Kindertransport

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Arrival of a transport of Polish children in the Port of London (February 1939)
“Visa” for Helga Wertheimer from Vienna in 1939

As a Kindertransport (also called "Refugee Children's Movement") is internationally the departure of more than 10,000 children as "Jewish" under the Nuremberg Laws were, from the German Reich and out of this endangered countries between late November 1938 and 1 September Inscribed to Great Britain in 1939 . Children from Germany, Austria , Poland , the Free City of Danzig and Czechoslovakia , in particular, were exiled in this way. The children were able to leave the country in trains and by ship; most of them never saw their parents again. Often times, they were the only ones in their families who survived the Holocaust .

overview

As early as 1933, Jewish organizations in the United States began planning aid campaigns for Jewish children from Germany. This led in 1934 to the founding of the German Jewish Children's Aid (GJCA), the German-Jewish children's aid . Despite the very restrictive US entry regulations in the course of the Immigration Act of 1924 , the organization was repeatedly able to facilitate child transports from Germany to the USA, later also from Austria and - in cooperation with the Œuvre de secours aux enfants - from France. After the de facto failed Évian conference in July 1938 could not and did not want to offer any help for the Jews living in Germany and, above all, did not offer any prospects for people wishing to leave, the Nazi regime of its own accord moved the problem into focus only a few months later the world public. The November pogroms against the Jewish population from November 9th to 10th, 1938 made it clear that Jews were defenseless in Germany . However, this did not lead to a relaxation of the strict immigration regulations in place in most countries, which is why most Jews living in the German Reich were still prevented from leaving Germany despite the persecution by the Nazi state that was visible around the world. The only bright spot in this situation remained the Kindertransporte to England and the, albeit to a lesser extent and without state support, the continued transports to the USA.

Receiving countries

After the Kristallnacht, the British government and people acted Britain but quickly. On November 15, 1938, British Prime Minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain received a delegation of influential British Jews and Quakers , including Bertha Bracey , who was involved in many relief operations of the Germany Emergency Committee , to negotiate the temporary admission of children and young people to Great Britain. The Jewish community pledged to provide guarantees for the children's travel and resettlement costs amounting to 50 English pounds per child (around 1,500 euros based on today's value ) and promised to distribute the children in the country and provide them with an appropriate education . Later, the children were to be reunited with their families and found a new home in British-administered Palestine .

A few days later, the British government relaxed the entry requirements and an appeal was made to British families to accept such foster children . Jewish children up to the age of 17 were now allowed to immigrate, provided a sponsor or foster family was found for them. The move was organized by the "Inter-Aid Committee for Children", which also issued passport replacement papers.

The British government made this decision, despite its immigration quotas already being met, with the ulterior motive that this demonstration of goodwill could induce the USA to relax its entry regulations as well. The US parliament rejected a corresponding bill a little later.

In Western Europe, transports brought 1,500 Jewish children to the Netherlands , 1,000 to Belgium , 600 to France , 300 to Switzerland and 450 to Sweden .

Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meyer , an influential Dutch banker's wife , was negotiating with Adolf Eichmann at the same time , and she managed to obtain a flat-rate tolerance of such transports under strict conditions. The children were only allowed to take a suitcase, a bag and ten Reichsmarks with them; Toys and books were forbidden, only one photograph was allowed. Valuables carried along were confiscated. The tour groups were issued block visas; every child got a number. In order to prevent tearful - and thus high-profile - farewell scenes, parents and relatives were forbidden to step on the platform when the children were leaving. Wijsmuller-Meyer was honored as Righteous Among the Nations for organizing the Kindertransporte .

Arrival of exhausted children, Harwich December 2nd 1938

On December 1, 1938 - less than three weeks after the November pogroms - the first Kindertransport drove from Berlin's Anhalter Bahnhof with 196 Jewish children to London. The transport arrived at Parkeston Quay in Harwich on December 2, 1938 . With great sympathy from the British population and the media, the children were received by carers and assigned to their foster families. Reception centers were located in Parkfield and Dovercourt (see below). For a year, until the outbreak of war on September 1, 1939, the transports were tolerated by the National Socialists . The children traveled by train from their home stations via the Netherlands , mostly to Hoek van Holland , and from there, as with the first transport, by ship to Harwich.

In addition to German and Austrian children, attempts were also made to rescue Czech Jewish children through such kind of child transport. The Briton Nicholas Winton was known for rescuing 669 Jewish children from Prague.

The recording situation in Great Britain

Letter from Berlin to the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany (later RCM), April 20, 1939

After just a few weeks, however, the number of refugee children arriving exceeded the care places offered. As a result, some children were exploited as free service personnel, and many were interned in refugee camps. In addition, there was the suffering of the children, who mostly did not know or did not understand the circumstances of their departure and often believed that their family had rejected them. Other children and adolescents suffered from the fact that they were well aware of the danger in which the retarded parents, siblings and other relatives were floating, and that they could not help them. The helpers had to deal with all these problems in the reception camps, most of which were refugees.

