by Deborah Cadbury (2022); Published by PublicAffairs
In 1933, the same year Hitler came to power, schoolteacher Anna Essinger saved her small, progressive school from Nazi Germany. Anna had read Mein Kampf and knew the terrible danger that Hitler’s hate-fueled ideologies posed to her pupils, so she hatched a courageous and daring plan: to smuggle her school to the safety of England.
As the school she established in Kent, England, flourished despite the many challenges it faced, the news from her home country continued to darken. Anna watched as Europe slid toward war, with devastating consequences for the Jewish children left behind. In time, Anna would take in orphans who had given up all hope: the survivors of unimaginable horrors. Anna’s school offered these scarred children the love and security they needed to rebuild their lives.
Featuring moving firsthand testimony from surviving pupils, and drawing from letters, diaries, and present-day interviews, The School that Escaped the Nazis is a dramatic human tale that offers a unique perspective on Nazi persecution and the Holocaust. It is also the story of one woman’s refusal to allow her belief in a better world to be overtaken by hatred and violence.
by Grainger, Jean (2019); Published by Independently Published
Could you put your children on a train to save their lives? Ariella Bannon is alone except for her two Jewish children. With every passing day, life is becoming more and more dangerous for Liesl and Erich in Berlin. The Nazis are allowing some children out on the Kindertransport, but can she bear to let them go? Amazon bestsellers, The Star and the Shamrock, and its sequel The Emerald Horizon are stories of the darkest days in human history, but amid the terror is the indominable human spirit, and the incredible kindness of strangers.
by Milton, Edith (2005); Published by Chicago: University of Chicago Press
by Whiteman, Dorit Bader (1993); Published by New York: Insight Books
Dorit Bader Whiteman has woven together the stories of 190 escapees, including several who left via the Kindertransports.
by Bentwich, Norman (1956); Published by London: Cresset Press
Norman Bentwich writes of his involvement with the Kindertransport movement.
by Selo, Laura (1992); Published by London: Excalibur Press
The autobiographical story of three sisters who traveled from Prague to London.
by Stolzberg Korobkin, Frieda (2008); Published by Devora Publishing
In Throw Your Feet Over Your Shoulders: Beyond the Kindertransport, Frieda Stolzberg Korobkin presents a compelling, powerful and vividly described odyssey of her life as a six-year- old child sent by her parents (along with her siblings) from their home in Vienna, Austria to the relative safety of England. It is December 1938, and Friedl’s parents make the heart-wrenching decision to send her and her sisters and brother on a kindertransport to England — organized by Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld.
by Schlesinger, Joe (1990); Published by Toronto: Random House Canada
May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Heifetz, Julie (1989); Published by Detroit: Wayne State University Press
Julie Heifetz’s collection of interviews with child Holocaust survivors. May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Paretsky, Sara (2001); Published by New York: Delacorte Press
by Guske, Iris (2009); Published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing
The present volume is the result of an interdisciplinary oral history research project, which was carried out at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex. While each Holocaust survivor’s developmental story is unique, it is, however, linked to the others’ by the common experience of negotiating an identity between two countries, cultures, and religions against the background of unparalleled political upheavals, and as such also sheds light on, and offers ways out of, the traumata suffered in present-day contexts of enforced migration and displacement.
by Kramer, Lotte (2009); Published by Rockingham Press
Lotte Kramer has been described as a “Holocaust poet” and it is true that she writes feelingly about the family and friends she left behind when she came to Britain in 1939 in the Kindertransport. But her canvas is much broader. She writes about the landscapes of modern Europe, about the Fen Country where she now lives and about paintings and literature. May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center
by Baumel, Judith Tydor (1990); Published by Juneau, AK: Denali Press
A scholarly book by the author of two theses on the Kindertransport movement. May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Heckscher, Helmut (2017); Published by Xlibris
n this lively memoir, Helmut shares his experiences and adventures, starting with his childhood growing up as a Jew in Nazi Germany and his escape to the UK with the Kindertransport. He writes of working in a factory in England, his interment at the start of World War II, and nights in the subways of London during the Blitz. Helmut eventually reunited with his parents in Wisconsin, then was drafted into the Army. With a lively voice, Helmut tells the story of his remarkable life, and paints a picture of a refugee becoming an American in the 20th Century.
by Curio, Claudia (2006); Published by The Zentrum fuer Antisemitismusforschung of the Technische Universitaet Berlin
In this book, her doctoral dissertation, Claudia Curio delves into the question of why for so long pre-WWII emigration studies tended to overlook the Kindertransport experience in contrast to the attention given to the Youth Alijah. Through use of well documented case studies and extensive analysis Curio provides raises many issues of intimate concern to Kinder, and which, as she skillfully shows, had lasting influence on their lives. May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Berkley, George E. (1988); Published by Lanham, Maryland: Madison Books
by Edelman, Gwen (2001); Published by New York: Penguin Putnam
by Gershon, Karen (1966); Published by New York: Harcourt Brace and World
May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Hopkinson, Deborah (2020); Published by Scholastic Focus
Ruth David was growing up in a small village in Germany when Adolf Hitler rose to power in the 1930s. Under the Nazi Party, Jewish families like Ruth’s experienced rising anti-Semitic restrictions and attacks. Just going to school became dangerous. By November 1938, anti-Semitism erupted into Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, and unleashed a wave of violence and arrests.
by Eliach, Yaffa (1990); Published by Brooklyn, NY: Center for Holocaust Studies and Documentation
May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.