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
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.
The late Anne Forchheimer in 2008 with her daughter, Rachel Green. Photo courtesy of Rachel Green
Every morning in 1936, Anne Forchheimer would bicycle to school, over a bridge in the German town of Coburg. She tried not to notice the signs of hate she passed along the way. Hate for Jews and the call for their removal from German society. German law had forbidden Jewish students from attending public schools. Anne’s destination on this November morning, as it had been for the last 18 months, was a special school for Jewish children.
THE memories of children rescued from Nazi Germany and brought to Dovercourt more than 75 years ago have been shared with pupils. Five of the children saved as part of Kindertransport have relived their experiences during a visit to Harwich and Dovercourt High School. They were helping pupils with an Exits and Entrances project, in which the youngsters are examining the part played by the town in rescuing the children.
Article in the Suddeutsch Zeitung about young historian Lilly Maier and the research and writing she is doing on the Kindertransports.
After a decade traveling the world, the ‘Für Das Kind’ Kindertransport exhibition finds a permanent home in Vienna.
A Kindertransport Museum has recently opened in Vienna: FÜR DAS KIND Memorial Museum, 1030 Vienna, Radetzkystraße 5/Pfefferhofgasse 5 “Für das Kind” is dedicated to all who helped ten thousand – mostly Jewish – children in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland to escape and to survive the Nazi machinery of death between 1938 and 1939. Visits must be arranged in advance.
KTA member Olga Drucker writes about the very first Kindertransport Reunion: “We came alone. We were as young as 4 months, as old as 17 years. Most were never to see their parents again. I was one of the luckier ones. After 6 years in England, I was reunited with my parents in New York. In 1989, I attended the 50-year Reunion of Kindertransport (Children’s Transport)held in London, England. It was the brainchild of one woman, Bertha Leverton, herself a Kind from Munich….”
Vienna will be the home of what organizers are calling the world’s first permanent museum dedicated to the story of the Kindertransport. The memorial museum “For the Child” is set to open in the center of the Austrian capital on Wednesday. The Dec. 10 opening is on the 76th anniversary of the departure of the first group of Jewish children from Vienna as part of the Kindertransport — the German-language name for the organized shipment of Jewish children, to save them from the Holocaust.
Ruth Moll speaks at the second World Kindertransport Day at the Burbank Town Center on Tuesday, December 2, 2014. Tim Berger / Staff Photographer
Kindertransport survivors share their stories. Burbank Town Center talk remembers 76th anniversary of Kindertransport. Ruth Moll and Hilda Fogelson remember packing their life’s belongings into a single suitcase, the tearful goodbyes, not knowing when they would see family again — if ever — and the language barrier when they arrived in a new country.
Paddington’s 88-year-old creator, Michael Bond reveals his inspiration for the kindly bear: the Jewish evacuee children he remembered seeing in the train stations of London during the Kindertransport of the late 1930s. “They all had a label round their neck with their name and address on and a little case or package containing all their treasured possessions…”
Now 105, the man who helped more than 600 Jewish children escape the Nazis before the second war war has been hailed as a hero around the world. He tells a different story …
The Kindertransport Farm in Millisle, Northern Ireland has secured listed status, after leading a long campaign to ensure the historic site was properly protected. Kindertransport Farm is closely linked to the Holocaust and Northern Ireland’s own war history, especially the past it played in saving the lives of so many Jewish Children.
The Kindertransport Association, which represents many of the surviving “children” (now American citizens in their 80s) and their descendants, urges that the unaccompanied children arriving in the United States today receive the respect, protection and support that they require in order to rebuild their lives. To read, download and send the complete letter: https://www.sendspace.com/file/1vxuac