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 –
Alison Pick’s Holocaust novel, Far To Go, puts a new spin on moral compromise and, especially, the experience of young children living in Jewish households where the growing terror becomes unbearable. It’s 1939, and Czech secular Jews Pavel and Annaliese Bauer’s comfortable life is slowly slipping away. As Hitler makes inroads into the country, they have to make some decisions.
Ruth Barnett gave her testimony to 200 students at Bishop Gore School in Swansea, as part of a visit organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust. The aim of the visit is to ensure pupils learn the lessons of the Holocaust — which led to the extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis. London-based Ruth first came to Britain back in 1939, along with her seven-year-old brother.
Wolf was born in Karlsruhe, Germany on December 18,1926. In 1939, at age 12, he was sent to England as part of the last Kindertransport. He spent the war years attending school at Eastbourne College, and then teaching younger students at a school which had been relocated to northern Wales. As a young man, he immigrated to the United States where in 1946 he finally reunited with his parents in New York City.
Later this month singer Max Raabe will bring his 12-piece Palast Orchester ensemble here from Germany, for the first time, for four performances of their Heute Nacht Oder Nie (Tonight or Never) show in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa. Raabe and the band’s repertoire is based on songs that were popular in Germany during the 1920s and early ’30s, “up to 1933,” as Raabe is keen to point out. Hits from America, which also made it big in Europe at the time, also feature in the show.
Lithe and still a head-turner at 85, Phillips, a former model, questioned me about my history before detailing her escape in 1939 to England from Vienna, and her New York reunion with her parents. An artist since childhood, Phillips recalled the “sexual harassment” she endured as the only woman illustrator at the comic book publisher Fiction House.
Meditations: Eva Hesse, featuring Heather L. Tyler, is at Highways Performance Space this weekend.
Eva Hesse was an artist known for both her pioneering work with materials such as plastics, fiberglass and latex, as well as her short, tragic career and life. This weekend in Los Angeles, two opening art exhibitions and a new play focus on Hesse’s life and work. Born in Germany in 1936, Hesse and her sister escaped on one of the last kindertransport trains.