Simon Wessely is an internationally renowned expert on Gulf War illnesses.Director of the King’s Centre for Military Health Research, his team’s work has influenced policy on the health of British armed forces. “I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I greatly admire our armed services and feel we don’t value them enough.Those feelings have no doubt been influenced by my father’s background.”As a teenager his dad travelled on the Kindertransport from Prague to Britain to escape the Nazis.
A HARWICH festival is celebrating a very special anniversary. Harwich Festival of the Arts is marking 70 years since the Kindertransport, when more than 10,000 children, who were mostly Jewish, were shipped to Harwich to escape Nazi oppression. For more information: www.harwichfestival.co.uk
Ruth Joseph, whose mother was one of 10,000 child refugees who fled Nazi Germany in the kindertransport, wants every child in Wales to read Anne Frank’s diary as part of their schooling. Her mother, Judith Heyman, was sent to Britain at the age of 12. She carried the family’s set of candlesticks used to celebrate the Sabbath. Judith’s parents would not escape the Holocaust. They were taken to Latvia and then killed.
It has been 65 years since D-Day, but the memories haven’t faded for two Oneonta men who fought in the invasion of Normandy, the Allied offensive that was a turning point in Europe during World War II. Ernest Goodman, who escaped Breslau on a Kindertransport in 1939, was an infantryman fighting with the elite British Coldstream Guards. Both volunteered for the military as teenagers.in Europe during World War II. Article in the Oneonta Daily Star.
A Kind works with the Anne Frank Project in Great Britain: St Mary’s pupils had a talk from Henry Wuga, originally from Nuremburg, who described being beaten up by the SS and watching Hitler giving a speech. He also recalled how he was treated with suspicion by the authorities when he arrived in Scotland as an asylum seeker and was sent to the High Court in Edinburgh, charged with communicating with the enemy.
The Arlington Human Rights Commission sponsored a talk on the Holocaust by Kind Fred Manasse and Dr. Margot Segall-Blank. The two speakers were children when they saw their native Germany transform from familiar neighborhoods into a place they had to flee.
When plans to evacuate civilians from towns and cities were put into action on 31 August 1939, millions of children’s lives were immediately changed. Outbreak 1939 will incorporate the stories and exhibits of a number of those children, including a teddy bear belonging to a little girl evacuated on 3 September 1939; and an exercise book kept by Celia Horwitz, a German Jewish girl, who arrived in the UK in December 1938 as part of the Kindertransport and was later evacuated to Norfolk.
The troop was recruited from the tens of thousands of refugees who had fled to Britain from the Nazi persecution of the Jewish population before the war. When war began, they were classified as enemy aliens amid fears of infiltration by fifth columnists, and interned. But as time went by, distrust eased and men of fighting age were freed to join the British Army. These men, including several Kinder, were serious and brave soldiers who risked more than most in World War II.
Born in Nuremberg, Germany in 1926 to Polish-Jewish parents, Gustav Metzger was evacuated to England with his brother Max/Mendel as part of the Kindertransport in 1939. This overview presented by the Serpentine Gallery represents the influential artist and activist Gustav Metzger’s life-long exploration of politics, ecology and the destructive powers of 20th-century industrialised societies. Destruction, creation and transformation lie at the heart of much of Metzger’s art.
Like the soldiers portrayed on screen, the men of 3 Troop, 10 Commando, a unit of the British Army that was almost entirely composed of German-speaking Jewish refugees, were motivated by a hatred of Nazism and were sent on secret missions, often behind enemy lines. But any similarities end there. At the age of Max Dickson arrived in England on a Kindertransport. He never saw his parents again – they died in the Warsaw ghetto. Mr Dickson retains vivid memories of his wartime experiences.
Holocaust survivor Guy Bishop passed away on Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 21, 2008. Few people know that he arrested Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi responsible for the mass murder of 6 million Jews. Guy Bishop was born Günther Brüg on April 9, 1926, in Germany and was sent to England on the Kindertransport, in July 1939. With no one to greet him in England, Günther was sent to a refugee camp.
