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.
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
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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
KTA member Eva Yachnes has written a letter to the New York Times: When I was 6, I was torn, screaming, from my grandmother and put on a train taking me far from home and family. Unlike the tragedy perpetrated by our president, my separation was done to save me from the Nazis. I was put on a Kindertransport from Vienna bound for England….
Now 81, the former refugee child on Sunday began retracing that journey to freedom — but this time by bicycle as part of a commemorative ride to pay tribute to the Kindertransport scheme that saved him and thousands of Jewish children eight decades ago.
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. The cyclists set off from Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse station, where a statue commemorates the 10,000 mostly Jewish children who made it to Britain from Nazi Germany and elsewhere in Europe starting in late 1938.Organized by the British-based World Jewish Relief group, the ride retraces the route of the trains.
An 80-year-old refugee who arrived in Britain from Nazi Europe as a toddler is taking part in a cycle ride to mark the rescue of 10,000 children. Paul Alexander will retrace the first journey of the Kindertransport rescue for the 80th anniversary. The rescue was organised after the anti-Jewish violence of Kristallnacht in Germany in November 1938.