Quentin Tarantino’s Nazi revenge movie may have plenty of drama but the real story is even better. Kim Masters on the heroic band of Jewish commandos known as X Troop. My father was an Inglourious Basterd. Actually, he was the opposite of that. But he was a Jewish commando in the British Army during World War II. A native of Vienna, he belonged to a secret unit made up of refugees from the Nazis. They went on reconnaissance missions in enemy territory and much more.
Born in Breslau in 1928, Michael was one of 10,000 Jewish children saved from Nazi Germany in the Kindertransport. After immigrating to the U.S., he trained as a musicologist and became a renowned music writer.
Michael Steinberg, widely recognized as one of the most important writers on classical music of our time passed away this morning at age 80. Born in Germany in 1928, he spent part of his childhood in England via the Kindertransport. It was in England that he first discovered his love of music. In his book “For the love of Music: Invitations to Listening” co-authored with Larry Rothe, Steinberg revealed it was not in a concert hall, but in an alley behind a movie theater.
Curtis L. Mann, a lawyer and Holocaust survivor, died Saturday (July 25, 2009) at Brooking Park in Chesterfield. He was 83. Mr. Mann was born in Frankfurt, Germany. At 13, he boarded a Kindertransport which would take him to England. “The children were of school age, from about 6 to 17, and they had one thing in common: They were the lucky ones… This was an escape from almost certain death in the extermination camps of the Holocaust,” Mr. Mann wrote in a 1989 article.
More than 75 students listened to Holocaust survivor Walter Kammerling talk about his personal experiences as part of a visit organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust. Mr Kammerling was among thousands of Jewish children evacuated from Austria under the Kindertransport scheme. He was born in 1923 in Vienna and was 14 when Nazi Germany occupied Austria. Mr Kammerling’s parents sent him to Britain on the Kindertransport. He was 15, but his sisters, 17 and 18, could not join him.
PUPILS at a Birmingham school learned first hand about the horrors of the Holocaust when they were visited by a survivor of the Nazis’ efforts to exterminate all Jews during the 1930s and 40s. Susi told the pupils how she escaped to London with her twin sister on the Kindertransport taking Jewish children out of Germany, and how her identity was changed by the childless Welsh minister and his wife who adopted them.
Retired Sheffield teacher Inge Joseph, who came to Britain as a 12-year-old refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, has had a third volume of her memoirs – My Darling Diary – Vol III – published. The honesty and frankness of her diary-keeping (using the pen name Ingrid Jacoby) has already caught widespread attention through Radio 4 programmes Message to Myself and Woman’s Hour.
When he was 14, Alfred Bader was sent out of Austria on a kindertransport. He ended up interned in Canada. By 1941, he had applied to Canadian universities. Toronto and McGill rejected him, having decided that they had enough Jews already. Queen’s, however, accepted the young man, who eventually completed degrees in history and chemistry. At the party in his honour Bader said he still appreciated what the university had done to help him get his start decades ago.
Henry Lowenstein was born July 4, 1925, and grew up in Berlin, where his parents hosted nightly parties for artists of all kinds. One of his father’s best friends was composer Kurt Weill, who worked out his masterpiece “The Three penny Opera” on the Lowenstein family piano. Lowenstein’s war stories are harrowing. At 13, he was part of an illegal scout troop that met in secret to swap tips on staying alive. “We were naïve as hell,” he said. But we were doomed if we stayed.”
Joe Wohlfarth is affably modest for someone who has represented Great Britain in the Maccabiah games – a quality that is magnified when you discover that he played on the British soccer team twice, in 1950 and 1957, and that he is preparing to represent Israel in the tennis masters, at the age of 77, having made aliya from the UK nine years ago. Wohlfarth distinctly recalls playing soccer with older children when he arrived in England from Frankfurt on the Kindertransport, aged seven.
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.