Dovercourt and the Claydon workhouse camp

Dovercourt ( Lage ) is best known through the work of Anna Essinger , Hanna Bergas and their team from the Bunce Court School . Anna Essinger describes how this cooperation came about: “Several of us were asked by one of the refugee committees to help receive the Kindertransporte that had come to England since the pogroms in Germany and Austria. Six of us went to Dovercourt with some former helpers and some of the older children of the school to see the children. ”Their assignment lasted from December 1938 to the end of January 1939.

Entrance to Warners Holiday Camp in Dovercourt, which served as a temporary camp for many refugee children (1937).
Prototype of a Butlin chalet, as it looked in Dovercourt.

Dovercourt, near Harwich , where most of the children from the Kindertransport arrived, was planned as a summer camp for around 1,000 school-age children. According to Leslie Baruch Brent, Dovercourt was one of the nine summer camps planned by Billy Butlin between 1936 and 1966 in the United Kingdom and Ireland, some of which were converted into reception camps during World War II . The camp consisted of lightweight houses and dormitories, with a central hall for social gatherings, meals and community activities. However, everything here was geared towards summer operation, but “December and January days can be cold, gray and wet on the British coast - and they were. Rain gradually turned into snow. The rooms in the camp had been built for summer use, and although heated, they were uncomfortably cool, occasionally freezing. The water in the jugs on the breakfast tables that was exposed in the evening froze overnight. We were glad that despite the extreme cold and the generally primitive living conditions, we were able to keep the young people in pretty good health. "

In the camp, it was the job of the three teachers on the Bunce Court team to “help the children arrive in the unfamiliar environment and learn as much English as possible in a short time. Our fourth person had to organize the huge kitchen, plan meals and coordinate the work of all the people in the kitchen, up to ten at times. We barely had the dormitories and the great hall ready for occupancy when the first transport arrived. "

Hanna Bergas describes in detail the efforts and difficulties that it cost to prepare the children a reasonably pleasant arrival in a country that was foreign to them, and Leslie Baruch Brent supplements her view from the experience of a former Kindertransport child. But the feeling of happiness at having helped many children start a new life was offset by negative experiences, as Anna Essinger summed up:

“None of us will ever forget the heartbreaking days and weeks there. Thousands of children were saved, but these were necessarily hasty arrangements and perhaps it was only natural that serious mistakes should not be avoided; Mistakes that must have started with telling children that they would have a comfortable life if they left their parents and came to England; Mistakes from local committees who believed that the sooner these children could find a place in English families, the better it would be for them and the community. None of us knew the children; in many cases even the bare facts of their origins were not known, and few knew the families who offered to take them in. Some of these children saw being put into eight to ten different families during those four years, and some of the newcomers who had recently joined the school came here as a result of these hasty and generous offers to take in unknown children. "

Hanna Bergas also shared this criticism, who welcomed the fact that it was finally decided to place the children in private homes, boarding schools or children's homes instead of in families without supervision. So the Bunce Court School, similar to the Stoatley Rough School , became a home for a limited number of children from the Kindertransporte:

“Bunce Court was asked, or allowed, to select ten children whom we found most receptive to our type of education. We were, of course, in a better position to make a decision than the weekend visitors because we had lived with these children for at least a few weeks. In hindsight, I can say that these ten all benefited greatly from what we could do for them and, like our other children, they became happy, useful adults, both as parents and as members of the human species. "

One of these ten children who were allowed to go to Bunce Court School was Leslie Baruch Brent, who had come to Dovercourt in 1938 when Lothar Baruch was thirteen. For him it was a stroke of luck, as he remembers:

“This was the third happy event in my life that had a major impact on my survival, development and career. I only spent about four weeks in the camp, escaping the cattle market and the trauma caused to many of the children who have been neglected by prospective foster parents or placed in less than positive environments. Was I a Sunday child, as my beloved father reminded me in a message from the Red Cross in 1942? But yes!"

And despite everything, Hanna Bergas can also draw a positive conclusion from her time in Dovercourt:

“All of us who had worked at Camp Dovercourt Camp had a wealth of experience when it closed on February 1, 1939. We were aware of the service it had done and how such a task could be improved if it were needed again in the future. We were interviewed by newspapers and radio people to increase refugee aid in the anti-Nazi world. "

Despite these positive reviews, both Hanna Bergas and Leslie Baruch Brent had an experience in Dovercourt that both of them greatly disturbed. The occasion was the meeting of Jewish refugee children from Germany and Austria.

“Soon children from Vienna joined us and I found it quite disturbing when a strange knife fight broke out between the older boys from Berlin and Vienna. Jewish boys who had escaped the Nazis took as a model an old hostility that apparently existed between the two cities. Simply incomprehensible! Apparently, they admitted these national rivalries in order to override their Jewish ties and shared experience during the persecution. Hopefully they will soon outgrow this nonsense. Harry Schwartz recalled in And the Policeman Smiled that 'Germans still considered themselves Germans and Austrians considered themselves Austrians; they did not consider themselves primarily Jews. When you think back to it, there was no explanation. '"

Around the same time that Anna Essinger and Hanna Bergas started their work in Dovercourt, Sophie Friedländer , who had volunteered to look after the Kindertransport children, was also appointed deputy camp director by one of the refugee committees (“Second-in -Command ") for another holiday camp, in which mainly older girls from Dovercourt should be cared for.

