I once shared a house with a man who shouldn’t have been alive. Karel Reisz, the great British-Czech filmmaker, was a kindertransport child rescued from Hitler’s Europe in the closest nick of time. Unprecedentedly, one morning the BBC broke into the news to ask for volunteers willing to take one or more German or Austrian children, between eight and 17, and the applications poured in. (This, when President Roosevelt refused to accept refugee kids.)
He helped to save around 700 children from the Nazis, seeing most of them off at the train station in Prague, watching as they were whisked away from genocide and on to their new homes in Britain. Despite not being Jewish, he quit his job teaching in Dorset to risk his life forging papers for Jewish refugees. But Trevor Chadwick is almost completely unknown and unheralded for his heroic deeds alongside his colleague in the operation, Sir Nicholas Winton.
As Cameron announces England will accept 20,000 Syrian refugees by 2020, a former Kindertransport child wonders what happened to the great Britain that saved his life
Orphans of the conflict would be given priority in a programme which Mr Cameron likened to the “modern equivalent of the Kindertransport” scheme, when Britain gave sanctuary to tens of thousands of children during the Second World War.
Since Hitler had come to power in 1933, Tory-led governments had been doing their utmost to block the rising tide of refugees from Germany – mostly Jewish – from entering the UK. Sadly, and piteously, history has a way of repeating itself… The formal arguments used to refuse Jewish refugees admittance to the UK then are much the same as those used today to keep out Syrians and others. For starters, there is the alleged burden on the public purse.
Prime Minister David Cameron has said the 20,000 Syrians he intends to accept into the UK over the next five years are “the modern-day equivalent of the Kindertransport”.
Recently, Rabbi Goldsmith accompanied some of those refugee children — now elderly adults — to a meeting at Parliament with young Syrian refugees. “These are people in their 80s and 90s … but they absolutely recognized in young men who had made it from Syria, themselves when they themselves were teenagers.” At that meeting, Goldsmith heard some of his congregants’ stories for the first time.
This photo from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library of former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt was taken in October 1959 at a stop in Livingston, N.J. by photographer Charlotte Kapp.
Charlotte Kapp has four letters on Eleanor Roosevelt’s stationary and the original, autographed photo she shot of the former first lady in 1959. Now the portrait photographer who lives in Boca Raton wants to see that photo on the $10 bill. “I could never in my wildest dreams have thought this would happen to me,” she wrote. “I was on the last children’s transport from Danzig, Germany [to England] in May, 1939,” narrowly escaping Hitler’s Holocaust.
Nicholas Winton organized the escape of 669 children, mostly Jews, from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II. After Mr. Winton died on July 1, at age 106, The New York Times asked the survivors, the original Winton’s Children, and their descendants — whose numbers now exceed 6,000 — to share their stories.
Nicholas Winton with one of the 669 children he rescued from Czechoslovakia on the eve of the second world war. Photograph: PA
It was long after I arrived on a Kindertransport in London in the summer of 1939 that I heard of Nicky Winton. I simply knew I had arrived on a Kindertransport, but had no idea who had made it possible for me, and hundreds of other mainly Jewish children to escape the Nazis. Then, in 1988 Esther Rantzen featured Nicky on her TV show That’s Life, and described what he had done. All of us who came on a Kindertransport from Prague soon began to meet him, and we kept in touch regularly.
Nicholas Winton deserves all the praise he has received, but when your obituary (2 July) states that he “modestly insisted” that Trevor Chadwick was the real hero, he may well have just been saying what he believed. It was Chadwick who was stationed in Prague and had to select the children (the British guarantors who paid £50 for the privilege mostly wanted girls aged seven to 10 and, if possible, fair-haired) and organised their travel, at first by plane, later by train.
Alice Masters, who was a “Winton Kind” remembers.
JOHN KISH IV, MORAVIAN COLLEGE
The perpetual question, which has been with me ever since the Kindertransport, is: Why was I saved when so many others perished? Why did that happen? said the 86-year-old Backer, whose memoir, “Train to Freedom: A Jewish Boy’s Journey from Nazi Europe to a Life of Activism,” will be published next year. “I concluded that, out of gratitude, I needed to do something for other people.”
On 25 November the BBC Home Service broadcast a nationwide appeal for foster homes: and by the end of the year representatives of the MCCG were scouring Germany and Austria for those children most at risk. Among those who immediately responded to the appeal for homes for them was Althea Davis from Crawley Down.
KTA member Alice Masters is interviewed. Watch online
A family picture of Nicholas Winton with one of the hundreds of Jewish children whose lives he saved during World War II. Credit Press Association, via Associated Press
Nicholas Winton, a Briton who said nothing for a half-century about his role in organizing the escape of 669 mostly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II, a righteous deed like those of Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, died on Wednesday in Maidenhead, England. He was 106.
Those who survived thanks to his efforts still refer to themselves as “Winton’s Children.” “One saw the problem there, that a lot of these children were in danger, and you had to get them to what was called a safe haven, and there was no organization to do that. Why did I do it? Why do people do different things. Some people revel in taking risks, and some go through life taking no risks at all.”
Dubbed the “British Schindler”, Sir Nicholas Winton rescued 669 children destined for Nazi concentration camps from Czechoslovakia as the outbreak of World War Two loomed. His death at the age of 106 came on the same day 76 years ago when the train carrying the largest number of children – 241 – departed from Prague.
Anita’s passport when she traveled to London, June 1939. COURTESY OF ANITA HOFFER
Anita was six when she said good bye to her mom. She was crying on a train during her trip from Berlin to Holland. Her dad didn’t know she was leaving Germany. She felt alone, but she wasn’t. She was part of a group of European Jewish children who boarded a ferry in Holland on their way to England. Hoffer said most of the children were too young to understand that they had been saved from Adolf Hitler.
Bill Graham launched the psychedelic music era at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco and the Fillmore East in New York, with bands such as The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Graham was a child of the Holocaust, and this exhibition brings that story to light.