News

The Cost Of Courage: The 2 Couples Who Rescued My Family From The Nazis

Posted on November 15, 2018

In recent months, I’ve learned that my life is bound together with two families who took enormous risks to save my father and my grandparents from the Nazis. What I have discovered about the rescuers is both wondrous and bleak. One family, the Furstenbergs, has thrived; another, the Mynareks, is gone, seemingly without a trace. My father, who had been rescued via the Kindertransport, was taken in by the Furstenberg family in Kalmar, Sweden.

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Kindertransport survivors call for government to take in child refugees

Posted on November 15, 2018

A group of 60 Kindertransport survivors have urged the government to provide more routes to sanctuary for child refugees. ‘As former child refugees ourselves, we believe the UK government should give more children at risk the same life-saving opportunity that we had’

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A Toy Monkey That Escaped Nazi Germany And Reunited A Family

Posted on November 14, 2018

Gert Berliner, 94, tied the little stuffed monkey to his bicycle when he was a child in Berlin. Claire Harbage/NPR

The monkey’s fur is worn away. It’s nearly a century old. A well-loved toy, it is barely 4 inches tall. It was packed away for long voyages, on an escape from Nazi Germany, to Sweden and America. And now, it’s the key to a discovery that transformed my family.

“I liked him,” recalls my dad, who is now 94. “He was like a good luck piece.”

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Council backs Safe Passage campaign for child refugees on 80th anniversary

Posted on November 13, 2018

Organisers in Dorset of the campaign to allow three child refugees a year to settle in this county and all other local authorities have welcomed backing from county councillors. Dorset county councillors voted unanimously to give their support to the local safe Passage campaign which aims to replicate the so-called ‘KinderTransport’ initiative 80 years ago this year when Britain took in 10,000 child refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe.

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Remembering The Kindertransport 80 Years On at the Jewish Museum

Posted on November 13, 2018

Elsa Shamash and her brother before they came to the UK on the Kindertransport picture © Jewish Museum London

“The first train arrived on December 2 so the organisations and volunteers involved reacted very quickly, it was a fast response and an amazing effort to galvanise the British Home Office,” says Kathryn Pieren, curator of Remembering The Kindertransport, a new exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Camden Town

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Reflections on the Occasion of the 80th Anniversary of the Kristallnacht

Posted on November 13, 2018

S Franklin Spira, with his mother, in an undated photo

Today is the 80th anniversary of the Novemberpogrome, or Kristallnacht. I was a 14 year-old boy then and my parents and I never thought of emigrating until the Kristallnacht, even though Jews were gradually being deprived of their rights before then. At that point, it became clear that my parents and I could no longer remain in our homeland.

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The Kindertransport children 80 years on: ‘My father had nightmares”

Posted on November 10, 2018

Even 80 years on from her flight from the Nazis, Elsa Shamash, 91, retains a strong German accent. She is a little deaf and her daughter helps her understand my questions. Her father was a pioneering radiologist and the family, which lived in Berlin, was wealthy. She and her brother Heinz were at private school before Adolf Hitler came to power, but then had to transfer to a Jewish school. Video www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=3xxfOKoblHk

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The Kindertransport children 80 years on: ‘When I was 14″

Posted on November 8, 2018

Ruth Barnett, 83, was born in 1935, in a Germany that was already descending into Nazi tyranny. Her Jewish father was a judge who had been deprived of his post and frogmarched out of his court by the SS in 1933; her non-Jewish mother ran a cinema-advertising business in Berlin. “We had a brilliant future in front of us until the Nazis came to power,” she says.

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Holocaust survivor looks back on the night her life shattered

Posted on November 7, 2018

Ruth Zimbler, 90, was just 10 years old when Nazis invaded her hometown of Vienna, Austria. Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

Then a 10-year-old in Vienna, Ruth Zimbler remembers standing outside her home with her brother and an older relative and watching the family’s synagogue burn to the ground. “We couldn’t have known it at the time, but it was the beginning of the end,” Zimbler says.

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The Kindertransport children 80 years on: ‘I’m grateful my parents sent me”

Posted on November 7, 2018

His place on the Kindertransport was obtained with the help of Jewish organisation B’nai B’rith, and, aged eight, he left Fürth in March 1939, to Hamburg and then by ship to Southampton – a picture of the ship, the SS Manhattan which brought 80 refugee children to the UK, adorns the wall of his living room. The only English he knew was one sentence his parents had taught him: “I’m hungry; may I have a piece of bread?”

