by Kratz, Kathe (1999); Published by Extrafilm
Three former residents of Vienna, KTA member Anne (Anny) Kelemen, Gerda Lederer and Curtis Brown (Kurt Braun), return to Vienna, the city where they were born. They are invited by the ‘Lost Neighborhood’ memorial project, part of which is the reconstruction of the façade of a synagogue destroyed 60 years ago. The stories told by these three emigrants are juxtaposed with images of this project, resulting in a dramatic, humorous and moving documentary of Jewish life in 1930s Vienna.
by Eden, Thea, Irene Reti and Valerie Jean Chase (1995); Published by Santa Cruz, California: Herbooks
This oral history of Thea Felika Eden focuses on the Kindertransport, a program which rescued 10,000 Jewish children from Germany and Austria and brought them to England. It is an important contribution to the literature by and about child survivors of the Holocaust and other extreme forms of trauma.
May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Weiner Library (2018); Published by Harwich Haven: Surrender and Sanctuary
This exhibition tells the story of the Kindertransports through the experiences of eight children and the loved ones they left behind, whose documents, letters and memoirs are amongst those held in the Wiener Library Collections. It is a story of persecution, migration, of refugees who were made welcome and those who were turned away.
by Barnard, Robert (2010); Published by Scribner
Kit Philipson has always felt like something of a stranger in his family. Growing up as the only child of professional parents in Glasgow, Scotland, he had every advantage. His mother was a teacher; his father, a journalist, escaped from Nazi Germany at the age of three on one of the 1939 Kindertransports. But on her deathbed, Kit’s mother tells him he was adopted and that his birth name was Novello. Soon, vague memories of his early life begin to surface: his nursery, pictures on the wall, the smell of his birth mother when she’d been cooking. And, sometimes, there are more disturbing memories—of strangers taking him by the hand and leading him away from the only family he had ever known.
by Hartman, Geoffrey (2007); Published by Fordham University Press
Geoffrey Hartman’s eloquent memoir takes us through the author’s five decades as a widely influential literary scholar. Geoffrey Hartman arrived in New York in 1945, at the age of 16, a young refugee from Hitler’s Germany. His mother had come here before the war, but he was sent on a Kindertransport to England, where he developed a feeling for both the English countryside and English literature. These discoveries came together in his lifelong love of Wordsworth’s poetry, the subject of his seminal book in 1964.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-scholar-s-tale-intellectual-journey-of-a-displaced-child-of-europe-geoffrey-hartman/9766396?ean=9780823228324&next=t&aid=56539&listref=kindertransport-memoir&next=tby Gershon, Karen (1993); Published by London: Peter Owen Publishers
An account, from the point of view of an adolescent girl, of life in Germany in the years leading up to her departure on the Kindertransport. May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Presland, John (1944); Published by Bloomsbury House
Out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Zack Miley, Hanna (2013); Published by Outskirts Press
When little Hannelore (Hanna) Zack left Cologne, Germany, on a train bound for London age 7 on July 24, 1939, she had no way of knowing that she was part of the Kindertransport. Written over a four-year period beginning when Hanna was seventy-five years old, A Garland for Ashes is both a gripping detective story recounting the heartbreaking process of discovering her family’s fate and a poignant account of her journey from vengeful hatred to forgiveness and release from bitterness.
by Thor, Annika (2009); Published by Delacorte Books for Young Readers
In the summer of 1939 two Jewish sisters from Vienna, 12 year-old Stephie Steiner and 8 year-old Nellie, are sent to Sweden to escape the Nazis. They expect to stay there six months, until their parents can flee to Amsterdam; then all four will go to America. But as the world war intensifies, the girls remain, each with her own host family, on a rugged island off the western coast of Sweden. Children will readily empathize with Stephie’s courage. Both sisters are well-drawn, likable characters. This is the first of four books Thor has written about the two girls.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-faraway-island-annika-thor/8556643?ean=9780375844959&next=t&aid=56539&listref=kindertransport-for-young-readers&next=tby Hirschhorn, Norbert (1999); Published by London: Slow Dancer Press
May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Blend, Martha (1996); Published by Edgware, England: Vallentine Mitchell Publishers
May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Hannam, Charles (1977); Published by London: Andre Deutsch
Charles Hannam’s Kindertransport memoir. May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Chad McDonald (2018); Published by Routledge
McDonald’s article explores how Kindertransport survivors describe the moment they learned the fate of their parents after the Holocaust. Through close analysis of survivor testimonies, she shows how these discoveries shaped their identities, their sense of belonging, and their understanding of what it meant to become “British aliens.” The article highlights the emotional complexity of reconstructing family histories marked by loss, silence, and fragmented information, and it examines how survivors narrate these experiences many decades later.
by Angela Davis (2019); Published by Oral History Society
This article explores how Holocaust survivors narrate their relationships with their mothers, focusing on the emotional tension between closeness and distance. Drawing on forty oral‑history interviews with women who later lived in Britain and Israel, Davis examines how pre‑war family dynamics, wartime separation, migration, and later motherhood shaped survivors’ memories and self‑understanding. The study shows that mother‑child bonds were often marked by ambivalence, shifting attachments, and the long aftereffects of trauma.