Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day but it is also a special day for a Hicksville woman who escaped Nazi Germany. Margarete Goldberger was aboard a mass humanitarian operation called Kindertransport, and her memories of fleeing the Nazis were captured on faded family photographs. Goldberger recalls that 23 of her close relatives were killed in the Holocaust. Goldberger, 85, is from Hicksville and was just 12 years old when her homeland of Germany turned into her prison.
Hal Myers was five in 1935 when Nazi Germany passed the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws that stripped Jews of their rights. Myers’ father, a salesman and World War I veteran, lost his job in Adolf Hitler’s first step in clearing Germany of all Jews, Myers said. He grew up in Karlsruhe, the capital of Baden, and remembers his family moving next to the Jewish community center, where Myers’ father got a job as a janitor and his mother as a cook.
The flash of a swastika on the arm of a German soldier. His mother’s anxious face peering back at him from the platform. Prague at night through the train window. These are the memories of Lord Alfred Dubs, 78, the life peer and former MP for Battersea now living in the village of High Lorton near Cockermouth. “It was a traumatic parting,” he recalls.
Last month, in Berlin, some 40 people gathered outside a block of flats on Gieselerstrasse 12. They came to commemorate seven Jews who were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to their deaths in Auschwitz. Among the guests was 87-year old Ilse Newton of Golders Green. The last time she had set foot on this street was in 1939 with her parents, Hugo and Flora Philips, who took her to the train station where she joined other children as part of the Kindertransport that brought her to England.
A MEMORIAL to commemorate Harwich’s role in the Kindertransport will be unveiled next week. The bench and information plaque, located on Harbour Crescent, will remember the 10,000 Jewish children who passed through the seaside town in 1938 escaping persecution from Nazi Germany.
Miriam Goldfarb holds a photo of her mother Elizabeth Goldfarb in 2nd grade, she’s 3rd from the left.
Elizabeth Goldfarb was 17 when her parents put her on a train and sent her far away from Nuremberg, Germany. She spent the next year and a half in England, working for a London family and trying to get visas for her parents so they could flee the looming genocide of the Holocaust. The year was 1939.
Bern, who lives in Los Angeles, is a Jew from Iowa, where he and his sister were the only Jewish kids in their school. His parents were Jews from Europe. His mother left Germany on the kindertransport; his father fled Lithuania in 1939, one of two survivors of his family; the rest were massacred with the other Jews of Lithuania in 1941.
This is a remarkable book about a most remarkable man. Gerard Gould is a teacher and director of amateur drama with a uniquely charismatic personality, and those gifts are rare enough to merit attention; but the life of the man behind the work is truly fascinating. He was born Günter Goldstein in Germany in 1922, the youngest child of a prosperous Jewish family. He was a witness (and a perceptive, profoundly intelligent witness) to the gathering horror that was Nazi Germany.
Ralph Samuel
Rita Goldhor, Leo Mark Horovitz and Ralph Samuel all have extraordinary tales about how they escaped the Holocaust in 1939 via the Kindertransport. The trio will be talking in a roundtable discussion titled “Holocaust Survivors Reclaim Their Mother Tongue and Cultural Heritage.” Open to the public, the talk is being organized by the Oakland-based Gerlind Institute for Cultural Studies, which teaches and promotes German cultural studies throughout the Bay Area.
CARLA KING reviews Children’s Exodus: A History of the Kindertransport By Vera K Fast IN THE GRIM years before the second World War one beacon of courage and kindness was the Kindertransport , a voluntary effort that saw the movement of more than 10,000 Jewish children from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to the relative safety of Britain.
It’s not every day a Holocaust victim comes and speaks to us, said Rabbi Noam Silverman, head of Jewish studies at the Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School, as he introduced 82-year-old Ellen Fletcher. “And it’s not every day a Holocaust victim comes to us on a bike, especially in the rain.” With that, more than 100 middle-school students grinned and welcomed the former “kindertransport kid,” one of 10,000 Jewish children rescued from Nazi Germany just before World War II broke out.
Herman Hirschberger at a Holocaust Memorial Day event with pupils from Bentley Wood High School.
Herman Hirschberger, a Stanmore holocaust survivor on the New Year honours list says fighting for justice for Jewish refugees was the “best job I’ve ever done”. He will be given an MBE by the Queen for services to the Jewish Community and the Kindertransport evacuees.
The celebrated ‘Kindertransport’ project finds an echo in the noble decision by Digvijaysinhji, the maharaja of Nawanagar to take in Polish children from war-torn, occupied Poland and Soviet prison camps. He took personal risks to make the arrangements at a time when the world was at war, and when the exhausted refugees were denied entry at all ports. Digvijaysinhji, son of the legendary cricketer-prince Ranjitsinhji, built a camp for them beside his summer palace and made them feel at home.
Here The Horror was nurtured and exalted — at monster rallies between 1923-1939, where hundreds of thousands of Germans massed every summer to pledge fanatic fealty to “der Führer”… And here, in Courtroom 600 of the Palace of Justice, beginning in 1945, the perpetrators of The Horror were brought to account for their deeds by the Allies… Nuremberg: ground zero. Among the 200 honored guests in Courtroom 600 sat a diminutive 86-year-old German-born lady named Hedy Epstein.
The year is 1938. Betrayed at Munich by European countries desperate to appease Hitler — “Peace in our time,” infamously crowed Neville Chamberlain — Czechoslovakia is about to be invaded by Germany. Toronto poet and novelist Alison Pick dissects this national tragedy in a multilayered narrative, a tale of betrayals large and small, that focuses on the fates of the Bauers, secular Czech Jews.
Marion Marston, 85, of Stanmore, lost 22 members of her family in the Holocaust. She came to Britain on the Kindertransport. She struggles to afford any luxuries. “I have four hours’ paid homecare a week from the AJR, and the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre in Hendon is a lifeline for me. But I would be very happy to have more help.”
Kingston celebrated interfaith week with a Faith Fest allowing different groups to share their food and artefacts. The week ran until Sunday, November 28, and included a talk by a survivor of the kinder transport from Nazi Germany at Kingston Liberal Synagogue.
Mr Hirschberger, a refugee from Nazi Germany who came to the UK in 1939 on the Kindertransport, reminded us that we must not discriminate against anybody on the grounds of race or colour or religion. That is such an important lesson that we can take forward from this Mitzvah Marathon.
Lotte Kramer came to England in 1939 with the Kindertransport. Her 13th volume, Turning the Key (Rockingham Press, £7.99) is made up of a compelling quantity of toughly pared-down lyrics. One instantly sees why she cherishes an unassumingly grey-toned necklace though . . . not prone to ornaments./It was the simple beauty of design/That spoke to me, the thinness of the chain,/The tiny pearls like petit-pois.
Melissa Hacker, eine New Yorker Filmemacherin hat sich der Geschichte ihrer Familie angenommen. Im NU-Gesprach erzahlt sie uber ihre Mutter Ruth Morley, eine beruhmte Filmdesignerin, die als Kind aus Wien fluchten konnte und uber ihren Grossvater Mordechai Birnholz, den Besitzer einer beruhmten Exlibris-Sammlung, die von den Nazis gestohlen wurde. -Scroll down page to ARTIKEL and clic on Zerbrochene Kindheit –