Kindertransport

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Arrival of Jewish refugee children, port of London, February 1939

Flor Kent's Kindertransport Memorial unveiled by Sir Nicholas Winton 2003 outside Liverpool Street Station.

Frank Meisler's Kindertransport memorial stands outside Liverpool Street Station.

Kindertransport (also Refugee Children Movement or "RCM'") is the name given to the rescue mission that took place nine months prior to the outbreak of World War II. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Nazi Germany, and the occupied territories of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Free City of Danzig. The children were placed in British foster homes, hostels, and farms.

On 15 November 1938, 5 days after "Kristallnacht", a delegation of British Jewish leaders appealed in person to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Neville Chamberlain. Among other measures, they requested that the British government permit the temporary admission of Jewish children who would later re-emigrate. The Jewish community promised to pay guarantees for the refugee children.

The British Cabinet debated the issue the next day and subsequently decided that the nation would accept unaccompanied children ranging from infants to teenagers up to the age of 17. No limit to the number of refugees was ever publicly announced. Initially the Jewish refugee agencies saw 5,000 as a realistic target, but after the British Colonial Office turned down a Jewish Agency request to admit 10,000 children to Palestine this number was adopted informally. The RCM ran out of money at the end of August 1939 and decided it could not take more children, but the declaration of war occurred a few days later.

The rescue operation is, in general, considered a success as most of the rescued children survived the war. A small percentage were reunited with parents who had either spent the war in hiding or survived the Nazi camps. The majority of children, however, lost home and family forever. The end of the war brought confirmation of the worst: their parents were dead. In the years since the children had left the European mainland, the Nazis and their collaborators had killed nearly six million European Jews, including nearly 1.5 million children.

A similar but much less formal effort, which has come to be known as the "One Thousand Children," transported a smaller number of mostly unaccompanied Jewish children to the United States between November 1934 and May 1945. But the Wagner-Rogers Bill to admit 20,000 Jewish refugees under the age of 14 to the United States from Nazi Germany, co-sponsored by Sen. Robert F. Wagner (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Edith Rogers (R-Mass.), failed to get Congressional approval in February 1939.

Organization and management

On the eve of a major House of Commons of the United Kingdom debate on refugees on 21 November 1938, Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare met a large delegation representing various Jewish and non-Jewish groups working on behalf of refugees. The groups were allied under a nondenominational organisation called the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany. The Home Secretary agreed that to speed up the immigration process, travel documents would be issued on the basis of group lists rather than individual applications. But strict conditions were placed upon the entry of the children. The agencies promised to fund the operation and to ensure that none of the refugees would become a financial burden on the public. Every child would have a guarantee of £50 (approximately US$4000 in today's currency) to finance his or her eventual re-emigration, as it was expected the children would stay in the country only temporarily.

Within a very short time, the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, later known as the Refugee Children's Movement (RCM) [cf], sent representatives to Germany and Austria to establish the systems for choosing, organising, and transporting the children. On 25 November, British citizens heard an appeal for foster homes on the BBC Home Service radio station from Viscount Samuel. Soon there were 500 offers, and RCM volunteers started visiting possible foster homes and reporting on conditions. They did not insist that prospective homes for Jewish children should be Jewish homes. Nor did they probe too carefully into the motives and character of the families: it was sufficient for the houses to look clean and the families to seem respectable.

Before Christmas 1938, 29 year old British stockbroker of German-Jewish origin, Nicholas Winton was about to fly to Switzerland for a ski vacation when he decided to travel to Prague instead to help a friend who was involved in Jewish refugee work. There he single-handedly established an organization to aid Jewish children from Czechoslovakia separated from their families by the Nazis. He set up an office at a dining room table in his hotel in Wenceslas Square. In November 1938, shortly after Kristallnacht, the House of Commons had approved a measure that would permit the entry of refugees younger than 17 years old into England if they had a place to stay and a warranty of 50 pounds sterling was deposited for a return ticket for their eventual return to their country of origin. Winton found homes for 669 children, many of whose parents perished in Auschwitz. Throughout the summer, he placed advertisements seeking families to take them in. The last group, which left Prague on 3 September 1939, was sent back because the Nazis had invaded Poland, marking the start of World War II.

