Harry Grenville will be at Dorchester’s Corn Exchange on Friday, January 27, for the free event starting at 12.30pm. It is being organised by the South West Dorset Multicultural Network and features several speakers during the hour-long commemoration.
Mr Deutsch, who lived at Surbiton Avenue, Southchurch, visited schools and various organisations delivering talks about his life and working tirelessly to commemorate and educate people about the Holocaust across the country.
80 years after he escaped Europe on Kindertransport, Lord Alfred Dubs criticizes new criteria for asylum seekers. Nearly 80 years since he arrived from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, Labor politician Lord Alfred Dubs said he did not believe his adopted country has lost its willingness to help youngsters fleeing persecution.
Anne Lehmann Fox. Photo courtesy of Julian Fox
At 12 years old, longtime KTA member Anne Fox was sent to England, where her brother had gone a year before, via the Kindertransport. Her experience growing up in Nazi Germany and being separated from her parents, whom she never saw again, served as inspiration for her first of many books, My Heart in a Suitcase. The memoir was turned into a play which is performed in schools across the USA today. Anne attended local productions of the play, so students could meet her and ask questions.
Otto Deutsch, a well-known Kindertransport survivor who “never forgot Vienna” after forging a new life in London in 1939 when he was 12 years old, has died at the age of 88. He spent years engaged in Holocaust education, recalling his agonising separation from his family, and how – years later – he went back and found the exact spot where they were shot.
She was born Rosel Lerner on May 30, 1922, in Worms, south of Frankfurt. Her parents were immigrants from Poland. In 1938, when the family was living in Ludwigshafen, her father was arrested and imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp. Speaking only German and Yiddish, she was sent to Britain on one of the last Kindertransport trains that carried Jewish children out of Germany.
Ruth Westheimer was 10 years old in 1939, when she boarded a train leaving Germany with 300 other Jewish children. She brought along one doll, a favorite named Matilda. But a younger child was crying inconsolably, so Westheimer gave the little girl her doll. Because, she says, “she needed it more.” Today Dr. Ruth, America’s favorite sex therapist, is 88. She lives in a New York apartment teeming with books and photos and honorary degrees.
For more than a decade, Holocaust survivor and KTA member Dave Lux has been traveling around Southern California telling people about his experience as one of the 669 children on a Kindertransport from Czechoslovakia, a rescue effort before World War II that saved nearly 10,000 Jewish children in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Germany.
Seventy-eight years ago this week, on December 2, 1938, the first Kindertransport left Germany. In the following months over 10,000 mostly Jewish children were saved from Nazi-occupied territories, because their parents were willing to separate from them. In England they were placed in foster families, schools and shelters. After the war, many of these children emigrated to the United States.
Child refugees sent from the demolished Calais “jungle” to supposedly safe welcome centres across France claim they have been pressed into forced labour. Legal interviews by the charity Safe Passage UK with unaccompanied minors dispersed from the refugee camp to France’s official reception centres have uncovered allegations that children have been forced into unpaid work. Youngsters said they were too scared to refuse because they feared it would harm their chances of asylum to the UK.
Courtesy Rachel Rubin Green
What is it in life that inspires or compels each of us to tell our stories? Is it the realization that we, too, have lived important historical events? Or is it something much more personal? And if we have an important story that we have kept hidden for a time, what circumstances create the breakthrough moment of revealing, sharing, and confronting that story? Each time I read my mother’s 1988 article about what happened to her on Kristallnacht, I struggle anew with these questions.
Lord Dubs (left) and Professor Leslie Brent (right) (Pic: Guy Smallman)
Two men who came to Britain as child refugees in the 1930s spoke out for the refugee children of today at London Liverpool Street last night Friday. Labour lord Alf Dubs and Professor Leslie Brent came as part of the “Kindertransport” trains fleeing the Nazis. Dubs said, “I was six years old when I arrived at this very station, but the cause of refugee children continues.”
Hans, centre, with cheeky grin and spotty tie, and his brother Wolfgang, standing second from left.
Snapshot: My father with other Kindertransport boys These boys were photographed in 1939 in the garden of 47 Lytton Grove, Putney, in south London. At the centre of the group with a cheeky grin, side-parting and spotty tie is my father, Hans, and second from left, back row, with penny specs, is his elder brother, Wolfgang.
On the morning of Nov. 10, 1938, a date that would come to be known as Kristallnacht, 14-year-old Lore Rosen (nee Baron) left for school from the fifth-floor, walk-up apartment where she lived with her mother in Mannheim, Germany. Just outside, the owner of the small grocery next door suddenly intercepted her. “Go to the Jewish old-age home and stay with your mother,” the woman instructed. Lore asked her why. “Just run and go,” she replied.
Former HIAS client, Kindertransport survivor and refugee advocate Manfred Lindenbaum attended the Leaders’ Summit on the Global Refugee Crisis, convened on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly by President Obama. The next morning, Lindenbaum, 84, was interviewed live on Democracy Now!, sharing his personal experiences as a refugee and responding to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s son’s comparison of Syrian refugees to poisoned Skittles.
British beneficiaries of the Kinder-transport programme have begun raising funds to help the scores of unaccompanied refugee children stranded in Calais. Almost 80 years after Britain sanctioned a mission to help children escape the antisemitic aftermath of Kristallnacht, Britain’s Jewish community is raising funding to evacuate at least 120 child refugees identified as having the legal right to be reunited with their families in the UK who remain trapped in northern France.
In her blog, the Wiener Library’s Digital Engagement Manager Jessica Green discusses letters written from children on the first Kindertransport to their families back in Germany. On 1 December 1938, approximately 200 unaccompanied German-Jewish child refugees boarded a train towards the Hook of Holland, where a ferry carried them to their new home in England. While in transit, they wrote postcards back home to their families.
Ilse, a native of Vienna, is interviewed on a recent visit. In German.
A memorial service has been held for Sir Nicholas Winton, who rescued hundreds of children from the Holocaust in the months before World War Two. Some 28 of those he saved as children were among 400 people who attended the event at London’s Guildhall, along with Czech, Slovak and UK government representatives. Sir Nicholas organised the “Kindertransport” in which 669 mostly Jewish children came to Britain by train from Czechoslovakia in 1939. He died on 1 July last year, aged 106.
Abrahamson is remembered most for two big contributions. One is his four decades of work at the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources — known after 1966 as the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. The other is the part he played in the creation of the Beverly and Qamanirjuaq Caribou Management Board in 1982.