As we remember December 2, 1938, the day that the first Kindertransport arrived safely to Harwich, England, and the day that KT2 David Meyerhoff named World Kindertransport Day, we think of Kindertransport Survivor Anita Weisbord from Vienna, who has died this week at 99 years. A committed educator, she shared her story widely. This short clip is beautifully moving.
https://bit.ly/AnitaWTalk
An exhibition tracing the history of refugees in Wales, from those fleeing the Nazis in 1930s up to the present day, is going on display next week.
Refugees from National Socialism in Wales: Learning from the past for the future will be on display at Aberystwyth Arts Centre from 10 November to 29 January, after which it will travel to the Senedd and Pierhead Galleries in Cardiff between February and April 2023.
It tells the stories of those who found sanctuary in Wales after fleeing from central Europe due to the National Socialist dictatorship, and draws parallels with modern-day refugees who are making Wales their home.
Watching Ukrainian women and children flee Putin’s death machine as men remain to fight evokes a heart-rending image from my family narrative 84 years ago.
In 1939, my wife’s maternal grandparents parted from their beloved daughters, Gertrud, 8, and Erika, 10, at the railroad station in Graz, Austria. The girls boarded a kindertransport (transport for children) to Sweden. Barred from the platforms as Jews, their parents strained for a final glimpse at their departing daughters.
Trude and Maja, 1939
Sundering the Silber family devastated the adults and bewildered the girls but it saved the daughters from the Holocaust. It also imbued Gertrud, called Trude, who would be my mother-in-law, with lifelong pangs of abandonment and want. Too young to comprehend the situation, she could not understand the absolute necessity of her parents’ action. She did not experience it as an act of love.
GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP – For most of her life, not many people knew that Ruth Kessler was a survivor of the Holocaust.
“I was the only one who knew her Holocaust story,” her daughter Michele Taroff said. “She never talked about it. My brothers never knew.”
And Kessler continued to keep mostly quiet about her experience as part of the Kindertransport for many years until her granddaughter, Dani Hong, approached “Mom Mom” in eighth grade to ask if she would talk to her class.
“I saw her face turn white and she just looked at Dani and said, ‘OK.’ And that was the beginning of her telling her story, which she never thought was important enough,” Taroff said.
Kessler’s story about being separated from her mother and sister and sent from her home in Vienna to England in 1939 as part of the Kindertransport has become very important, not just to her family but to hundreds of students she spoke to until her death in 2016.
Her important story and family’s legacy will live on with Stockton students as part of the Ruth Fisch Kessler Memorial Endowed Scholarship. Taroff and her husband, Scott, have set up the scholarship, which will go to a Stockton undergraduate student with a demonstrated interest in Holocaust and genocide studies. The family announced the gift in a ceremony at Stockton’s Sara & Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center earlier this month.
“It’s such a deeply personal part of his history: this saved his life,” said Eger’s son Phil Emberley, a retired Ottawa pharmacist.
Emberley is one of at least three descendants of Kindertransport survivors who live in this city; two of them will speak Wednesday at a city hall ceremony to mark the launch of a new exhibit, For the Child.
He was bound for England as part of a rescue effort, the Kindertransport (children’s transport), mounted by British refugee groups to save Jewish children from Nazi terror. The operation — made possible by the British government’s decision to allow unaccompanied minors from the German Reich to enter as refugees — saved about 10,000 Jewish children, including Eger.
He was bound for England as part of a rescue effort, the Kindertransport (children’s transport), mounted by British refugee groups to save Jewish children from Nazi terror. The operation — made possible by the British government’s decision to allow unaccompanied minors from the German Reich to enter as refugees — saved about 10,000 Jewish children, including Eger.
He was bound for England as part of a rescue effort, the Kindertransport (children’s transport), mounted by British refugee groups to save Jewish children from Nazi terror. The operation — made possible by the British government’s decision to allow unaccompanied minors from the German Reich to enter as refugees — saved about 10,000 Jewish children, including Eger.
One tiny beacon of hope that emerged during [the World War II] period was the Kindertransport, a train service that took Jewish children fleeing Nazi persecution, and rehomed them predominantly in British homes that had been volunteered by British families. These poor frightened children were separated from their parents and travelled alone, some just babies, guided by a network of volunteers to safety. They represented a fraction of the children in peril, the majority of whom never made it out of that horror alive. Which is where development of Night Of The Broken took shape. The idea of a Jewish Kindertransport child who had grown up in England to become a doctor in the 1960s. What kind of person had she become? What was her legacy? How did she feel about surviving whilst so many of her people had died?
The story of an organised rescue effort to save children from Nazi occupation is coming to Ledbury this month. Ledbury Amateur Dramatic Society, known as LADS, will be performing Kinderstransport from Thursday, October 20 to Saturday, October 22 at the Market Theatre.
