A Derby Holocaust survivor has spoken of his “extremely lucky” escape in a heartfelt video aimed to tell the city’s students the true horror of the horrific Nazi regime. As part of his special visit, which took place to mark National Holocaust Memorial Day, the inspirational survivor, from Alvaston, also spoke of his life in front of the camera for a video filmed by the university.
Holocaust Memorial Day is a time of great reflection for many of us across the country. Today I will think about the Jewish family members and friends I left behind in Prague when I was put on a train to London Liverpool Street at six years old; about the courage of men and women who helped children such as me escape on the Kindertransport just months before the Nazi occupation; and I will think about the millions killed because they couldn’t flee.
A memorial recognising the agonising moral choice made by parents of the 669 mostly Jewish children sent away is to be constructed in Prague’s main railway station, from where eight evacuation trains departed in the spring and summer of 1939, after Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia.
There were times when Gerald Wiener tried to forget everything about his homeland. Nobody could have been more anti-German than I was, from the day I arrived,” he said. “I never wanted to speak German, I never wanted to know anything about Germany. I wanted to become British. I wanted to assimilate.”
The Mayor of Newham said: “During World War II, this city and this country came to the aid of thousands of Jewish children escaping Nazism through the Kindertransport, but it is absolutely undeniable that the British Government did too little to prevent and alleviate suffering during the Holocaust.” Sir Robin Wales said that Newham “absolutely stands ready to do our bit and to do our share” with the current refugee crisis from Syria.
Their 11th-hour escape on the eve of the second world war became the stuff of legend, earning international recognition for the man who organised it, Sir Nicholas Winton. Now people spirited out of German-occupied Czechoslovakia when they were children are to pay homage to previously unsung heroes in the affair – the parents who boarded them on to Winton’s “kindertransport” trains bound for Britain in a desperate attempt to save them from the Nazis.
“At the time I didn’t understand why I was being sent like a parcel with a label to a strange country, with strange people and a strange language. But I know because of that I survived, when others didn’t. I think I have spent my life making sure that it was worthy of that survival.” These are the words of Dame Stephanie Shirley who managed to escape the horrors of the Nazis, by securing a place on a Kindertransport, and make a new life in the West Midlands.
The duo are Bernd Koschland, who escaped persecution by coming to Britain as a child on the Kindertransport, and Gerald Granston, who fled Germany on the SS St Louis cruise liner and received a British Empire Medal in the New Year’s honours for his services to Holocaust education.
Dancing on a Powder Keg: The Intimate Voice of a Young Mother and Author, Her Letters Composed in the Lengthening Shadow of Hitler’s Third Reich; Her Poems from the Theresienstadt Ghetto,” by Ilse Weber (translated from German by Michal Schwartz). Bunim & Bannigan. 340 pages. $34.95 It is unlikely that you have ever heard of Ilse Weber. But once you know her story, her name will be seared into your heart.
Lord Dubs was one of 10,000 children rescued by the Kindertransport, an organised British effort to rescue Jews from Nazi Germany and elsewhere in Europe during the 1930s. He will speak at the British Library Theatre in Euston Road from 9–10am on Friday, January 27
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.