Kindertransport News

Kindertransport Memory Quilts

2008-09-08T22:48:00.004-04:00

Dedication to Take Place on October 5

A dedication ceremony will be held to recognize the three Kindertransport Memory Quilts and welcome them to the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan at 1pm on Sunday October 5th. RSVP by calling 248-553-2400, ext. 25.

Quilt detail courtesy of the Kindertransport Association (KTA)

Coverage in "Queens Courier"

2008-05-31T14:54:00.007-04:00

New York's Queens Courier cited the Kindertransport numerous times in its recent set of Holocaust-related articles. Mentioned are at least three Kinder: Ellen Alexander nee Gladke, her sister Ursula, and Hannah Deutch.

In the article "The Will to Survive" (May 19, 2008), Jessica Lyons writes

About 10,000 children were able to find refuge in Great Britain through the Kindertransport, which is a German word meaning “transportation of children.” During the transports, which were held from December of 1938 to September of 1939, children left their parents to eventually live in foster homes.

Fresh Meadows resident Ellen Alexander, who was born in Berlin in 1929, went on the Kindertransport with her older sister Ursula. As a 10-year-old, she considered it a big adventure. She and her sister stayed with a couple previously unknown to the family throughout the duration of the war.

Lyons profiles Ellen Alexander here. From the profile:

"In 1945, right after the war ended, we got a telegram from my mother saying that she was alive and wondering if we had heard from my father, which of course we hadn’t because he had died by then," Alexander said. "He was sent on a death march to Auschwitz."

Alexander’s mother came to England to live with the girls and their foster parents in 1946. There were disagreements as to who should be in charge of the girls, and eventually Alexander, her mother and sister left for America, making it to the United States in 1947 after a 10-day sea voyage. Even after leaving England, Alexander said she kept in touch with her foster parents.

In "60 years later: Never ending anguish for survivors" (May 28, 2008), Noah Rosenberg mentions another Kind, Hannah Deutch. From her profile:

A great aunt, who had a cousin in charge of the child transport, or Kindertransport, in London, added Deutch, who was 18 at the time, to a list of around 150 children who were being sent to the U.K. Deutch’s mother and stepfather, unable to get visas to come to England, managed to get on the last ship leaving from Holland to Chile before war was declared.

Realizing she owed a debt of gratitude to England, Deutch became a registered nurse and joined the British Army. Based in London, Deutch came face to face with war casualties and collected "the arms, legs and heads" of a troop transport that had been bombed. Deutch heard the first "buzz bomb" floating above London and at one point she, herself, was bombed out.

"I can still feel the ceiling on my back pushing all the people down the stairs," she said....

She eventually learned that her aunt, uncle and grandmother, who had raised her for a time while her mother was ill, along with her two-year-old cousin, had died at the Riga concentration camp....

Deutch still reels from the fact that Nazi Germany destroyed her family, stole her German identity and forever altered the landscape of world Jewry.

"It’s something that doesn’t leave you. You put it away in your brain so it doesn’t hurt you from day to day," Deutch explained.

"But it’s there."

Thanks to Joseph Haberer for the lead.

Eva Kollisch: "The Ground Under My Feet"

2008-05-27T19:00:00.001-04:00

Eva Kollisch, rescued in childhood from the Nazis by a Kindertransport, will read from her new book, The Ground Under My Feet, in New York City at the Morningside Bookshop (2915 Broadway at 114th Street, (212-222-3350) on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 7pm.

Kollisch is professor emerita at Sarah Lawrence College, where she taught literature for over 30 years. She is the author of Girl in Movement, a memoir of her early years inside a small American Trotskyist party during World War II.

Here's an excerpt from The Ground Under My Feet.

Siegmund Nissel, 86

2008-05-27T17:03:00.005-04:00

Siegmund Nissel, second violinist in the Amadeus String Quartet (with Norbert Brainin, Peter Schidlof, and Martin Lovett) has died at the age of 86, according to the Telegraph.

Siegmund Walter Nissel (Sigi) was born in Munich on January 3 1922 and began playing the violin at the age of six. His mother died when he was nine and he was taken by his father to live in Vienna, where his teachers included Max Weissgärber. Father and son were touring Germany in 1936 and saw some of the Olympic events in Berlin. As Jesse Owens, the black American runner, won one of his four gold medals Nissel spotted Hitler in his box and observed the Führer's discomfort. He also told, in Daniel Snowman's book The Hitler Emigrés, of how, two years later, he watched: "with horror and incredulity as the stolid burghers of Vienna welcomed the Nazis as 'liberators'."