“Most of them were over 16 years old, from Vienna. She had been taken out of Dovercourt camp because it was feared that there would soon be trouble with the many boys of the same age and older. So these girls were already standing at the post office by noon and waiting longingly for mail - from Dovercourt. In order to help them find accommodation, we had to get to know them at least a little. Of course, the group leaders could talk to them, and in the evening we gathered what we had learned from them. Not all the formalities for their accommodation in families had yet been completed, so they were temporarily housed in the camp. "

That camp was in Selsey Bill . ( Location ) Sophie Friedländer describes the difficulties of building structures for everyday life in the camp within a very short time and with a motley team. But she didn't have much time to do it. A fortnight later, the camp was inspected by a London committee including Helen Bentwich, Norman Bentwich's wife , and shortly afterwards she was ordered to Dovercourt.

Sophie Friedländer leaves open exactly when this happened, but it seems to have been after the time when Anna Essinger and Hanna Bergas were still working in Dovercourt, because none of their three reports on their work in Dovercourt mention that they were there met. Friedländer also reports that she worked in Dovercourt until after Easter, while Hanna Bergas (see above) assumed that the camp was closed on February 1, 1939.

The reason for Sophie Friedländer's secondment to Dovercourt, where around 500 children and young people were staying at the time, “mainly boys over 16 years of age who had been rescued directly from concentration camps”, was disagreement between the staff and the camp leader. Friedländer should investigate the situation and report about it to the superior. She did so the morning after she arrived. The warehouse manager was immediately replaced by an employee who was better off from the rest of the staff, and Friedländer stayed in the camp as a “selection officer”. From then on, it was their job to find jobs for the camp residents outside the camp, mainly in families who were prepared to do so. Like Leslie Baruch Brent above, Sophie Friedländer also reports on the difficulties in finding a place for children and adolescents, which they often perceived as a “cattle market”.

After Easter 1939 the Dovercourt camp was closed and the last 200 boys and a small group of kindergarten children were quartered in the old "workhouse" in Claydon ( Essex ) ( Lage ). Together with an English Protestant and an Irish Catholic, Sophie Friedländer was part of the management team there. The main task was still to find family places for the remaining children or jobs for the older ones.

The hygienic conditions in the workhouse were not very pleasant. Friedländer reports huge masses of dust and the presence of rats. In the course of the year the situation even came to a head:

“In the meantime we not only had an epidemic of scabies that preoccupied the doctor from Berlin and the doctor from Vienna on a daily basis, there were also cases of scarlet fever and diphtheria, at least from bacilli carriers. That meant quarantine for all of us, which was extended again and again with and without new cases, which, strangely enough, only affected the German and Austrian inmates. The English and Irish were apparently immune and were able to maintain their daily pub visits. "

The joint camp management ended with the outbreak of the Second World War. The English member of the management team declared himself sole leader and gave a speech in front of the assembled camp residents: “It is war, and you are now all in enemy territory. Anyone who criticizes something about the camp management criticizes the government and is interned. ”Another consequence of the outbreak of war was that the chances for the children and young people to get connected outside of the camp dwindled:

“Now the offers for housing the boys also dried up. Not only that: For many children who were already housed in families, the insecurity threatened again. Family fathers were drafted; Caring for an extra child could become a problem. At that time, dormitories for refugee children and young people were built in almost all of the larger cities. They were supported by local committees and led by refugee workers, which became a beneficial institution for many children. Here they could - rather than in a family - collectively maintain the connection to their past, which we considered to be absolutely important for their healthy development. "

Towards the end of 1939, Sophie Friedländer, in consultation with some colleagues, tried to inform the superior office in London about the increasingly unbearable conditions in the camp. Shortly before Christmas came the written answer: “Your services are no longer required.” When Sophie Friedländer and a colleague then tried to intervene again personally in London, they were told: “If they do not like it, they can return to where they are What happened to the remaining children and adolescents is no longer reported by Friedländer.

Successor institutions

In looking after children and young people after their time in the reception camps, institutions that are still little known in Germany gained importance: the farm schools and refugee hostels . These were not only a supplement to the family accommodation of the refugee children, but also a conscious alternative to it. Rebekka Göpfert outlines the political background that played a role in the founding of the farms and highlights the different interests of the organizations that look after the Jewish refugee children -  Kinder- und Jugend-Alijah and Refugee Children's Movement (RCM), the organizational backbone of the Kindertransporte  - attentive.