In Germany, a network of organisers was established, and these volunteers worked around the clock to make priority lists of those most imperiled: teenagers who were in concentration camps or in danger of arrest, Polish children or teenagers threatened with deportation, children in Jewish orphanages, children whose parents were too impoverished to keep them, or children with a parent in a concentration camp. Once the children were identified or grouped by list, their guardians or parents were issued a travel date and departure details. They could only take a small sealed suitcase with no valuables and only ten marks or less in money, and were issued with a numbered identity card with photo :

This document of identity is issued with the approval of His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom to young persons to be admitted to the United Kingdom for educational purposes under the care of the Inter-Aid Committee for children. / This Document requires no Visa. / Personal Particulars. / (Name; Sex; Date of Birth; Place; Full Names and Address of Parents)

Upon arrival at a port in Great Britain, children without prearranged foster families were sheltered at temporary holding centres located at summer holiday camps such as Dovercourt and Pakefield. Finding foster families was not always easy, and being chosen for a home was not necessarily the end of the discomfort or distress of the children. Although many of them were well treated and grew up to develop close ties to their British hosts, some were mistreated or abused. Some families took in teenage girls as a way of acquiring a maid.

Für Das Kind
Vienna, Westbahnhof Station 2008, a tribute to the British people for saving the lives of thousands of Children from Nazi terror through the Kindertransports.

Access to the Kindertransport trains

A Nazi edict that barred Jews from using the tramways or having access to railway stations and German ports nearly eliminated the possibility of the children taking advantage of the Kindertransport opportunity. However, many Quaker representatives were present at stations ready to organise the flight of the children. On many trains, the Quakers travelled as far as the Hook of Holland, ensuring that the children got a connection to London. Quakers at Liverpool Street Station in London ensured that there was someone there to receive and care for each child. The statue shown above was created to commemorate these events. Without the help of the Quakers, many of the 10,000 children rescued would have died in the concentration camps.

Transports

The first Kindertransport from Berlin departed on 1 December 1938, and the first from Vienna on 10 December 1938. For the first three months the children came mainly from Germany and then the emphasis shifted to Austria. In March 1939, after the German army invaded Czechoslovakia, transports from Prague were hastily organised. Trains of Jewish Polish children were also arranged in February and August 1939.

As the Nazis decreed that the evacuations must not block ports in Germany, the trains crossed from German territory into The Netherlands and arrived at the port of the Hook of Holland. From there the children travelled by ferry to the British ports of Harwich or Southampton.

The last group of children from Germany departed on 1 September 1939, the day the German army invaded Poland and provoked Great Britain, France and other countries to declare war on Germany. The last known transport of Jewish children from The Netherlands left on 14 May 1940, the day the Dutch army surrendered to Germany. Tragically, hundreds of the children were caught in Belgium and The Netherlands during the Nazi onslaught, with such capture resulting ultimately in their murder at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators.

Internment and war service

In 1940, the British government ordered the internment of 16- to 70-year old refugees from enemy countries — so-called "enemy aliens." Consequently, approximately 1,000 of the older Kinder were held in makeshift internment camps, and around 400 were transported overseas to Canada and Australia. The young men among the interned Kinder, in particular, were offered the chance to do war work or to enter the Auxiliary Pioneer Corps. About 1,000 German and Austrian teenagers served in the British armed forces, including combat units. Several dozen joined elite formations such as the Special Forces, where their language skills could be put to good use.

In popular culture

The first documentary film made on the subject of the Kindertransport was My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports which was shown, and nominated for the Grand Jury Prize, at the Sundance Film Festival in 1996 and released theatrically in 1998. The director, Melissa Hacker, is the daughter of the costume designer Ruth Morley who was a Kindertransport child.

Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, narrated by Judi Dench and released by Warner Bros. Pictures, won the Academy Award in 2001 for best documentary feature. There is also a companion book by the same name. The film's producer, Deborah Oppenheimer, is the daughter of a Kindertransport survivor. The director, Mark Jonathan Harris, is a three-time Oscar winner.

The Children Who Cheated the Nazis, narrated by Richard Attenborough is a British documentary film by Sue Read and Jim Goulding, first shown on Channel 4 in 2000.

Kindertransport is the name of a play by Diane Samuels, which examines life, during World War II and afterwards, of a Kindertransport child.