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The Kindertransport children 80 years on: Adventure

Posted on November 6, 2018

n 1938, the first of the Jewish Kindertransport children evacuated from Nazi Germany arrived in Britain. This week, we’re publishing the stories of six of those refugees, beginning with Bob and Ann Kirk.

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These Kindertransport refugees didn’t speak of their past for decades.

Posted on November 1, 2018

Ann and Bob Kirk both came to England as children on the eve of the Second World War. Even their children didn’t know their stories.

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Miller South students presenting ‘Stories of the Kindertransport’

Posted on November 1, 2018

“The year 2018 marks the 80th anniversary of the Kindertransport and the 25th anniversary of this play,” said Miller South theater teacher Alex Funk in a press release. “Given the emotional journey of the production’s characters and its painful relevance to current events, ‘Kindertransport’ isn’t an easy show for middle-schoolers to undertake. But the story is an important reminder that we must learn from history to keep from repeating it.”

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Survivors Remember: The Echoes of Kristallnacht

Posted on October 30, 2018

Just before midnight on November 9, 1938, Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller sent a telegram to every police unit in Nazi Germany. “In shortest order,” it read, “actions against Jews and especially their synagogues will take place in all of Germany. These are not to be interfered with.” Firefighters stood by as synagogues and Jewish-owned homes, schools, and businesses burned to the ground. Within a day, 91 Jews had been murdered, and between 20,000 and 30,000 sent to concentration camps.

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Vienna’s Kindertransport museum set to reopen in new home

Posted on October 22, 2018

The Kindertransport museum in Austria’s capital will reopen this October after a ten-month struggle to find a new home. The new museum, which will reopen just in time for the anniversary of the first Kindertransport eighty years ago, will be housed in Urania, the Art Nouveau public education institute, in the heart of Vienna.

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Saved by the kindness of strangers: reflections on the Kindertransport

Posted on October 11, 2018

There are always heroes amid the horrors of war. They are often from ordinary backgrounds, but prove extraordinary in their unwavering sense of humanity. Bernard and Winifred Schlesinger were such a couple, according to Monique Vajifdar, the daughter of Kindertransport survivor, Hedwig Leonore Vajifdar (nee Feig). Although the Schlesingers already had five children of their own, they took in twelve more children as part of the Kindertransport.

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Kinder castle saved from ‘perilous’ state after 20-year campaign

Posted on June 22, 2018

Grade I Listed Gwrych Castle in Abergele from the air

The future of the Grade I Listed Gwrych Castle in Abergele, which was the original home of Zionist youth movement Bnei Akiva, was secured last week after UK government-funded National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) stepped in with “the final piece of the financial jigsaw”. Dating from 1810, with direct links to British royalty, the castle housed 200 Jewish refugee children as part of Operation Kindertransport during the Second World War.

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81 Year-Old Kindertransportee Will Retrace His Holocaust Escape Route

Posted on June 22, 2018

Paul Alexander, and grandson Daniel, 14, are both taking part in a commemorative cycle ride from Berlin to London to mark 80 years since the Kindertransports. (World Jewish Relief/PA Wire)

Paul Alexander, a former child refugee from Nazi Germany, is embarking on a bike trip that will retrace his original journey to freedom, paying tribute to the Kindertransport effort that saved him and thousands of other Jewish children 80 years ago. Now 81, Alexander was a toddler when his mother handed him to a volunteer nurse on a train leaving Nazi Germany in 1938.

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On a bike, ex-child refugee retraces escape from Nazi Germany

Posted on June 22, 2018

Paul Alexander, 81, will pedal 600 miles with son, grandson and 39 others to pay tribute to Kindertransport program that saved thousands of Jewish children.

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Cyclists retrace 1938 Jewish ‘Kindertransport’ child refugee journey to Britain

Posted on June 22, 2018

BERLIN – Almost 80 years after the first “Kindertransport” evacuations of Jewish children to safety in Britain, 42 people set off Sunday on a memorial bike ride that will retrace their journey from Berlin to London. Among the saved children was Paul Alexander. The only participant in the ride who was on a Kindertransport — “children’s transport” — he was joined by his 34-year-old son, Nadav, and 14-year-old grandson, Daniel.

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