“In contrast to the RCM, Youth Aliyah opposed the placing of the children in foster families, including Jewish ones, because such placement would not adequately prepare them for a life in the kibbutz in Palestine. For this reason, farms were bought or leased specifically for this purpose, on which the children would work. Since the capacity of these farms was not sufficient to accommodate all the children, individual children were distributed to English farms, which were as close as possible to each other, so that a joint program could be organized in the evenings and on weekends. "

Göpfert reports about 20 hachshara centers in Great Britain, in which, in addition to children, adolescents and adults are said to have stayed. These included:

The camps in Kent had to be closed when the war broke out because they were in a zone where German attacks on Great Britain were expected. Enemy aliens were not allowed to stay in this zone , for whom young and adult refugees of German origin were also assumed. Bydon was set up to replace the two camps.

The training practiced in the farm schools mentioned was subordinate to the aim of preparing for emigration to Palestine . The acquisition of the Hebrew language and the practical and theoretical acquisition of basic craft and agricultural knowledge were therefore important. In addition, the lessons took place in the usual English school subjects.

For the children, the education - depending on their age - was associated with more or less hard work on their own farm or on a neighboring farm. In addition to the pure training purpose, this field work also served to secure one's own supply.

An important part of the concept behind the youth farms was also to take care of the psychological well-being of the children and young people discussed above. This was the goal of joint events and activities in the evening and at the weekend, whereby the aim was always to counteract the loss of home and the parental home with positive experiences and feelings. Göpfert assumes “that the emotional care of the children in such a home was generally more intense or warm-hearted than in English families.

In addition to the facilities mentioned by Göpfert, there were several communal accommodations for the children and young people of the Kindertransporte in Scotland alone :

  • Garnethill Hostel in Glasgow
  • "A Quaker hostel for women and girls, located on the other side of the synagogue in Renfrew Street, from 1940-1942. This hostel accommodated fifteen people at a time, mostly adults. [..]
  • Polton House, near Dalkeith in Midlothian
  • and others at Birkenward, Skelmorlie in Ayrshire, Ernespie House (Castle Douglas), and The Priory in Selkirk. "

Sophie Friedländer and Hilde Jarecki founded and managed two shared accommodation themselves:

The children and young people also received support and help from various organizations in exile and from institutions founded by German emigrants. The pedagogue Anna Essinger had fled to England with 66 children in 1933 and later took refugees from the Kindertransport in her boarding school, Bunce Court School . Organizations such as the FDJ in Great Britain also looked after the displaced children and young people. The FDJ had between 1941 and 1945 “about 750 members in England. About 100 of them went back to Germany. "

Beginning of the Second World War

The official end of the Kindertransport was September 1, 1939, when the Second World War was unleashed with the German invasion of Poland . The last known Kindertransport, organized by Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer , was carried out by the Dutch freighter SS Bodegraven , which with 80 children on board crossed the canal from IJmuiden on May 14, 1940 under German machine gun fire and finally landed in Liverpool . Mrs. Wijsmuller could have escaped, but according to her biography she wanted to stay with her husband in Holland.

With the beginning of the World War, the situation of refugee children in Great Britain worsened, as Sophie Friedländer (see above) had already drawn attention to. Many were given to refugee camps by the foster families or suspected of being German spies . So it came about that older children were first interned on the Isle of Man and then taken to Australian and other internment camps. They could return later when they joined the English army . Yet almost 10,000 children found protection in Great Britain.

Around 8,000 other children were placed in foster families or homes in the Netherlands , Belgium , France , Switzerland or Sweden . Not all escaped deportation to the east and extermination.

In France, after the occupation of northern France by the Wehrmacht in the summer of 1940, and in the rest of France, which was ruled by the Vichy regime , around 10,000 Jewish children were saved from deportation and death with the help of the Resistance . 2000 of them reached Switzerland illegally between 1942 and 1944. Several hundred were smuggled into Spain via the Pyrenees . The rest remained hidden in the country, often in institutions of the Catholic Church.

Traumatization

Many of the children only found out details of their rescue and the fate of their families who had remained in Germany after the end of the war. Mark Jonathan Harris , whose film Kindertransport - In a strange world in 2001 for Best Documentary with the Oscar was awarded, describes how the children were left with dealing with their experiences alone:

“The fate of the children and their further history show lasting traces of trauma. Many never saw their parents again, and even if their mother or father were among the survivors at the end of the Nazi regime, normal relationships were usually no longer established. Depression and relationship disorders, fears of all kinds, restlessness and mistrust, the consequences of a traumatic loss of identity, are particularly common among children. On top of that guilt of the survivors '(' survivors guilt '): Similar to people as hidden children' escaped under a false identity of extermination machinery of the Nazis, the children of the bailout was their own sorrow over their suffering is not granted, not from the environment and not from one's own conscience. "

compensation

On December 17, 2018, the German Federal Ministry of Finance and the Jewish Claims Conference (JCC) announced an agreement on symbolic compensation for survivors of the Kindertransport in the form of a one-off payment of 2,500 euros. The Kindertransportfonds exists from January 1st, 2019.

memory

Kindertransport - The arrival of Frank Meisler in front of London's Liverpool Street Station
Frank Meisler's Kindertransport memorial in front of Friedrichstrasse train station, Berlin
Frank Meisler's Kindertransport memorial in front of Gdańsk Główny train station in Gdańsk
Frank Meisler's Kindertransport memorial in the ferry port of Hoek van Holland

The flight of Jewish children has been made public in Austria since 2002 by the school project A Letter To The Stars and by the artist group “Counter / Act”, which distributed cardboard boxes in Vienna in which racism was denounced on strips of paper. Among other things, the box contained advertisements from Jewish parents who were urgently looking for adoptive or foster parents in England for their children in 1938/1939. The advertisements were reprinted in their original form in November 2006 in Die Presse and in the Jewish Chronicle in London, where they originally appeared.

