Each year the Holocaust Center provides a community program for Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Day of Remembrance. This year’s commemoration, scheduled for May 1 at 4 p.m., will be held in the gymnasium at The Roth Family Jewish Community Center, Maitland, Florida. There is no charge to attend, and reservations are not required. For additional information about the program contact Terrance Hunter at 407-628-0555 x 225.
Parliament
The Government will have to take in 3,000 unaccompanied Syrian child refugees after Lords agreed a plan put forward by a Labour peer rescued from the Nazis nearly 80 years ago. The House of Lords this afternoon backed an amendment from Alf Dubs calling on the Government to accept 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees who fled Syria and ended up in Europe.
Geoffrey H. Hartman, a Kind from Frankfurt and a literary critic whose work took in the Romantic poets, Judaic sacred texts, Holocaust studies, deconstruction and the workings of memory — and took on the very function of criticism itself — died on March 14 at his home in Hamden, Conn. He was 86.
In ‘Their Promised Land,’ Ian Buruma pays tribute to his British grandparents, who opened youth hostel to save 12 young Berliners before WWII
Generous theatregoers have raised thousands of pounds for a homeless hostel after a direct appeal by musician and writer Mona Golabek to audiences at her one-woman show. The money will go to the nearby Cardinal Hume Centre, which works with homeless young people and families with housing problems.
Susie Lind speaking with Natasha Kaplinsky
Susie Lind was one of 669 children rescued by the man dubbed the British Schindler – escaping on the penultimate train out of Czechoslovakia in May 1939. But the 91-year-old had not spoken in detail about her experiences for nearly eighty years, eventually doing so last year in response to a call from the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation for survivors to record their testimony.
Susie Lind, who was rescued from the Nazis by Sir Nicholas Winton’s Kindertransport, spoke about her experiences for the first time in almost 80 years. Ms Lind contributed to the BBC One documentary programme ‘Children Saved from the Nazis: The Story of Sir Nicholas Winton’. The programme celebrates the life and work of Sir Nicholas Winton on Holocaust Memorial Day in partnership with the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation.
JUAN CARLO/THE STAR Lina Edwards escaped Germany on the Kindertransport, the informal name given to a rescue effort that saved thousands of children
When Lina “Lee” Edwards was 15 years old, her tearful mother dropped her off at a train station, where mostly Jewish children like her were being whisked away from the Nazis and toward freedom. At the train station in Germany, Edwards’ mother wiped her tears on a handkerchief, which she also used to hide a gift — a diamond and pearl jewelry piece.
Following the success of their 2015 Edinburgh hit Spillikin, Cornwall’s Pipeline Theatre revives its debut play Transports for a national tour in Spring 2016. The play – described by the Cornish Guardian as “brave, bold and brilliant” – tells the story of a volatile teenager who is shunted from one foster home to another in the 1970s, until she finds her new carer – an eccentric chatterbox, who keeps her Kindertransport past buried in a trunk.
Kind Manny Lindenbaum and KT3 granddaughter Lauren light the menorah with President Obama.
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.