Nissel was to leave the city on one of the last Kindertransport trains. He made his way to Britain where, in order to save his father, he had to find a guarantor. He knocked on doors until the Farrer family in Twickenham – total strangers, and Anglicans to boot – agreed to offer the requisite guarantee. Nissel père arrived in August 1939, just days before the outbreak of war.

Initially young Sigi was an air raid warden in Richmond, but he was soon interned on the Isle of Man as a "friendly enemy alien" by a British government fearful that the Nazis might have planted spies in the country.

There he met Schidlof and later Brainin. He was released after the intervention of [Ralph] Vaughan Williams and Myra Hess and found employment in the East End of London working in a metals factory for the war effort.

Here the "Wolf Gang" plucks a Bartók movement.

Source (3:05)

Thanks to Joseph Haberer for the lead.

Hugo Marom Gets Czech Wings

2008-04-04T11:26:00.005-04:00

Pilot Hugo Marom, who left Czechoslovakia on the Kindertransport, recently received the wings of the Czech Air Force, as reported in the article "After sixty years, pilots finally get their wings" by Yossi Melman for Haaretz (March 31, 2008).

Marom was born in Czechoslovakia to the Meisel family, whose family tree shows that they spent 1,000 years in the country. "My father used to say that we were more Czech than the Czechs," he said with a smile.

Marom's life was saved when he was sent out of Czechoslovakia to Great Britain as part of the Kindertransport in 1939. He returned to his homeland after World War II and was offered a spot in a pilots' course for Czech Jews in 1948; those who completed the course were supposed to be sent to help the fledgling Jewish state fight for its existence....

After completing the course, Marom moved to Israel and became one of the first members of the IAF [Israel Air Force]. He was the first commander of the flight school and made the rank of major - the most veteran major in the air force, he said - and retired from the IAF in 1954. He served for 10 years as the chief test pilot for the Defense Ministry and Israel Aerospace Industries, and went on to plan airports around the world as a private consultant. He planned airports in the United States and Paraguay, and is working on Israel's second international airport, which is slated to go up off the coast of Tel Aviv after the Sde Dov airport shuts down.

Thanks to Joseph Haberer for the lead.

Geoffrey Hartman to Speak in NYC

2008-03-25T14:11:00.000-04:00

As a tie-in with his memoir A Scholar's Tale, literary critic and Yale University professor Geoffrey Hartman is scheduled to appear at The Museum of Jewish Heritage at 6:30 pm on Wednesday, April 2, 2008.

Professor Hartman will reflect on how his career was influenced by his experience as a child of the Kindertransport.

Admission is $5 but free for museum members. The program is part of the Museum's book club, Looking Back, Facing Forward, co-sponsored by the Forward and moderated by its associate editor, Gabriel Sanders.

Erica Jesselson (Pappenheim), 86

2008-03-14T11:44:00.002-04:00

Kind Erica Jesselson, a major Judaica collector and a co-founder of Manhattan's Yeshiva University Museum, died on Wednesday, March 12, 2008 at her home in the Bronx, as reported by The New York Times and other sources. From Dennis Hevesi's obituary in the Times:

Born Erica Pappenheim in Vienna on March 1, 1922, Mrs. Jesselson was a daughter of Adolph and Paula Pappenheim. When World War II broke out, she and her sister, Lucy, were among 10,000 Jewish children evacuated to England on Kindertransport trains. In 1940, they were reunited with their parents, who had escaped to the United States and found a home in Brooklyn.

Erica Jesselson purchased the First Nuremberg Haggadah at auction for more than $1,000,000 in 2001; she donated the rare manuscript to the Israel Museum. With her husband Ludwig, she had also purchased and contributed the Trent Manuscript and other important artifacts to the Yeshiva University Museum.

The Yeshiva University's obituary mentions many more of the couple's achievements, including the financing of a synagogue at the Haifa Technion, the founding of a religious school for girls in Jerusalem, the endowment of a chair of mathematics at The Hebrew University, the endowment of a program for rabbinic scholarship at Bar-Ilan University, and the planning and building of Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek hospital, for which Erica Jesselson served as national president of the American Friends of Shaare Zedek Hospital. Jesselson, who was highly involved with Yeshiva University, a vice chairman of the Center for Jewish History, and a co-founder of PEJE (Partnership in Excellence in Jewish Education), also served on the International Board of Bar-Ilan University and the boards of the Haifa Technion, the Israel Museum, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, and the UJA Federation of New York.

Erica Jesselson is survived by her sister, Lucy Lang, as well as three sons and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Representative Tom Lantos (1928-2008)

2008-02-11T14:26:00.000-05:00

Representative Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo, San Francisco), 80, passed away this morning due to complications from esophageal cancer.