One ad read:

“Looking for a way out: Which magnanimous family is taking care of my children or adopting them in these tough times? Her father is Dr. Ing., Long time employee of the Österr. State railways, and now unemployed as a Jew. The two children are 10 and 12½ years old, pretty and perfectly healthy. The parents would be happy to have the children in a Jewish religious family. Dr. Ing. S. Morgenstern, 2, Böcklinstrasse, Vienna 2. "

societies

In the 1980s, the British Reunion of Kindertransport and the American Kindertransport Association were founded.

In 2001 the association Child Survivors Germany e. V. - Surviving children of the Shoah founded, the first chairman was Cilly Levitus-Peiser . This is where people come together who were persecuted as children during the Nazi era because of their Judaism or their Jewish roots.

Memorials

Exhibitions

Since May 2012, the traveling exhibition "When you arrive here ..." - the fate of a Jewish family between Kindertransport and failed emigration by Christoph Gann has been dedicated to the topic using the example of the Mosbacher family from Meiningen and Nuremberg . The twelve-year-old Eva Mosbacher came to England in May 1939.

Since 2014 there has been an exhibition at Urania Wien with 23 photos and personal items.

In Berlin-Charlottenburg, from August to October 2019, three advertising pillars with texts and pictures about the children's transports were set up in front of the Charlottenburg train station , accompanied by a supporting program from the district's municipal gallery.

Rescued children

Some of the children saved are:

A nearly complete list of the children and young people who have attended Whittingehame Farm School can be found on the school's history website.

See also

More helpers

literature

Across all persons

  • Vera Fast: Children's exodus. A history of the kindertransport . Tauris, London 2010, ISBN 978-1-84885-537-3 .
  • Angelika Rieber (Ed.): "At least save the children!" Kindertransporte from Frankfurt am Main. Life paths of rescued children . Fachhochschulverlag, Frankfurt 2018 ISBN 978-3-947273-11-9 .
  • Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): The Kindertransporte 1938/39. Rescue and integration , with contributions by Ilse Aichinger , Fischer Taschenbuch 15745, Frankfurt 2003 (series: Die Zeit des Nationalozialismus) ISBN 3-596-15745-5 .
  • Mark Jonathan Harris , Deborah Oppenheimer , Jerry Hofer: Kindertransport in einer Fremdwelt Goldmann, Munich 2000 ISBN 3-442-15138-4 .
  • Barry Turner: Kindertransport. An unprecedented rescue operation. Bleicher, Gerlingen 2002 ISBN 3-88350-033-X .
  • Rebekka Göpfert: The Jewish Kindertransport from Germany to England 1938/1939. History and memory. Campus, Frankfurt 1999 ISBN 3-593-36201-5 .
  • Gerald James Holton, Gerhard Sonnert: What happened to the children who fled Nazi persecution. Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2006 ISBN 978-1-4039-7625-3 (research in the USA).
  • Claudia Curio: persecution, escape, rescue. The Kindertransporte 1938/1939 to Great Britain Metropol, Berlin 2006 ISBN 3-938690-18-6 (dissertation).
  • Gertrude Dubrovsky: Six from Leipzig. Kindertransport and the Cambridge Refugee Children's Committee Vallentine Mitchell, Edgware 2003 ISBN 978-0-85303-470-4 .
  • Anne C. Voorhoeve: Liverpool Street. Ravensburger, 2007 ISBN 978-3-473-35264-7 .
  • Gerrit Pohl: Die Unzen der Zeit (poems for the 3rd Hamburger Kindertransport) Schardt, Oldenburg 2012 ISBN 978-3-89841-626-9 .
  • Anna Wexberg-Kubesch: "Never forget that you are a Jewish child!" The Kindertransport to England 1938/1939. Mandelbaum, Vienna 2012 ISBN 978-3-85476-410-6 .
  • Anja Salewsky: "The old Hitler should die!" Memories of the Jewish Kindertransport to England. Econ Ullstein List, Munich 2002 ISBN 3-548-60234-7 .
  • Andrea Strutz: 'Detour to Canada ': The fate of juvenile Austrian -Jewish refugees after the 'Anschluss' of 1938. In: Simone Gigliotti, Monica Tempian eds .: The young victims of the Nazi regime. Migration, the Holocaust, and postwar displacement. Bloomsbury Publishing , London 2016, pp. 31 - 50 engl.
  • Sophie Friedländer, Hilde Jarecki: Sophie & Hilde. A life together in friendship and work. A twin book . Ed. Bruno Schonig. Hentrich, Berlin 1996 ISBN 978-3-89468-229-3 .
  • Gerda Hofreiter: Alone in a foreign country. Child transports from Austria to France, Great Britain and the USA 1938–1941. Studien-Verlag, Innsbruck 2010, ISBN 978-3-7065-4830-4 .
  • Anne Prior: "Don't give up on these children!" Kindertransport to Belgium and the fate of the residents of the Israelite orphanage Dinslaken 1938–1945. Klartext-Verlag, Essen 2015, ISBN 978-3-8375-1448-3 .
  • Eva-Maria Thüne: Saved. Reports of Kindertransport and Emigration to Great Britain. Hentrich & Hentrich, Berlin / Leipzig 2019, ISBN 978-3-95565-280-7 .

