News

What the Holocaust can teach us about the migrant crisis

Posted on November 13, 2015

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.

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Stunning Vintage Photos Reveal The Brief Life Of Artist Eva Hesse

Posted on November 4, 2015

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.

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Artist becomes subject in new Tate exhibition

Posted on October 30, 2015

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.

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Kindertransport – BBC radio

Posted on September 26, 2015

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.

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Citing Kindertransport, 100 British Rabbis Demand Open Door for Refugees

Posted on September 22, 2015

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.

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Far From Home, In Need of Help – But From Where?

Posted on September 11, 2015

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.)

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Call to recognise the teacher who risked his life to save children

Posted on September 10, 2015

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.

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Is Britain still a port in a storm for refugees?

Posted on September 9, 2015

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

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Four thousand Syrian refugees every year to be given homes in UK, David Cam

Posted on September 7, 2015

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.

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Don’t believe the lies about UK support for the Kindertransport

Posted on September 7, 2015

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.

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PM: Rescue of refugees from Syria ‘modern equivalent of Kindertransport’

Posted on September 7, 2015

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”.

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How the Kindertransport could provide lessons for helping Syrian refugees

Posted on September 3, 2015

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.

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Photographer wants Roosevelt picture on $10 bill

Posted on July 15, 2015

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.

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Winton’s Children Share Their Stories

Posted on July 13, 2015

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.

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Nicholas Winton saved me from the Nazis. I only found out 50 years later

Posted on July 6, 2015

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.

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Forgotten heroes of the kindertransports

Posted on July 6, 2015

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.

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KTA Member Alice Masters on Canadian television

Posted on July 6, 2015

Alice Masters, who was a “Winton Kind” remembers.

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Moravian College graduate saved from Nazis on Kindertransport

Posted on July 4, 2015

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.”

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The Jewish children who found refuge in Crawley Down

Posted on July 3, 2015

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.

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CTV News program on Nicholas Winton

Posted on July 3, 2015

KTA member Alice Masters is interviewed. Watch online

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