Arlington, Mass. – The Arlington Human Rights Commission is honored to host “Lest We Forget: Memories and Lessons from the Holocaust” on Thursday, May 21. Dr. Fred K. Manasse, a child survivor of the Holocaust who witnessed the burning of his synagogue during Kristallnacht, will describe his wartime experiences. He was sent on a Kindertransport to Brussels where he was placed in an orphanage. He escaped to France and over the Pyrenees to Spain and eventually to New York.
A monument was unveiled Wednesday in the Polish port city of Gdansk remembering 10,000 Jewish children evacuated to Britain to save them from the Nazis. The bronze memorial went up in front of the main train station in Gdansk, a city on the Baltic Sea coast that at the time was Danzig, a free city lost to Germany after World War I.
Though Sam Barriskell is nearly 70 years younger than Lilly Drukker, the 13-year-old was keenly aware that in a different time and place, her story could easily have been his. Drukker was only 11 when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, and on Sunday, she held Barriskell and an intimate group of his peers rapt at attention as she related the story of her life under Nazi occupation before leaving Vienna and her family for London on a Kindertransport.
My grandmother took my father to the platform, put him on a train and waved goodbye knowing it was likely to be the last time she would see her son,” said Rod Bluh. “That takes some kind of courage.” Rod is well-known throughout Swindon as the tough-talking leader of the borough council. Yet he tells the story of his grandmother and father with emotion in his voice and watery eyes. http://www.swindonadvertiser.co.uk/news/4325160.Council_leader_s_family_torn_apart_by_Holocaust/ 0
66 2009-04-29 00:00:00 Unlikely Trio Uncover Tales of Wartime Rescues The feature documentary, The Rescuers: Heroes of the Holocaust” which is due out next year, documents the incredible stories of 12 non-Jewish diplomats from 11 countries, who, against the orders of their governments, helped save an estimated 200,000 European Jews during World War II. The three principals in the project came together last November at the 70th reunion in London of the Kindertransport.
Everybody in Britain should give some of their time or their money to charity as a routine part of life, according to the “ambassador” appointed by Gordon Brown to promote philanthropy. Dame Stephanie Shirley, a Kind from Austria,who was given the job last week, said philanthropy should be part of everyday life.
Marianne Bern and her sister fled Nazi Germany for England in 1939 though the Kindertransport. On Tuesday, Bern participated in the third annual Holocaust Remembrance Day service in the Cedar Valley. She lit a candle in memory of victims of the Holocaust and read a self-authored poem about horrors suffered under Hitler’s rule.
Holocaust survivor Felix Weil, 81, tells his life story of survival to Mrs. DiCuirci fifth grade classroom at Xenia Christian School. In the late 1930s, Felix Weil’s life was spared from the Holocaust by the Kindertransport. And had it not been for a clerical mistake, Felix Weil of Clayton,Ohio, could not have been at Xenia Christian School this week to share his experiences with the 5th grade class. He probably would not have escaped Hitler’s clutches, the horror of the Holocaust, he said.
A Holocaust survivor who escaped to Britain as a teenager has shared his tragic experiences with students at Wallington County Grammar School. Harry Bibring, 83, escaped Nazi-occupied Vienna on a Kindertransport train after his father’s menswear business was destroyed during Kristallnacht. His father later died of a heart attack after being robbed while buying travel tickets and his mother was deported to the Sobibor death camp in Poland in 1942.
Friedel (Fred) Ransenberg was born in Wenneman, Germany, the second oldest of six children. His father, Jakob Ransenberg, an Iron Cross recipient and decorated sergeant in the German Army during World War I, supported his family as a butcher. Before the drastic rise of anti-Semitism, Ransenberg and his brothers played soccer on the local team alongside many Catholic Germans. Fred’s older brother was sent away on the Kindertransport. In 1943, at the age of 16, Fred arrived in Auschwitz.