In the play, nine-year-old Eva ends up in Manchester and when her parents fail to escape she changes her name and begins the process of denial of her roots. It is only years later when her own daughter discovers some old letters that Eva is forced to confront the truth about her past.
Tickets are £11 (£8 for students) and are available from the Market Theatre box office.
UNCW’s Theatre Department kicks off its 2022-2023 season with Diane Samuel’s Kindertransport. The production looks at the life of a young child who is forced to leave Nazi-occupied Germany and sent to live with a foster family in Britain, uncertain of what her future will hold.
Director, Dr. Charles Grimes, says as we read news stories and think about what’s happening now, this story becomes very relevant. Grimes explains it reminds you that everything you read about in the headlines, is actually happening or happened to an individual somewhere.
“Telling us something about how easy it is to lose something as a person, to the forces of history. And it’s a smart play about how people in society kind of accept what’s going on even if that’s leading in the direction of fascism or inhumanity. And it just shows how those forces affect individual people.”
Kindertransport is in the Mainstage Theatre at the UNCW Cultural Arts Building. Shows run Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 pm and Sundays at 2, starting tonight and ending on October 9th.
KTA Board member Kindertransportee Ilse was brilliant, highlighting the work of the Quakers and the importance of hearing refugee’s stories on the panel: NO LONGER UNIMAGINABLE: A Conversation with Holocaust Survivors.
To watch: https://bit.ly/PBSTalk
Where is the best place to watch and stream Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport right now? Read on to find out!
You can also see the cast, crew, plot and release date for Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport on this page.
The KTA mourns the death of Barbara Winton. Dear friend, staunch advocate for refugees today, writer, founder of the Sir Nicholas Winton Trust to support her father’s legacy, work and spirit. She will be deeply missed.
To quote her twitter bio “pessimistic optimist, previously optimistic pessimist. Supporting today’s refugees while talking about yesterday’s – Kindertransport & my father Nicholas Winton”
On the eve of the funeral of Queen Elizabeth, the KTA remembers the generous people of the UK who opened their homes, schools, hostels, farms to homeless Kindertransport children. We invite KTA members to submit their memories, thoughts and stories of Queen Elizabeth and Prince/King Charles for the Spring issue of the Kinderlink.
One Kindertransportee has written “During my life in England, public celebrations which had royal participation created an atmosphere of unity which thrilled me. Being a refugee I felt an outsider – on the whole, at that time, the British were suspicious of foreigners.”
A memorial has been unveiled to mark the arrival of 10,000 children to the UK who sought safety from Nazi Germany before the start of World War Two.
The bronze statue by artist Ian Wolter has gone up at Harwich quayside.
The first children arrived at the Essex port on 2 December 1938, with some taken to London and others to local holiday camps such as Dovercourt Bay.
Guests at the unveiling of the statue included more than 30 refugees who arrived on the Kindertransport.
There’s a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yu7aVy6sXU&ab_channel=5News
Production is underway on the biopic, One Life, which tells the story of Nicholas Winton and the Czech Kindertransport.
Celebrated theatre artist, Jeanmarie Simpson, known for her beautifully innovative stagings of Shakespeare, contemporary plays, adaptations, and her own original works, is set to begin rehearsals September 6th in Las Vegas for a November 3rd opening.
A statue has been erected of a British war hero compared with Oskar Schindler for his efforts to save hundreds of children destined for Nazi death camps.
Trevor Chadwick helped Sir Nicholas Winton rescue 669 youngsters from Czechoslovakia ahead of World War Two.
He was dubbed the “Purbeck Schindler” in reference to him being from Purbeck in Dorset, and the statue is being erected in his hometown of Swanage.
Every child who came over as part of the Kindertransport initiative had a story to tell and in Diane Samuel’s 1993 play Kindertransport we’re told the story of Eva Schlesinger who’s taken in by Lil and moved to Manchester unable to speak the language of her new country of residence and confused by why she was sent away by the parents who loved her. The play, although fictitious, is based on some real Kindertransport children and their stories have been woven together to produce Kindertransport at the South London Theatre and is the debut production from Everything’s Rosie.
Kenneth Appel, grew up in Nazi Germany, was expelled from school when the Nazis rose to power, suffered at the hands of his former school friends, until he fled with the Kindertransport to Britain. Having arrived in Britain, he witnessed the London Blitz in 1940 and eventually put himself through university and began research at a laboratory that was working to develop penicillin.
Lisl was born in Vienna, Austria, on December 20, 1927. In 1938, Lisl’s parents made the difficult decision to put her and her brother Walter on the “Kindertransport” – a British rescue operation that saved 10,000 Jewish children. Despite a seven year separation, this decision saved their lives.
After reuniting with her parents in NYC, Lisl met and married her husband who had also escaped from Vienna. In 1959 they moved to Clearwater.
While active in numerous community organizations, it was the Florida Holocaust that was her passion.