In the novel The Remains of the Day and subsequent film adaptation, two teenage refugee sisters fleeing Germany are employed in Lord Darlington's household, only to be dismissed soon afterwards when Darlington, a Nazi sympathiser, reads the work of Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

Austerlitz, by the Anglo-German novelist W G Sebald, is an odyssey of a kindertransport boy brought up in a Welsh manse who later traces his origins to Prague and then goes back there. He finds someone who knew his mother, and he retraces his journey by train

Sisterland, a young adult novel by Linda Newbery, concerns a Kindertransport child, Sarah Reubens, who is now a grandmother; sixteen-year-old Hilly uncovers the secret her grandmother has kept hidden for years. This novel was shortlisted for the 2003 Carnegie Medal.

In BBC1's The Kindertransport Story, three rescued children, now in their eighties, tell their moving stories. Also taking part in the programme was Lord Attenborough, whose own parents took in two girls after responding to the urgent appeal for foster families.

Personal accounts

• Bob Rosner (2005) One of the Lucky Ones: rescued by the Kindertransport, Beth Shalom, Newark (England). ISBN 0-9543001-9-X.

  An account of a 9-year-old Robert from Vienna and his 13-year-old sister Renate, who stayed throughout the war with Leo Schultz in Hull and attended Kingston High School. Their parents survived the war and Renate returned to Vienna.

• David, Ruth. Child of our Time: A Young Girl's Flight from the Holocaust, I.B. Tauris.
• Golabek, Mona and Lee Cohen. "The Children of Willesden Lane." --account of a young Jewish pianist who escaped the Nazis by the Kindertransport.
• Newman, Otto, British sociologist and author; Escapes and Adventures: A 20th Century Odyssey. Lulu Press, 2008
• Oppenheimer, Deborah and Harris, Mark Jonathan. "Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport" (2008, Bloomsbury/St Martins, New York & London) ISBN 1-58234-101-X.
• Segal, Lore. "Other People's Houses." --the author’s life as a Kindertransport girl from Vienna, told in the voice of a child. The New Press, New York 1994.
• Smith, Lyn. "Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust." Ebury Press, Great Britain, 2005, Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York, 2006. ISBN 0-7867-1640-1.
• Strasser, Charles. "From Refugee to OBE." Keller Publishing, 2007, ISBN 13: 978-1-934002-03-2 ISBN 10: 1-934002-03-8.
• Weber, Hanuš. Ilse: A Love Story Without a Happy Ending, Stockholm: Författares Bokmaskin, 2004. Weber was a Czech Jew whose parents placed him on the last Kindertransport from Prague in June, 1939. His book is mostly about his mother, who was killed in Auschwitz in 1944.
• Whiteman, Dorit. "The Uprooted: A Hitler Legacy: Voices of Those Who Escaped Before the "Final Solution." by Perseus Books, Cambridge, MA 1993.
• A collection of personal accounts can be found at the website of the Quakers in Britain at www.quaker.org.uk/kinder.

Winton train

Main article: Winton Train

On 1 September 2009, a special "Winton train" set off from the Prague Main railway station. The train, consisting of an original locomotive and carriages used in the 1930s, headed to London via the original Kindertransport route. On board the train were several surviving "Winton children" and their descendants, who were to be welcomed by the now hundred year old Sir Nicholas in London. The occasion marked the 70th anniversary of the intended last Kindertransport which was due to set off on 3 September 1939 but never did because of the outbreak of the Second World War. At the train's departure, Sir Nicholas Winton's statue was unveiled at the railway station.

See also

• The Holocaust
• Nicholas Winton
• One Thousand Children
• Arno Penzias and Walter Kohn, two "Kinder" who went on to be Nobel Prize-winning scientists.
• Timeline of young people's rights in the United Kingdom
• Timeline of young people's rights in the United States
• Leica Freedom Train

External links

• Kindertransport Association of North America - an association of children rescued in the Kindertransport who have settled in North America.
• [1] [2] Two WWW pages maintained by the Association of Jewish Refugees in London, UK, with links to the Kindertransport Association of the United Kingdom.
• A collection of personal reminiscences and tributes from people who were rescued on the Kindertransport, collected by the Quakers in 2008.
• Link to information about the film "My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports" (1996)
• Link to information about the Oscar winning film "Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport" (2000)
• Link to information about the British documentary "The Children Who Cheated the Nazis" (2000)
• World Jewish Relief (formally known as The British Jewish Refugee Committee)
• Wiener Library in London (holds documents, books, pamphlets, video interviews on the Kindertransport)
• Archive of ten refugees in Gloucester in 1939
• Through My Eyes website (personal stories of war & identity - including 3 Kindertransport evacuees - an Imperial War Museum online resource)