The only Holocaust survivor who has served in the United States Congress, Representative Lantos spoke at the 2004 Kindertransport Association (KTA) national reunion, which was held in Burlingame, California. Born in Budapest, he escaped a forced labor camp and served in the anti-Nazi underground. Many of his family members perished in the Holocaust.

Here Lantos is pictured visiting a federally funded shelter for homeless women and children.

"German Students Confront the Holocaust"

2008-02-10T13:02:00.000-05:00

Kind Selmar Hubert recently recounted his experiences to young people from the German School and other Westchester, NY schools, as reported in "German Students Confront the Holocaust," a February 10, 2008 New York Times article by Joseph Berger. The students attended a traveling exhibit about Anne Frank. Excerpts from the article:

The students were also spellbound by a talk given by Selmar Hubert, 82, of Rye Brook, who described the brutality he experienced growing up in the 1930s in the Bavarian village of Cronheim. He told of the day his schoolmates pounced on him and his sister, cursing and spitting at them, while the teacher, a Nazi, egged them on. The school forced him to shout slogans like "Kill all Jews."

"Imagine what it feels like to shout 'Kill all Jews' when you’re Jewish," Mr. Hubert said.

Mr. Hubert held the students riveted, like a counselor telling a ghost story around a campfire. On Kristallnacht in 1938, Nazi vandals ransacked his home; his father was taken to Dachau, then released as inexplicably as he had been arrested. Finally, his father put the boy — just 13 —on a train that would take him to England in the Kindertransport program that saved 10,000 Jewish children.

"I looked in his eye and he looked in mine and we both knew we would never see each other again," Mr. Hubert said. In fact, they did not.

But Mr. Hubert also wanted students to know about the English people who safeguarded him and his sister and about his return seven years ago to Cronheim, where he was warmly greeted by children from the very village that had once scorned him.

He echoed Anne Frank.

"You have to have faith in the goodness of people," Mr. Hubert said. "I would not be sitting here if not for that."

Mr. Hubert like to tells [sic] young Germans troubled by guilt over atrocities they did not perpetrate that he suffers from survivors’ guilt. "Neither your feelings nor my feelings make any sense," he will say. "How can we overcome that guilt? That’s one of the things we do here — help each other."

Thanks to Joseph Haberer for the lead.

Returning to NYC: Kindertransport, The Play

2008-02-08T12:09:00.000-05:00

The play Kindertransport, by Diane Samuels, is scheduled to be performed at the historic Provincetown Playhouse (133 MacDougal Street, New York, NY) on various dates and times from February 22 through March 2, 2008, in a production offered by the Steinhardt School of New York University (NYU).

Admission is $15 ($5 with NYU ID). Call 212-998-5281 for info and reservations.

Kindertransport Event at United Nations

2008-01-22T11:14:00.000-05:00

The Oscar-winning documentary Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport will be screened on Thursday, January 31, 2008 at the Dag Hammarskjöld Library Auditorium at the United Nations. A question and answer discussion will follow with producer and KT2 Deborah Oppenheimer and David G. Marwell, Director of New York City's Museum of Jewish Heritage. Local survivors who appear in the film will be in attendance.

Commemorating the third annual observance of Holocaust Remembrance Week, the event will be hosted by Kiyo Akasaka, Under-Secretary General for Communicatons and Public Information, with opening remarks by Ambassador Karen Pierce of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the United Nations.

NOTE Registration for the event is now closed due to the high level of interest.

Coming to NYC: KTA Chanukah Party 2007

2007-11-25T00:17:00.000-05:00

The annual KTA Chanukah Party in New York City is scheduled for 12:30pm on Sunday, December 16, 2007. The program will feature a screening of the documentary Vienna's Lost Daughters, followed by a discussion with Kinder who appear in the film.

RSVP no later than December 1, 2007.

For more details, please see the KTA website.

Arnold Weiss: Giving Hitler Hell

2007-11-09T18:29:00.000-05:00

"This is the story of a man who has stared evil in the eye and held the fates of mass murderers in his hands. It begins at a company picnic, where children are cavorting as their parents dine on healthful salads and low-carb entrees. This is appropriate, in a roundabout way, because alongside the theme of hard, brutal justice, this story also concerns the American dream."

This is the story of Kind Arnold Weiss, as written by Matthew Brzezinski in "Giving Hitler Hell" a major feature in the Washington Post Magazine (July 24, 2005).

Interview with Archivist Geoffrey Hartman

2007-11-04T11:38:00.000-05:00

Kind Geoffrey Hartman is the project director and faculty advisor for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.