Fiction

  • WG Sebald undertakes a literary treatment of the subject in the novel Austerlitz (2001).
  • Linda Winterberg (Nicole Steyer): As long as hope is ours. Aufbau taschenbuch, Berlin, 2017, ISBN 978-3-7466-3289-6 . On the basis of very precise research and on the basis of fictional characters who are modeled on real people (Eva Heymann, Walter Bloch and others), the author creates a novel that covers everything from child transports to survival at the Bunce Court School .
  • Ursula Krechel's novel Landgericht (Jung und Jung, Salzburg / Wien 2012, ISBN 978-3-99027-024-0 ) gives a lot of space to the topic of child transport and relies on the fate of real people: the family of Robert Michaelis and his children Ruth (married Barnett) and Martin. This topic also plays an important role in the ZDF film adaptation of the novel from 2017.

Person-related

  • Marion Charles: "I was a lucky child: My way out of Nazi Germany with the Kindertransport." Cbj, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-570-40222-1 .
  • Ruth L. David: A child of our time: autobiographical sketches of a Jewish girl: childhood in Franconian-Crumbach, child transport to England, life in exile . Frankfurt 1996.
  • Brigitte Diersch: The short life of Doris Katz ( Memento from March 21, 2015 in the Internet Archive ).
  • Charles Hannam : A boy in that situation. An autobiography. Harper & Row, London 1977, ISBN 978-0-06-022219-2 , German 1979
  • Christoph Gann : "12 years, Jew, 10.5.39 deregistered to England". The fate of Eva Mosbacher and her parents. State Center for Political Education Thuringia, Erfurt 2013 ISBN 978-3-943588-17-0
  • Report by Rudy Lowenstein (originally Rudi Löwenstein), in: Bertha Leverton, Shmuel Lowensohn (eds.) "I Came Alone": The Stories of the Kindertransports. Lewes, Sussex 1990
  • Ruth Barnett: Nationality: Stateless: the story of the self-discovery of a Kindertransportkindes . Translation from English by Lukas Guske. Metropol-Verlag, Berlin 2016. See also: Ursula Krechel : Landgericht (2012)
  • Dorrith M. Sim: In my Pocket. 1996; another edition 2012. ISBN 978-0-948785-05-4 [Children's book with illustrations by Gerald Fitzgerald]
    • in German: In my pocket . 1st edition: Kassel 2000; 2nd edition Kassel 2013 ISBN 3-9806761-1-0
  • Elisabeth Cosanne-Schulte-Huxel (Ed.): "My dear Ilsekind". With the Kindertransport to Sweden - letters to a rescued daughter. Klartext, Essen 2013 ISBN 978-3-8375-1114-7

Movies

  • Sabine Brüning, Peter Merseburger : When they were no longer allowed to be German. About the Kindertransport to England. Documentary. Sender Free Berlin 1989.
  • Mark Jonathan Harris & Lee Holdridge & Judi Dench: Into The Arms Of Strangers: Stories Of The Kindertransport 2000 u.ö .; German version Kindertransport - In a foreign world 2001 (see DVD)
  • Käthe Kratz: Maybe I was lucky Documentary, Austria 2002
  • Melissa Hacker : My Knees Were Jumping. Remembering the Kindertransports . Documentary. Docurama, published 2000 (daughter of Ruth Morley)
  • Mirjam Unger: Vienna's Lost Daughters . Documentary. polyfilm video (awarded the audience award - Diagonale's most popular film 2007) ISBN 978-3-9502204-5-2
  • Mathias Haentjes (with Lorenz Beckhardt ): The Jew with the swastika . Documentation, WDR Cologne 2007.

Theatrical performance

piece of music

  • On June 17, 2012, the Manchester Hallé Orchestra performed the ensemble Last Train to Tomorrow, composed on his behalf by Carl Davis . This premiere was dedicated to the memory of the Kindertransport.

See also

The Children's Overseas Reception Board was a British government initiated program to evacuate British children from England during World War II. B. to Canada and New Zealand.

