The plight of unaccompanied children during the current refugee crisis resonates in two important ways. First, the focus on children strikes an emotional chord and second, we inevitably recall the Kindertransport, an important chapter in both Jewish and British refugee history.
LIB Dem leader Tim Farron is calling for the UK to take in 3,000 refugee children and likened their plight to Jewish youngsters brought to Britain via Kindertransport during the Holocaust.
What level of desperation would drive me to flee my home with, or without, my family and leave everything in my life behind? This is a question I think many Europeans have been asking themselves as the current refugee crisis has unfolded before our eyes. But I know it is also a very personal question for many Jews, who were forced to answer the same question three-quarters of a century ago.
Ruth Barnett, A Kindertransport refugee reflects on genocide, and what it means in a Europe dealing with advancing Islamophobia and a ‘refugee crisis’. The very least we can and should do is to treat migrants decently as human beings equal to ourselves, and provide what we can for them in terms of basic necessities like food, education, and medical care while pressing our governments to create a sustainable European framework for supporting people trying to find better lives.
A documentary set for release in April 2016 will reveal never-before-seen footage and writings of Eva Hesse, illuminating the short life of the extraordinary artist. From escaping Nazi Germany with her sister on a Kindertransport when she was only 2 years old to redefining sculpture in the 1960s, Hesse’s life is movie-worthy. Living in New York, Hesse challenged the prevalent structures of minimalism with a feminist practice.
Works by celebrated portrait, landscape painter Frank Auerbach who fled Nazi Germany as a child find their way to London’s top art gallery. Frank Auerbach has been described as Britain’s greatest living painter. With a flair for the abstract and urban landscape, he has worked out of his north London Camden Town studio for six decades, producing some of the most resonant and inventive art works of recent times.
In 1999, historian David Cesarani went in search of these children for a Radio 4 documentary, to find out how they had adapted to life in Britain, and to the eventual realisation of the terrible fate of most of their parents. With a new wave of refugees dominating the news, the story of the Kindertransport has again become a vital part of the national discussion. Radio 4 is repeating the 1999 broadcast to provide the human story of this tale of survival and heartbreak.
In a letter to British Prime Minister David Cameron, the rabbis and cantors referenced the 10,000 Jewish children that the United Kingdom rescued from the Nazis between 1938 and 1940. Two of the people delivering the letter Monday were themselves members of the Kindertransport rescue operation that brought Jewish children to the U.K, the British newspaper The Guardian reported.
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.
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.