Arlington, Mass. – The Arlington Human Rights Commission is honored to host “Lest We Forget: Memories and Lessons from the Holocaust” on Thursday, May 21. Dr. Fred K. Manasse, a child survivor of the Holocaust who witnessed the burning of his synagogue during Kristallnacht, will describe his wartime experiences. He was sent on a Kindertransport to Brussels where he was placed in an orphanage. He escaped to France and over the Pyrenees to Spain and eventually to New York.
A monument was unveiled Wednesday in the Polish port city of Gdansk remembering 10,000 Jewish children evacuated to Britain to save them from the Nazis. The bronze memorial went up in front of the main train station in Gdansk, a city on the Baltic Sea coast that at the time was Danzig, a free city lost to Germany after World War I.
Though Sam Barriskell is nearly 70 years younger than Lilly Drukker, the 13-year-old was keenly aware that in a different time and place, her story could easily have been his. Drukker was only 11 when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, and on Sunday, she held Barriskell and an intimate group of his peers rapt at attention as she related the story of her life under Nazi occupation before leaving Vienna and her family for London on a Kindertransport.
My grandmother took my father to the platform, put him on a train and waved goodbye knowing it was likely to be the last time she would see her son,” said Rod Bluh. “That takes some kind of courage.” Rod is well-known throughout Swindon as the tough-talking leader of the borough council. Yet he tells the story of his grandmother and father with emotion in his voice and watery eyes. http://www.swindonadvertiser.co.uk/news/4325160.Council_leader_s_family_torn_apart_by_Holocaust/ 0
66 2009-04-29 00:00:00 Unlikely Trio Uncover Tales of Wartime Rescues The feature documentary, The Rescuers: Heroes of the Holocaust” which is due out next year, documents the incredible stories of 12 non-Jewish diplomats from 11 countries, who, against the orders of their governments, helped save an estimated 200,000 European Jews during World War II. The three principals in the project came together last November at the 70th reunion in London of the Kindertransport.
Everybody in Britain should give some of their time or their money to charity as a routine part of life, according to the “ambassador” appointed by Gordon Brown to promote philanthropy. Dame Stephanie Shirley, a Kind from Austria,who was given the job last week, said philanthropy should be part of everyday life.
Marianne Bern and her sister fled Nazi Germany for England in 1939 though the Kindertransport. On Tuesday, Bern participated in the third annual Holocaust Remembrance Day service in the Cedar Valley. She lit a candle in memory of victims of the Holocaust and read a self-authored poem about horrors suffered under Hitler’s rule.
Holocaust survivor Felix Weil, 81, tells his life story of survival to Mrs. DiCuirci fifth grade classroom at Xenia Christian School. In the late 1930s, Felix Weil’s life was spared from the Holocaust by the Kindertransport. And had it not been for a clerical mistake, Felix Weil of Clayton,Ohio, could not have been at Xenia Christian School this week to share his experiences with the 5th grade class. He probably would not have escaped Hitler’s clutches, the horror of the Holocaust, he said.
A Holocaust survivor who escaped to Britain as a teenager has shared his tragic experiences with students at Wallington County Grammar School. Harry Bibring, 83, escaped Nazi-occupied Vienna on a Kindertransport train after his father’s menswear business was destroyed during Kristallnacht. His father later died of a heart attack after being robbed while buying travel tickets and his mother was deported to the Sobibor death camp in Poland in 1942.
Friedel (Fred) Ransenberg was born in Wenneman, Germany, the second oldest of six children. His father, Jakob Ransenberg, an Iron Cross recipient and decorated sergeant in the German Army during World War I, supported his family as a butcher. Before the drastic rise of anti-Semitism, Ransenberg and his brothers played soccer on the local team alongside many Catholic Germans. Fred’s older brother was sent away on the Kindertransport. In 1943, at the age of 16, Fred arrived in Auschwitz.
National Public Radio interviews James Jacobson, a self-professed serial entrepreneur, who feels many life lessons stem from the lives of his parents, who fled Germany and the Nazis as young children, and eventually made their way to St. Louis, where they found each other and married. When his father was 7, he was put on a train with his sister in what later became known as the kindertransport.
In a sombre ceremony at the University of Toronto, the Czech Republic recently marked the 70th anniversary of two separate – but ultimately related – events. On March 14, 1939, the first rescue train of Jewish children, known as the kindertransport, pulled out of Prague, bound for Britain. One day later, the German army marched into Prague, the Czech capital, transforming a democratic nation into a protectorate of Nazi Germany and dooming its Jewish population.
Irmgard Rosenzweig got out of Germany in March 1939 on a Kindertransport to England. She lived in a foster home for more than a year while her parents secretly plotted their escape. With the help of the American Friends Service Committee, the family was reunited in New York City in the summer of 1940 and offered the opportunity to go to Scattergood,Iowa. “I was sure it was the Wild West,” Irmgard laughed.
The 85-year-old director remembers how Helga and Irene Bejach arrived in August 1939, when he was 15. They stayed with the Attenboroughs for seven years before moving to America. Irene died in 1992 and Helga in 2005.
Dr. Heini Halberstam, KTA member and retired faculty of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana participated in a post-show discussion following the March 30, 2009 performance of My Heart in a Suitcase. As a child, Dr. Halberstam traveled from former Czechoslovakia to England on the Kindertransport.
KTA member Alfred Traum is featured in article about the Reverend Patrick Desbois and his search for evidence of Nazi crimes in the Ukraine. ‘We are running against time,’ the French priest said Thursday at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
Lisl Schick,was a guest speaker at a Florida high school in an initiative to bring more awareness of the Holocaust. The assembly was sponsored by the Holocaust Education Resource Council, which provides free materials to teachers.
The Providence campus of URI presents “The Holocaust: Women’s Stories — The Will to Survive and Thrive.” It’s not one event but three: two exhibits and one play. The exhibit “My Mother’s Story” is centered on the Kindertransport.
All of us know people who inspire us to do great things. If we are really lucky, we might be able to find a rare individual or two who motivate us by their selfless example of giving without seeking recognition for their efforts. Ilse Meyer was one of those people, and her impact on our community will continue to be felt for many years into the future.
The love story between KTA member Alfred Bader and his wife, Isabel, will be featured on a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Valentine’s Day-themed documentary Friday February 13 at 9pm on The Doc Zone. Love Interrupted features the stories of several couples who fell in love when young and then spent several decades separated before finally reuniting later in life.
The Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey is acting as matchmaker, bringing together bar and bat mitzva students with individual survivors, so that the youngsters can talk to and get to know them and learn what happened to them and their families.