DENVER — Ever hear of the man who narrowly escaped the Holocaust, studied art, engineered for a space program and then decided to go to law school and became an appellate judge for 15 years? Former Colorado Court of Appeals Judge Peter Ney did. He’s lived that life, and he also wrote a book, “Getting Here: From a Seat on a Train to a Seat on a Bench.”
The world can seem like a safe and familiar sort of place when you’re 13 years old and a pupil at the bustling Ashton Park School. The horrors of war could easily be confined to the grainy photographs in the books during your history lessons.But some Year 9 pupils at the south Bristol school have been taking part in a Conflict and the Media project, during which they’ve been filming a series of interviews with members of the community who have found their lives torn apart by conflict.
He writes, in the Delaware News Journal: On Nov. 23, 1939, my mother and I landed in Miami after an overnight boat trip from Havana. After a 36-hour bus trip we reached Wilmington, where I have happily lived ever since. I have always been grateful that the relatives whom we joined and who had preceded us to this country wound up in Delaware, a state that reflects the diversity of our country.
Kristallnacht survivor Rachel Zimbler speaks at the Kelley School of Business. Zimbler was just 10 years old when she left her home in Vienna, Austria.
“I am going to ask you not to look at me as an 81-year-old lady, but as a 10-year-old,” she said while standing in front of a crowd of students in the Kelley School of Business, “because the events I am going to speak about happened to me when I was 10.”
Brenda Lewis knew when she headed to Prague in late August she was in for a rollercoaster ride of emotion, even though her mode of transport was a train. “I didn’t know what to expect except that it would be emotional,” said Lewis, of Guelph, whose father Heinze Laufer was one of the 667 children Nicholas Winton brought to safety. Laufer, who later changed his name to Henry Lewis, died on Christmas Eve in 2007. Brenda Lewis took the trip to honour her father.
From the Jerusalem Post, coverage of the Nicky Winton trains.
As a child of 12, Lilly Tauber, 82, whose photo of her grandparents’ shop is in the Linz exhibit,was put on a Kindertransport. She had never traveled alone and still remembers waving goodbye to her parents on the platform. Tauber never saw either of them again. “I can’t forget what happened 70 years ago, whatever they say,” she said. “I’m sure some [politicians] mean it honestly. But with some people, I’m not so sure if they mean it or if they say it’s enough talking about it already.”
‘Till we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land’ (1998/2007)
Metzger, who arrived in Britain from Nurenburg at the age of 12 on a Kindertransport (and whose parents subsequently perished in the Holocaust), remains a radical and his relentless, revolutionary political stance places him at a vast remove from the insistent commercialism and banal self-indulgence of the contemporary art world. He once suggested that artists suspend commercial production for three years as a protest against capitalism
The Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies invites contributions to Volume 13 of the Yearbook, which is to appear in 2011. If you wish to offer a contribution to this volume, please send a synopsis of around 300 words to Dr Andrea Hammel, email: a.hammel[at]sussex.ac.uk by 1 March 2010. If accepted, your paper will have to be submitted for peer review by 1 September 2010.
As a Jew my feelings toward Britain have always been mixed. My grandmother and her siblings came to Britain on the Kindertransport in 1939 with 10,000 other Jewish children. This British hospitality very likely saved their lives and certainly afforded them freedom and opportunity in beginning life anew. On the other hand their brother was slain in the infamous Hadassah Convoy Massacre of April 13th 1948 that was directly facilitated by the British.
Lunch overlooking the sea at Kibbutz Lavi was a culinary and scenic delight. The religious-Zionist kibbutz in the lower Galilee was established in 1949 by a youth organization from England, many of whom had escaped the Holocaust through the kindertransport. Its first-class, ultra-modern hotel, surrounded by lavish gardens, was recently renovated and the rooms were fully booked.
The current exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery of the work of influential Jewish artist, Gustav Metzger marks the 50th anniversary of the date when Metzger decided to abandon painting to use everyday objects in his art as a critique of the terrible wastage of consumer society. Now aged 83, he continues to make new work that acts as a wake-up call to the public.
The Testimony House for the Heritage of the Holocaust in Moshav Nir Galim, near Ashdod, opened its galleries last week to an exhibit documenting the Bahad-Bnei Akiva youth movement’s activities in promoting Zionism in pre-World War II Britain. Attendee Max Kopfstein was born in Berlin and now lives in Kibbutz Lavi, in the Galilee. Kopfstein, whose life was saved by the Kindertransport, told the Post that he “had a soft landing in England, and was hosted by a rabbi originally from Berlin.
Born and raised in Austria, with two elder sisters settled in the nascent Zionist state of Palestine, Ramler was transported out of the country just before war broke out. Ramler’s experiences at the Nuremberg trials are fascinating and form the heart of his new book.
In 1939, Metzger and his brother came to Britain via the Kindertransport. The rest of his family stayed in Germany. His two sisters eventually got out via Sweden. In 1943 his father was deported to Poland.His mother followed. They died. “Died,” Metzger repeats softly. Gustav Metzger’s art is at once playful and aggressive, plainly sincere, and powerfully, brutally direct.
On Monday evening, I went to the 80th birthday party of the most dedicated football man I know. Ernest Hecht is the owner-chairman of Souvenir Press, a wonderfully eccentric publishing house that has remained proudly independent since it was set up in 1951. Hecht arrived in England with his mother on the Kindertransport at the end of the 1930s, a young Jewish child escaping Nazi terror.
The haunting images — all associated with Nazi atrocities and humiliation of Jewish people — speak to an era that’s back in the news, as the world celebrates the 70th anniversary of a triumph of the human spirit, the Kindertransport. In May 1939, 12-year-old Vera Coppard-Leibovic and her father were ushered into a room in Berlin, where 100 children were waiting to take the Kindertransport. In each corner of the room, a black-shirted Nazi stood guard with a German shepherd.
For the past seven years, whenever I have tried to wrestle a stamp or a library card out of my overcrowded wallet, a yellowing and much- folded newspaper cutting has fallen to the floor. Last week, I opened a daily newspaper and saw the same face that looks out at me every day from the cutting. In 1938, when Nicholas Winton was 29, a friend suggested he cancel their annual skiing holiday and instead go to Czechoslovakia to visit Jewish refugee camps. What he saw there horrified him.
A previously undiscovered letter relating to the Kindertransport has been found in a house in Manningtree. Doreen Parsons, aged 76, discovered the letter, written on March 10, 1939, in a study at Lawford Place in 1963 after the death of her husband Newman but only ever told her family. Now she wants to find out more information about the letter, which invites German children who were saved from Nazi persecution, to live at her father-in-law, William Parsons, house.
Hanna Slome shares her memories with reporter Caroline Tilley
Hanna Slome, 84, was 14 when she was put on a Kindertransport train to Harwich by her mother in May 1939. She said: “When my mother said goodbye she said ‘if anything happens to me don’t cry for me. I’m dying for my beliefs.’ “That left me with something to hang onto.” She never saw either of her parents again, both died during the Second World War.