by Greschler, Lori (2009); Published by BookSurge Publishing
The 10,000 Children That Hitler Missed reveals the largest and most poignant rescue of endangered children from the brutal clutches of the Nazi empire. The movement was coined the Kindertransport. Over a nine month period before the outbreak of World War II, Britain heroically brought children from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia in an effort to save their lives. Forced to leave their parents behind, the children were torn apart from their loved ones and said their last goodbyes. With few instructions, they boarded trains, sailed by boat, crossed the English Channel and traveled distances that they could barely comprehend while their parents remained trapped in Nazi territory and many inhaled their final breath under the Nazi regime. Now after seven decades their stories are being told, in their own words from child survivors. The testimonies are chilling and painful; searing with fear and entrenched with tragedy yet beneath their pain they show astonishing resilience.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-10-000-children-that-hitler-missed-stories-from-the-kindertransport/d5a515c608a57a60?aid=56539&ean=9781439243336&listref=kindertransport-history&next=tby Wyman, David S. (1984); Published by New York: Pantheon Books
In this landmark work, David S. Wyman argues that a substantial commitment to rescue European Jews on the part of the United States almost certainly could have saved several hundred thousand of the Nazis’ victims.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-abandonment-of-the-jews-america-and-the-holocaust-1941-1945-professor-david-s-wyman/18480545e418d40a?aid=56539&ean=9781595581747&listref=if-you-are-interested-in-the-kindertransports-you-might-be-interested-in&next=tby Wasserstein, Bernard (2014); Published by Harvard University Press
A moving account of courage and of all-too-human failings in the face of extraordinary moral challenges, The Ambiguity of Virtue tells the story of Van Tijn’s work on behalf of her fellow Jews as the avenues that might save them were closed off. Between 1933 and 1940 Van Tijn helped organize Jewish emigration from Germany. After the Germans occupied Holland, she worked for the Nazi-appointed Jewish Council in Amsterdam and enabled many Jews to escape. Some later called her a heroine for the choices she made; others denounced her as a collaborator.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-ambiguity-of-virtue-bernard-wasserstein/f037f20123105b71?aid=56539&ean=9780674281387&listref=kindertransport-history&next=tby Ford, Mary R (Volume 2, Number 2, 1983); Published by Immigrants & Minorities Journal, Routledge
May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Kushner, Tony (2012); Published by Manchester University Press
This pioneering study of migrant journeys to Britain begins with Huguenot refugees in the 1680s and continues to asylum seekers and East European workers today.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-battle-of-britishness-migrant-journeys-1685-to-the-present-professor-tony-kushner/6993ea7a33f0ab54?aid=56539&ean=9780719066412&listref=if-you-are-interested-in-the-kindertransports-you-might-be-interested-in&next=tby Lichtenstein, Jonathan (2020); Published by Scribnner UK
A formally audacious and deeply moving memoir in three timeframes that confronts the defining trauma of the twentieth century, and its effects on a father and son. In 1939, Jonathan Lichtenstein’s father Hans escaped Nazi-occupied Berlin as a child refugee on the Kindertransport. Almost every member of his family died after Kristallnacht, and, arriving in England to make his way in the world alone, Hans turned his back on his German Jewish culture.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-berlin-shadow-living-with-the-ghosts-of-the-kindertransport-jonathan-lichtenstein/e062a657c8a2be7c?aid=56539&ean=9780316541015&listref=kindertransport-memoir&next=t(2018) Published by The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide
A cache of 40 letters discovered recently in a UK loft and digitized for The Wiener Library archive, documents the prelude to this more unusual experience from a child’s perspective. The letters were written by a boy in Vienna to his mother, who was already in the UK, over the course of an agonizing four-month separation. During this time each worked frantically towards a reunion that they could not be certain would happen as war clouds gathered. May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Reich, Erich (2017); Published by i2i Publishing
The true story of a Jewish refugee boy, Erich, who arrived in this country from Nazi-occupied Europe three days before the start of the war. He was just four, and would never see his parents again. May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Golabek, Mona and Lee Cohen (2003); Published by New York: Warner Books
Aspiring pianist Lisa Jura was 14 when her family put her on a Kindertransport train in Vienna. Jura’s daughter, a pianist, traces the six years Jura spent in London, where she found a surrogate family in the 31 other young refugees at the Willesden Lane hostel.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-children-of-willesden-lane-beyond-the-kindertransport-a-memoir-of-music-love-and-survival-lee-cohen/0e55fdb7165b6288?aid=56539&ean=9780446690270&listref=kindertransport-memoir&next=tby Abells, Chana Byers (1987); Published by London: Julia MacRae Books
For 4 – 8 year olds, about children during the Holocaust. May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Zinser, Jana (2015); Published by BQB Publishing
May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Elizabeth Anthony (2021); Published by Wayne State University Press
The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews after the Holocaust explores the motivations and expectations that inspired Viennese Jews to reestablish lives in their hometown after the devastation and trauma of the Holocaust. Elizabeth Anthony investigates their personal, political, and professional endeavors, revealing the contours of their experiences of returning to a post-Nazi society, with full awareness that most of their fellow Austrians had embraced the Nazi takeover and their country’s unification with Germany, clinging to a collective national identity myth as “first victim” of the Nazis. Anthony weaves together archival documentation with oral histories, interviews, memoirs, and personal correspondence to craft a multilayered, multivoiced narrative of return focused on the immediate postwar years.
