Fritz Spiegl was a flautist, joker and composer of the Z-Cars theme. Until he died some years ago, I didn’t know that as a boy fresh from his Kindertransport, he had been taken in by Captain David Margesson, Chamberlain’s imperious chief whip.
Nicholas Winton with Tal Cohain, whose grandmother Hanna Slome was rescued by Winton’s Kindertransports.
From the Jerusalem Post, article on the Winton train: It took 70 years for this reunion, but when the vintage steam train pulled into London with a group of elderly Holocaust survivors, the emotions started to flow. The three-day trip from Prague – by rail and ferry – recreated the fateful journey the survivors made as children, part of the “kindertransports” organized by Winton that carried 669 mostly Jewish children to safety in England.
From the BBC: A train carrying evacuees who escaped the Holocaust has been met in the UK by the man who arranged their rescue ahead of the start of World War II. It marks the 70th anniversary of trains organized by Sir Nicholas Winton that carried 669 mostly Jewish children to the UK. In a speech to several hundred people gathered at the station, Sir Nicholas told the former evacuees: “It’s wonderful to see you all after 70 years. Don’t leave it quite so long until we meet here again.”
LONDON – British war hero Nicholas Winton, who helped evacuate hundreds of Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia before World War II, will meet on Friday some of the people he saved from Hitler’s death camps. He managed to bring 669 mostly Jewish children on eight trains to Britain through Germany in 1939 but the ninth train with 250 children never left Prague because the war broke out. None of the 250 children on board was ever seen again.
The associated Press covers the 70th anniversary of the kindertransports from Czechoslovakia. Sir Nicholas Winton, a Briton, arranged eight trains to carry 669 mostly Jewish children through Germany to Britain at the outbreak of World War II. Now 100 years old, Winton will be in London on Friday to greet the train’s 170 passengers, including 22 he saved.
From the BBC, coverage of the Nicky Winton train. More than 100 people will travel between Prague and London; among them 20 of Winton’s children, now with children and grandchildren of their own. They are part of an extraordinary worldwide family which owes its existence to the man who, at the age of 100, will once again stand on the platform at Liverpool Street to welcome them.
KTA member Celia Lee is featured in article about the the exhibition Outbreak 1939 at the Imperial War Museum in London. The exhibit looks at the mass evacuation of 2 million children from London and other British cities days before the war started in early September, 1939.
KURT Gutmann was only a boy when he was spirited away from the horrors of Sobibor to seek refuge among kind strangers in Scotland. But more than seven decades after his escape aboard the Kindertransport, Mr Gutmann is to realise his life’s ambition by testifying in one of the last Nazi war criminal trials.
German Jewish Celia Horwitz was part of the Kindertransport and was evacuated when in England. “Oh, it was so many moves at first and you know people said it must have been traumatic. And I thought: ‘Traumatic?’ I didn’t have time to think about it… You know when I think about the war and Hitler in particular, it just shouldn’t happen. Religion should never be the main cause of a war. I mean, how can you kill people for being one religion, one color, where does it stop?”
When Celia Lee was evacuated from London to Norfolk at the outbreak of war, it was the second time in less than a year that she had been uprooted. The previous winter she was among the 10,000 Jewish children evacuated from Germany and surrounding countries as part of the Kindertransport, an attempt to get as many of them as possible out of the Nazis’ reach. Then, she was Cilly-Jutta Horwitz, a 12-year-old from Hamburg. She would never see her father again.
Hesse was born in Hamburg in 1936 to a family of observant Jews. At two, she was put on a Kindertransport, first to Holland, then England and finally, in 1939, to America. Thirty years later, in New York, she was diagnosed with the brain tumour from which she died, aged 34. Her career as an artist had lasted 10 years.
Craig A. Spiegel writes, in the Cleveland Jewish News, of his trip with his mother, Cleveland resident Thea Lange Spiegel, to a reunion of Kindertransport Kinder in Gdansk (formerly Danzig), Poland.
A tribute to KT2 member David Fischer. There are no words to describe the sadness we feel at the death of David, the man behind (among many other projects and passions) Blog About Town, who was a friend of mine. I could never match his generosity or his ingenuity in getting fellow New Yorkers to ditch their work-crazed ruts and get together, out to dinner, out to a play.
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.