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.
Share4 By Robyn Rosen, September 21, 2010 Sir Nicholas Winton, known as the British Schindler after he rescued 669 Jewish children from Czechoslovakia, has been honoured with the unveiling of a life-size statue of himself. Sir Nicholas, who is 101, attended the unveiling of the bronze statue, created by sculptor Lydia Karpinska, on the Reading-bound platform at Maidenhead railway station at the weekend.
An Interview with Austrian Consul General Ernst-Peter Brezovszky Editor’s Note: Daniel Retter’s father, Marcus Retter, z”l, escaped from Vienna to England in 1938 on the Kindertransport.He says that since his father should have been the one asking some of the following questions, the interview is dedicated to his memory.
Gretel Beer, who has died aged 89, was a Kindertransport refugee from Austria and became a highly successful writer of cook books; her Classic Austrian Cooking (1954) remains the standard work in English. It was the first in a series on cooking in her homeland, and introduced a British public still dogged by postwar austerity and rationing to the exotic delights of thick soups, Wiener schnitzel, veal goulash, as well as famous Austrian desserts such as dumplings, nut cakes and Sachertortes.
Looking Towards Mornington Crescent Station
Considered one of Britain’s greatest living artists, Frank Auerbach has been based in North London for his entire career, spanning over fifty years. Auerbach was born in Berlin in 1931, to Jewish parents. In 1939 they sent him to England to escape the Nazis as part of the Kindertransport programme, where he has lived ever since. His parents died in a concentration camp.
I’ve always thought of Devorah (Gertrude) Jerichower as a true yekke. Born in Hamburg, she was sent to England in 1938 with her elder brother on the second Kindertransport, her parents perished in Auschwitz. There are others like Devorah, indomitable, motivated, proud Jews and human beings. Their lives have lessons to teach about purpose, courage and endurance in an era when too many are confused, rudderless and weak. We can, if we choose, learn them.
Lily Renée Phillips, photo by Jo Ann Toy for Newsweek
You can see in her work flashes of Klimt, Schiele, Dix, and other painters she studied as a wealthy young girl in prewar Austria. You can also see the influence of what happened next: World War II.Phillips spent two years as a Jewish war refugee in England, wondering if her parents were still alive, and ultimately escaped to the U.S. with the kind of derring-do you might find in Señorita Rio, an immigrant turned spy who became Phillips’s most celebrated comic creation.
Papakura Museum is organizing the first-ever nationwide tour of the Anne Frank exhibition. For Papakura District Council’s community development manager Leora Hirsh the exhibition holds special significance. Ms Hirsh’s immediate family escaped Nazi Germany in 1938 and were accepted into New Zealand as refugees while others in the family made it to England through the “kinder transport” system. Many of her extended family did not survive the holocaust.
Ellen J. Kennedy, Ph.D., the founder and Executive Director of World Without Genocide, a nonprofit organization committed to protecting innocent people around the world; preventing genocide by combating racism and prejudice; advocating for the prosecution of perpetrators; and remembering those whose lives and cultures have been destroyed by violence writes of her recent trip to the UK and her visit to kindertransport exhibits.
A FAMILY who founded the UK’s first Holocaust memorial centre are to receive a rare triple honour. Marina Smith and sons James and Stephen will receive honorary degrees from Nottingham Trent University. Much of the award-winning exhibition focuses on the Kindertransport. Also based at the centre is the Aegis Trust, a genocide prevention organisation the Smiths founded in 2000.
Former pupils of a temporary wartime Ort school in Leeds were reunited, 70 years after its relocation from Berlin. More than 100 boys aged 15-to-17 fled to Britain from Nazi Germany in 1939, along with seven teachers and their spouses. From the following year until 1942, it operated as the Ort Technical Engineering School. Eight old boys, who keep in regular contact, were at the anniversary celebration with family members and Ort officials at London’s Jewish Museum in Camden.
Local councillors and residents visited Leeds’ Brodetsky Jewish Primary to officially open three new building projects. A specially constructed nature teaching area known as the Outdoor School was dedicated to Sam Gitlic by his family, who had funded the £10,000 facility in his memory. Mr Gitlic came to Britain as a refugee on the Kindertransport, aged 13. He was taken under the wing of the Lawrence family of Leeds.
Otto was 17 years old when his father Karl and his mother Bertha put him on a train bound for Holland. It was August 18, 1939. He was the youngest in his family. His brothers and sisters were too old to be included in the Kindertransport.
The former Assistant Director of ITS Berkeley and the author of a widely used textbook on traffic engineering, died June 9,2010. Homburger was born in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1926. In 1939, at age 12, he was sent to England on a Kindertransport. He was a committed supporter of Neve Shalom-Wahat al-Salam, a village in Israel where Jewish and Arab families live together in a peace-building effort.
When the Jewish people were in peril of being totally extinguished, Ireland — or ‘Eire’, as the 26 counties were then called — did not lift a finger to help out. The Irish National Archives have overflowing files of letters to the Irish authorities from European Jews in the period 1938-1940, begging for help from or asylum in this country. Mr de Valera even refused to participate in the ‘Kindertransport’ project.
The Kindertransport Association has announced that it will host its Biennial Conference in Arlington, Virginia October 15-17, 2010. The event is expected to draw hundreds of members from throughout the United States. “We are very excited to be convening again this year.” said Kurt Goldberger, President of the KTA. “First, second and third generation KTA members as well as others who attend will experience a rich, meaningful weekend.”
Despite the rain outside, the crowd inside the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County’s new museum walked and learned as they toured the galleries and learned from the Center’s docents about the experiences of children during the Holocaust. On this special day, the Center held its annual Memorial Walk to remember the children who were murdered during the Holocaust.
Felix Weil, 82, shared his first-hand experience of traveling on the first Kindertransport that departed Germany for England in 1938. He related a tale of being chosen from a lottery, leaving his sobbing parents at the station (never to see them again),and finding three sizes of pants – from child, adolescent, and adult – in his meager suitcase. In addition to his personal experience, Weil explained the political, social & religious climate of Poland, Russia and Germany during that time.
Four Onalaska eighth-graders began working on this year’s National History Day projects before the school year even began. Sam Chilsen, Ben Reimler, Mary Diermeier and Tori Charnetzki spent last summer investigating topics and looking at the competition’s guidelines. Their final projects,including “Kindertransport: Journey to Safety,” a documentary by Chilsen and Reimler, qualified May 1 for the national competition to be held June 13-17 at the University of Maryland-College Park.