Susi Bechhofer visited a school as part of a week of events marking the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Susi Bechhofer, who escaped Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport in 1939, visited Barr Beacon Language College, and spoke to over 100 pupils about the atrocities and her journey in finding her true identity. For over 50 years Susi did not know her identity, having been sent to an orphanage as a child and brought up as a baptist in Wales.
About 60 pupils from Lothingland and Gisleham Middle Schools caught a train to travel from Beccles to Lowestoft yesterday morning to recreate part of a journey made by Jewish refugee children as part of Holocaust Memorial Day. The children, who carried handmade replica suitcases on the trip, arrived at the station in time for the unveiling of a memorial plaque which commemorates the arrival of a kindertransport train carrying Jewish refugees at Lowestoft railway station in December 1938.
Harry Bibring, a Holocaust survivor, is visiting The Helena Romanes School and Sixth Form Centre, in Great Dunmow. He will be talking to Year 10 students about his experiences during an event organised to mark the international Holocaust Memorial Day. Mr Bibring was born in Austria in 1925. His family suffered from persecution following Germany’s annexing of Austria in 1938 and the family planned their escape. He was sent by his parents to the UK with his sister on a Kindertransport.
His parents and sister perished at Auschwitz concentration camp. Sixty-five years later, Walter Kammerling ensured their memories lived on during moving Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations in Bournemouth. As a youth, Walter witnessed Nazi persecution in Vienna before his parents sent him to Britain; a decision that would ultimately save his life.
A woman who lost more than 65 members of her family in the Nazi Holocaust spoke of her devastating experiences, as part of a national commemoration. Mrs Collins was just five when she was bundled onto a train by her mother and family doctor with no idea where she was going on June 30, 1939. She had no idea that she would never see her mother, Hilda Altschul, or father, Otto Heinz, again. Both were to die in Poland’s concentration camps.
From the Uxbridge Gazette: 2,000 children from 33 schools will commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day in Northwood – the largest in the UK. Ann Kirk, 81, was just 10 when she left her parents in Germany in 1938 and escaped to England on a Kindertransport. “The Holocaust has become part of history but it’s so important that the world never forgets what happened and never underestimates the danger of racial prejudice and discrimination – that’s exactly why we share our experiences.”
Primary school children from across Liverpool will unite at the Town Hall tomorrow to hear the stories of people affected by the Holocaust. They will meet three women who fled to the UK to escape the Holocaust and will take part in questions and discussions. Speaking to the young people will be Inge Goldrein, a retired circuit judge, who escaped to the UK in 1939, aged eight, on a Kindertransport from Vienna.
On Thursday 21, the psychosexual therapist speaks at Planned Parenthood of Illinois’s annual Roe v. Wade event,“The Future of Choice.” You were very young when your family sent you from Frankfurt to Switzerland on a Kindertransport. “On January 5, 1939, I was on that train. If my parents hadn’t put me on that train, I wouldn’t be alive. Every January 5, some of my friends and I who were on the train, we talk to each other.”
A woman who lost 60 members of her family in the Nazi holocaust and escaped from Prague on the last children’s train from the city in 1939 will tell her story at Bridgend’s Holocaust Memorial Day. Renate Collins, who went on to grow up in the South Wales Valleys, lost approximately 60 members of her family in the Holocaust, including her parents Otto and Hilda Kress. She still wears her mother and grandmother’s rings which were smuggled out of a concentration camp in a loaf of bread.
Waveney will mark Holocaust Memorial Day with special events to remember the part the district played over 70 years ago. The commemorations begin with a launch event at St Felix School, Southwold.The school took care of around 200 Jewish boys, aged 12-18 over the Christmas period in December 1938. On Holocaust Memorial Day 60 local schoolchildren will re-trace the last leg of the refugees’ journey, on to Pontins in Pakefield, where the Kindertransport refugees were billeted.
Q. Is it ethical to relocate children from disaster zones? A. There are honourable precedents such as the Kindertransport programme. But children’s advocacy groups warn against mass airlifts of youngsters overseas in the wake of natural disasters… Given the chaotic state of communications in Haiti right now, a big fear is that some children may be shipped overseas without proper checks to see if any extended family members are alive.
A row has broken out over the meaning of the term Holocaust survivor after an 85-year-old grandmother used it to describe herself when criticising Israeli action against Palestinians. German-born Hedy Epstein was attacked by a senior figure in the Zionist Federation who dismissed her as a refugee “touted as a trophy survivor” to help vilify Israel. The row exploded into a heated online exchange and a debate about whether historians had a proper definition of the term.
He said it to everyone, from Air National Guardsmen deploying to Iraq to the at-risk kids attending the summer camp he established at Camp Rilea. “America,” he would say, “is the greatest country in the world.” To the young ones, he would add, “You can go as high as you want to.” He knew he was blessed to rise from persecution to honor and he would not let that blessing stop with him. It was his lifelong practice to pass it along.
The 10,000 Children That Hitler Missed With very few family members still alive, more than six years ago, Lori Greshler started to research her own family tree. Through the digging, she realized her family lost approximately 100 members to the Holocaust. “It just touched me so much,” says Greschler, “because their voices were stifled, I had to keep their memories alive and let people understand that these were real people like you and me who had hopes and dreams.”
Erich Reich, one of thousands of Kindertransport children sent from Nazi-occupied Europe to Britain during World War II, was among the people knighted by Queen Elizabeth as part of the annual New Year’s Honours list, the Telegraph reported Thursday. Reich, 74, is chairman of the Kindertransport Group of the Association of Jewish Refugees, who organized the celebrations last year to mark the 70th anniversary of the British Parliament’s decision to allow the children to enter the country.
A man who raised millions of pounds for charity after arriving in the UK as a four-year-old Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Europe is to become a knight. Erich Reich, 74, was among 10,000 “Kindertransport” children sent to the UK before the Second World War began.
BEIRUT — An 85-year-old Holocaust survivor entered the second day of her hunger strike on Tuesday, in protest over the Egyptian government’s refusal to allow an international Palestinian solidarity march to enter the Gaza Strip. “There comes a time in one’s life when one has to step up and risk one’s own body,” she said. “We’re in a desperate situation here, but not as desperate as the people in Gaza.”
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us a little more about yourself, Hedy. Talk about your early years in Germany and how you survived the Holocaust. HEDY EPSTEIN: I was born in Germany, and when Hitler came to power, I was eight years old. And my parents quickly realized that Germany was not a place to raise a family under the Nazi regime…In May 1939, I was fortunate to be able to leave Germany on a Kindertransport to England…My parents were not so fortunate. They perished in 1942 in Auschwitz.
I’m proof it’s never too late to go back to school, Wilde said. “But I don’t recommend people wait this long.” He was born Klaus Weiss and grew up in Berlin, where his father ran a family clothing store. He left Germany on a Kindertransport at the age of 15.
A WOMAN touched by the help and support she and her mother received from a charity is saying thanks by becoming a volunteer. Marilyn, a medical secretary, from Lisvane, said: “Sir Nicholas Winton saved my mother and hundreds of other children and she always wanted to do as much for others as it was a way she could help people to pay back for what people had done for her.”