The Compromise of Return is the first such social history to depict how survivors, individually and collectively, navigated postwar Vienna’s political and social setting. This book will be of special interest to scholars, students, and readers of Holocaust and European studies.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-compromise-of-return-viennese-jews-after-the-holocaust-elizabeth-anthony/15134062?ean=9780814348383&next=t&next=tby Debra Green (2022); Published by She Writes Press
A novel written by KT2 Debra Green.
When Dina and Julia meet at a surgical convention, they bond over frustrations with their husbands’ demanding schedules. But geography, time, and growing families make maintaining their friendship difficult and their relationship eventually falls apart. One of them is left to wonder why; the other has a secret. But neither of them knows that decisions made by family members decades earlier have set them on a collision course.
A sweeping saga that follows generations from a shtetl in Odessa to the comforts of Scarsdale, an uprising in Glasgow to servitude in the Caribbean, and a trek through the Alps to a displaced persons camp in Italy, The Convention of Wives is a story about the ever-evolving messiness of friendship and marriage, and the wonder of survival.
by Grainger, Jean (2019); Published by Independently Published
Liesl and Erich have found a home in Ireland away from the chaos of war-ravaged Europe. As the dark news of what has happened to their fellow Jews filters through, they are torn – love for their mother and their home on one hand, and the profound sense of peace and belonging they have in Ballycreggan on the other. Like all of the other children who escaped Nazi territory on the Kindertransport, they must wait to hear the fate of their loved ones.
by Simons, Jake Wallis (2011); Published by Polygon: An Imprint of Birlinn Limited
‘Rosa must carry her suitcase herself. She heaves it up, walks through the doorway, looks back one final time: Papa and Mama are standing arm in arm, they are waving, but their masks have fallen away, they look hopeless, and that is the worst thing of all; Rosa turns her back and they are gone.” The Klein family is slowly but surely losing everything they hold dear or ever took for granted as Hitler’s anti-Jewish laws take hold in 1930s Berlin. In desperation, fifteen-year-old Rosa is put on a Kindertransport train out of Germany, to begin a new life in England.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-english-german-girl-a-novel-jake-wallis-simons/cbf3839bce241841?aid=56539&ean=9781510718050&listref=kindertransport-fiction&next=tby Williams, Frances (2014); Published by Bloomsbury Academic
Introduction: The Forgotten Kindertransportees: A Scottish Experience 1. Protecting the Status Quo: The Reception of the Trans-migrants 2. The Making of an Invisible Trans-migrant: Kindertransportee Care 3. Scottish Care for the Jewish Minor: Kindertransportees’ Adaptation to a New Jewish Life 4. Creating New Olim in Scotland: The Limitations of a Zionist Endeavour 5. Narrating Life Stories: The Long-term Impact of a Residential Upbringing 6. Imagining Scotland: The Scottish Legacy after Migration Appendices Glossary Bibliography Index. May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center
by Umansky, Ellen (2017); Published by William Morrow
One very special work of art – a Chaim Soutine painting – will connect the lives and fates of two different women, generations apart, in this enthralling and transporting debut novel that moves from World War II Vienna to contemporary Los Angeles. It is 1939 in Vienna, and as the specter of war darkens Europe, Rose Zimmer’s parents are desperate. Unable to get out of Austria, they manage to secure passage for their young daughter on a kindertransport, and send her to live with strangers in England.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-fortunate-ones-a-novel-ellen-umansky/ef760cae29a25031?aid=56539&ean=9780062382498&listref=kindertransport-fiction&next=tby Baram, Myra (1988); Published by Sussex, England: The Book Guild
Kindertransport Survivor Myra Baram tells the story of her life from Berlin to Nethanya, Israel. May be out of print. Try your local library or Holocaust Memorial Center.
by Klempner, Mark (2006); Published by Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press
Individually or in small “humanitarian cells,” the ten Dutch people profiled in these pages saved the lives of thousands of Jewish children during the Nazi occupation of Holland.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-heart-has-reasons-dutch-rescuers-of-jewish-children-during-the-holocaust/4d2f06e3e72c5afc?aid=56539&ean=9780988567405&listref=if-you-are-interested-in-the-kindertransports-you-might-be-interested-in&next=tby Guske, Iris, Dr (2007); Published by Centre for German Jewish Studies, University of Sussex
Unpublished doctoral thesis featuring several members of the KTA.