Web links

Commons : Kindertransporte  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wiktionary: Kindertransport  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

References and footnotes

  1. ↑ Erwin Lichtenstein : The Jews of the Free City of Danzig under the rule of National Socialism . Mohr, Tübingen 1973, p. 103.
  2. ↑ Scientific service of the German Bundestag: Kindertransporte nach Great Britain (2008) ( Memento from December 20, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 75 kB)
  3. ↑ The missing chapter: How the British quakers helped to save the jews of Germany and Austria from Nazi persecution
  4. ↑ a b The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 , Volume 2: German Reich 1938 - August 1939 (edited by Susanne Heim ), Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-486-58523-0 , p 45.
  5. ↑ 600 Child Refugees Taken From Vienna; 100 Jewish Youngsters Going to Netherlands, 500 to England . In: New York Times . December 6, 1938 ( online, for a fee [accessed on March 28, 2013]).
  6. ↑ Lothar Eberhardt: Farewell forever. New memorial in memory of Kindertransporte , hagalil.com, December 1, 2008
  7. ↑ This reception center was located in the suburbs of Lowestoft in the county of Suffolk .
  8. ^ Anna Essinger: The Bunce Court School (1933-1943) , in: Hildegard Feidel-Mertz (Ed.): Schools in Exile. The repressed pedagogy after 1933 . rororo, Reinbek, 1983, ISBN 3-499-17789-7 , pp. 71-88.
  9. ↑ a b c Leslie Baruch Brent A Sunday child? From a Jewish orphanage to a world-famous immunologist. BWV Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin, 2009, ISBN 978-3-8305-1702-3 , pp. 65-69.
  10. ↑ On Billy Butlin see also the article in the English WIKIPEDIA: Billy Butlin . His camp in Dovercourt is also discussed there.
    Alan Major, on the other hand, speaks of a Warner 'Holiday Camp (Alan Major: Bunce Court, Anna Essinger and New Herrlingen School, Otterden , in: Bygone Kent Magazine , Volume 10, 1989, Part Three, p. 653). This supposed contradiction is resolved on the website Memories of the Butlin Camps and some related sites. Butlin apparently wanted to set up a camp in Dovercourt, had already completed plans for it, but then decided on the Clacton site. Captain Harry Warner, who worked closely with Butlin and ran similar camps, took over from Butlin's location and plans for Dovercourt.
  11. ↑ A better impression of the camp than the adjacent picture gives a photo on the website of the "United States Holocaust Memorial Museum": Jewish refugee children from Germany - part of a Children's Transport (Kindertransport) - at the holiday camp at Dovercourt Bay
  12. ↑ Hanna Bergas: Fifteen Years - Lived among, With and For Refugee Children , Palo Alto, California 1979 PDF of Fifteen Years available online. , P. 41. “December and January days on the British coast can be, and were, cold, gray and wet. Rain gradually became snow. The rooms in the camp were built for use in summer, and though heated, were uncomfortably chilly, occasionally ice-cold. The water in the jugs on the breakfast tables, which were laid in the evening, froze overnight. We were glad that in spite of the extreme cold and the generally primitive living conditions, we maintained a fairly good state of health among the youngsters. "
  13. ↑ Hanna Bergas: Fifteen Years , p. 39. “… to help the children to settle in the strange surroundings and to learn as much English as possible in a short time. Our fourth person was to organize the huge kitchen, to plan the meals, and to coordinate the work of all the people in the kitchen, up to ten at time. We had scarcely got the dormotories and the big hall ready for occupancy when the first transport arrived. "
  14. ↑ Anna Essinger: The Bunce Court School (1933–1943) , p. 77.
  15. ↑ Hanna Bergas: Fifteen Years , p. 42. “Bunce Court was asked, or permitted, to select ten children whom we considered most congenial to our way of education. We were, of course, better able to make a decision than the weekend visitors, as we had lived with these children for at least a few weeks. I can sys in retrospect that those ten all profited much from what we could do for them, and became, as our other children, happy, useful adults, both as parents and as members of the human species. "
  16. ↑ Hanna Bergas: Fifteen Years , p. 42. “All of us who had worked at Dovercourt Camp were richer by many experiences when, on February First, 1939, it could be closed; we were conscious of the service it had done, and also of how, if such a task were needed again in the furure, it could be improved on. We were interviewed by newspapers and radio people to stimulate refugee help across the anti-Nazi world. "
  17. ↑ Leslie Baruch Brent: A Sunday Child? , P. 66, and Hanna Bergas: Fifteen Years , p. 41.
  18. ↑ a b c d e f Sophie Friedländer / Hilde Jarecki: Sophie & Hilde. A life together in friendship and work. A twin book , by Sophie Friedländer and Hilde Jarecki, edited by Bruno Schonig, Edition Hentrich, Berlin, 1996, ISBN 978-3-89468-229-3 , pp. 52-64.
