosity and the occasional jolt of black humour.
The daughter of Sir Nicholas Winton, the British humanitarian who organised the Czech Kindertransport operation that saved 669 children on the eve of the second world war, has called on Theresa May to remember her father’s example and “do the right thing” by reconsidering the decision to close the Dubs scheme for vulnerable refugee children.
Britain is ending a program to take in child refugees proposed by a politician who arrived in the country by Kindertransport during World War II. Proponents of the program had wanted the United Kingdom to take in as many as 3,000 lone child refugees, but the government said Wednesday that the initiative would end in March after the resettling of 350 children, according to The Guardian
Sir Erich Reich, who arrived in the UK aged four, and whose parents were subsequently murdered at Auschwitz, said the government had “gone back on its word” to bring in 3,000 unaccompanied children to the UK for safe haven.
In the months before the start of World War II, 10,000 mostly Jewish children were saved on a “Kindertransport” or children’s transport. Now these “children” are making their voices heard to fight for current refugees hoping to come to America.
In one corner of the Jewish community, reaction to the Trump ban on immigration has traveled quickly. Almost as soon as the ban on people from seven Muslim-majority nations entering the U.S. went into effect, an organization made up of mostly Jews who were rescued from the Holocaust via transport to Great Britain, and their descendants, circulated to its members a letter of protest addressed to President Trump. “We write to urge you to keep the doors open to refugees,” said the letter.
Connecting to the plight of these children, the Kindertransport letter to the president points out that “in the months just before the start of World War II, nearly 10,000 children were sent from Nazi Germany, Austria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia to Great Britain. These children’s lives – our lives, and our parents’ and grandparents’ lives – were saved by the Kindertransport movement.”
From 1938 to 1940, England accepted about 10,000 child refugees from Germany and other German-annexed territories, under a program called the Kindertransport. Meanwhile, in the United States, a congressional bill to accept 20,000 child refugees under a similar program died in committee, because one of the arguments against the bill was that accepting children without their parents was contrary to the laws of God.