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.
World Jewish Relief has organised the commemorative ride from Berlin to London to mark 80 years since the evacuation effort.
Liane Segal with Damien Egan
Longstanding campaigner against racism and anti-Semitism, Liane Segal, 86, dubbed an ‘ inspirational figure’ by outgoing mayor. This week Segal said she was “honoured” to be Mayoress, adding: “Lewisham is stronger because of our history in welcoming residents from all corners of the world. I hope that by sharing my story, others will see it is as important as ever to provide sanctuary for people fleeing persecution.”
There were tears that come with such a parting, a 12-year-old boy leaving his parents to live with strangers far away, but they dried in a current of excitement as the train rumbled out of Berlin’s Zoo Station. In his small suitcase were clothes with name tags sewn in by friends of his mother the night before. John Berrys leaned through the open window as the train slowly rolled west. He said goodbye.
The quest of a daughter of a Kindertransport survivor to discover the identity of others who accompanied her. The photographs are old — 77 years old — but the children in them are young. Some look serious, while others smile. At that point in time, it was still not yet clear that they had escaped from the ultimate horror. As children of the Kindertransport, some of them would never have seen their family again. On the back of some of the pictures are messages—a few barely legible.
While Germany’s Reichsbahn is most infamous for carrying Jews to their final destination, the national rail system was also used to transport 10,000 Jewish children to safe haven in the UK. “My mother had a choice. She could save me, or one of my brothers. Only one of us could go to England, and she thought it would be easier for a girl to be placed in a family. I was lucky.” That’s how the three-year-old Ruth Auerbach ended up at Berlin’s Friedrichstraße station on February 2, 1939.
She survived the horrors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where most of her family were murdered by the Nazis. But it was on the County Down coast that Rachel Levy began to recover from the Holocaust. She was among a small number of Jewish orphans brought to live in a farm near Millisle in the immediate aftermath of World War Two.
World Jewish Relief is creating an exceptional new cycle challenge to commemorate 80 years since they, as the Central British Fund for German Jewry (CBF), orchestrated the Kindertransport and brought 10,000 children to safety. This unique six day cycle will emulate the journey taken by the children on the first Kindertransport train, departing Berlin and travelling to London Liverpool St, via Holland and the ferry to Harwich.
Ken Appel, 90, spoke to Watford Rotary Club about being beaten by his former friends and eventually being expelled from school for being Jewish during the rise of the Nazi Party.
Peter Wortsman, an American 2G, on Vienna on a fellowship from the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Literatur (the Austrian Society for Literature) encounters a KT2 at the Servittengasse memorial.
The entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist details his life as a Kindertransport orphan in his new memoirs, The Boy In The Statue.
On the face of it, the Kindertransport sounds like a highly successful, nay miraculous, operation which enabled thousands of children to escape the clutches of the Nazi regime and the fate of the family members they left behind. However, the lifesaving venture reveals some darker elements that left indelible marks on the lives of the young refugees and the next generation, and possibly also the third.
Dame Stephanie Shirley said the modern response doesn’t compare to how ‘Christian and Jewish activists got 10,000 children out’ Dame Stephanie Shirley arrived in Britain in 1939 as one of 10,000 unaccompanied child refugees who fled the Nazis. She spoke as she received her damehood at Buckingham Palace for services to IT and philanthropy.
Aafter Hitler came to power in 1933, Lore, then 9, remembers standing in the street watching the brownshirts marching and singing. She wanted to join in until she realized they were singing, “When the Jewish blood flows from the knife, we’ll all be better off.”
Angelika Rieber, a historian and life-long educator from Frankfurt, Germany, presented research she has done on the program and the stories she’s heard from those saved by it. Rieber began her presentation by explaining the kindertransport, a system by which Jewish children in Germany, specifically Frankfurt for her research, would escape the tightening grasp of Nazi rule before the onset of World War II by applying for transport to England, France or the U.S.
I’m saying to Theresa May: you know about child refugees, you know Nicholas Winton who organised the Kindertransport from Prague which saved my life; before he died he was a constituent of yours.You used to meet him. Please remember what he did. Please remember that as a country we’re humanitarian. Surely, surely, we can do better for child refugees than we’re now doing. Please think again. Watch video
Playwright Diane Samuels said: “My play does focus on a particular happening at a particular time, yet it also taps into a universal human experience, that of a mother’s separation from her child. Most of all my focus when writing the play is to probe the inner life where memory is shaped by trauma, history meets story, in order to gain psychological and emotional insight into how a damaged psyche can survive, possibly recover, and whether there might ever be an opportunity to thrive.”