  19. ^ The Workhouse. The story of an institution . However, the detailed chronicle does not mention the temporary use as a camp for the refugee children.
  20. ↑ Quoted from: Sophie Friedländer / Hilde Jarecki: Sophie & Hilde , p. 62.
  21. ↑ a b Rebekka Göpfert: The Jewish Kindertransport from Germany to England 1938/39 , pp. 124–125. Göpfert is wrong with her statement that Millisle Farm should have closed again soon. The facility existed until 1948.
  22. ^ Rebekka Göpfert: The Jewish Kindertransport from Germany to England 1938/39 , p. 126. "
  23. ↑ "Unfortunately, no admission registers have as yet been found for these three other hostels." ( The Garnethill Hostel for Nazi-Era Refugees 1939-1948, in Glasgow )
  24. ↑ Sophie Friedländer / Hilde Jarecki: Sophie & Hilde , p. 74 ff.
  25. ↑ Conversation with Alfred Fleischhacker , 2008. Also: Alfred Fleischhacker (Ed.): That was our life, memories and documents on the history of the FDJ in Great Britain 1939 - 1946. Neues Leben, Berlin 1996. ISBN 3-355-01475-3 , Pp. 8, 198 ff.
  26. ↑ a b Alexander Schuller: "This pain never stops." In: Hamburger Abendblatt dated December 6, 2013, p. 17.
  27. ↑ Survivors of Kindertransporte receive one-time compensation of 2500 euros on zeit.de.
  28. ↑ Kindertransport Fund at the Jewish Claims Conference
  29. ^ Child survivors website
  30. ↑ Kent's sculpture is characterized by two anachronisms: the child wears modern sneakers and a kippah . The children sent from Vienna did not wear a kippah.
  31. ^ Trains to Life - Trains to Death. kindertransporte.de
  32. ↑ Marlies Emmerich: Rescue trip to Great Britain . In: Berliner Zeitung , May 31, 2008
  33. ↑ Kindertransport monuments
  34. ↑ Inauguration of the monument
  35. ^ Report of the NDR
  36. ↑ HaRakevet 109 (June 2015), p. 14 (109: 07, XII).
  37. ↑ Homepage of the traveling exhibition
  38. ↑ Exhibition: For the Child - Museum of Remembrance: The Kindertransporte to Rescue Jewish Children to Great Britain 1938/39 , ikg Vienna, December 10, 2018
  39. ^ At the end of the tunnel - The Kindertransporte from Berlin 80 years ago. Kommunale Galerie Berlin, accessed on October 13, 2019 .
  40. ↑ Flyer for the exhibition. Kommunale Galerie Berlin, accessed on October 13, 2019 .
  41. ↑ A Sunday child? at DNB
  42. ↑ a b c d e f g h i With interview excerpts documented by Anja Salewsky: "The old Hitler should die!"
  43. ^ Kindertransporte as a rescue operation for young Germans of Jewish origin. Retrieved May 2, 2019 . Childhood, school and youth culminate in the Kindertransport to England on January 5, 1939: Alfred Dellheim, who was born in the city, tells his story and that of his family. A look back, 2002.
  44. ↑ Franziska Holthaus: "Suddenly everything was completely different" , Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, May 28, 2010.
  45. ↑ Kurt Gutmann, joint plaintiff in the Sobibor trial (PDF; 93 kB)
  46. Jump up to life (Wissenschaft, NZZ Online) . Nzz.ch. Retrieved May 21, 2010.
  47. ↑ Alasdair Steven: Obituary: Ralph Koltai, opera and theater designer. In: The Herald. January 4, 2019, accessed December 28, 2019 .
  48. ↑ Joachim Kronheim in the DRAFD Wiki.
  49. ↑ The Kaliski School on haGalil.com.
  50. ↑ Walter Lindenberg in the DRAFD Wiki
  51. ↑ For the history of the siblings see also: Ruth Barnett: Nationality: Stateless
  52. ↑ Cf.: Ruth L. David: A child of our time: autobiographical sketches of a Jewish girl: Childhood in Fränkisch-Crumbach, Kindertransport to England, Leben im Exil . Frankfurt 1996.
  53. ↑ USHMM Collections: Oral history interview with Marion Walter
  54. ↑ Herbert Wise obituary , Guardian article , Aug. 12, 2015.
  55. ↑ Hanna Zack Miley: My crown in the ashes: The Holocaust, the power of forgiveness and the long road to personal healing , Fontis - Brunnen Basel, 2014, ISBN 978-3-03848-010-5 .
  56. ^ East Lothian at War: Whittingehame Farm School
  57. ^ In June 1999 a "Reunion of the Kindertransport" took place in London for the second time. Salewsky held talks with the survivors. This resulted in the broadcast "Once I was a Münchner Kindl" from Bayerischer Rundfunk . This resulted in this book, which reproduces 12 of the original 33 biographies. Compare Barbara Link: A desperate cry gave the title to twelve fates . Die Welt , April 21, 2001
  58. ↑ Friedländer reports inter alia. about her work in Dovercourt and a successor institution. From 1942 the two women ran refugee hostels .
  59. ↑ The Jewish Kindertransport to England: “The old Hitler should die!” Judentum.net
  60. ^ Later exile in Canada . The Düsseldorf memorial site highlights the baton that accompanied Rudi and a friend, and which he bequeathed to the memorial site in 1993.
  61. ^ Kindertransporte - Berlin children on their way to London on the website at the Theater an der Parkaue .
  62. ^ Carl Davis: my Kindertransport song cycle . theguardian.com
  63. ↑ concert announcement