Here's a Yale Herald interview with Hartman.

Thanks to Joseph Haberer for the lead.

Nicholas Winton Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

2007-09-17T14:55:00.000-04:00

Bernard Josephs at The Jewish Chronicle reports that "More than 33,000 Czech schoolchildren have persuaded their government to nominate for the Nobel Peace Prize a British man who rescued hundreds of youngsters from the Nazis."

Former London Stock Exchange clerk Sir Nicholas Winton, 93, was instrumental in rescuing more than 650 children in Kindertransports via eight trains between March and August 1939.

In the article, Sir Nicholas remembers a ninth train.

A ninth train, the biggest, was to leave Prague on September 3, 1939, the day Britain entered the war — but it never left the station. "Within hours of the announcement, it disappeared,” he recalled. "We had 250 families waiting at Liverpool Street that day in vain. If the train had been a day earlier, it would have come through.

"Not a single one of those children was heard of again."

Known as the "British Schindler," Sir Nicholas has been honored internationally for his good deeds.

Liverpool Street Station Monument Controversy

2007-09-17T14:35:00.000-04:00

The Jewish Chronicle reports that a controversy may still be simmering over the replacement of Flor Kent's problematic Kindertransport sculpture Für das Kind with Children of the Kindertransport, by Kind Frank Meisler, at London's Liverpool Street Station.

FRED SPIRA, 83

2007-09-16T18:50:00.000-04:00

The New York Times (September 14, 2007) reports the passing of Kind Fred Spira.

Sigfried Franz Spira was born in Vienna on Aug. 7, 1924, the only child of Hans and Paula Back Spira. After emigrating to the United States, he changed his name to S. Franklin Spira, but he preferred to be called Fred....

Mr. Spira’s father, a Jew, had been a banker in Vienna. When the bank failed in 1929, he and a Christian friend opened a camera store. As the Nazis made inroads into Austrian politics even before they invaded, 14-year-old Franz Spira was barred from attending high school. He began working in the camera store — but only in the back, out of sight with his father.

In 1939 he boarded a Kindertransport, one of the trains that rescued Jewish children by taking them out of the country. He was sent to England. Then, joined by his father in May 1940, he arrived in New York. His mother arrived later that year.

In the United States, Spira and his father remained in the photography business, creating the very successful Spiratone company. He became "a photo historian and collector of photographic gadgets who is credited with helping standardize modern camera equipment and making it accessible to amateurs."

A 1979 article in Popular Photography credited Spira with the popularity of equipment including the fish-eye lens, lenses that can be switched from one camera to another, and a system of interchangeable lens mounts: "What [Henry] Ford did to our economy and culture with the concepts behind the Model A and Model T, Spira has done to photography with his accessory lenses, close-up attachments and processing machines."

Spira created an extensive photography collection and co-authored the book The History of Photography as Seen Through the Spira Collection.

Spira is survived by his wife Marilyn and their sons Greg and Jonathan.

ARNOLD FLAGG, 84

2007-09-16T18:20:00.000-04:00

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (September 5, 2007) reports the passing of Kind Arnold Flagg at the age of 84.

Flagg understood that not every childhood was easy. He was born in Germany, orphaned by the age of 10 as the Nazis rose to power.

"I had a happy childhood until the Nazis," he said.

At 15, Flagg was sent to England as part of the "Kindertransport," a mission to provide children refuge from Nazi persecution. That was in 1939, just months before the war began.

Flagg tried to join the British Army at 16.

"They said to come back in two years, so I did," he said.

More than 60 years later, war memories were still all too real. Flagg spoke quietly, intensely, his eyes closed as he watched the battles again.

One of those battles was made famous in the movie "A Bridge Too Far."

"I was there, too," he said.

Later, the British military wanted Flagg for his skill with several languages.

"I was privy to the negotiations that led to the surrender of the German forces," Flagg said. "I ended up at the war crimes trials in Hamburg. I was offered a double promotion if I would stay on."

The turning point came when a Nazi captain - a doctor accused of killing children - denied that he had killed that many children.

"I said, 'Keep your promotion, I want to be out of here,' " Flagg recalled.

In 1947, he came to the United States, where his older brothers, Richard and Kenneth, already lived.

Flagg became a legal translator, founding a translating business as well as a language school. He served as a reading tutor in Milwaukee for 17 years and spoke with school audiences about the Holocaust.

Flagg married his wife Marion in 1953; their family includes three sons and grandchildren.

St. Louis: Kindertransport Play

2007-09-16T18:00:00.000-04:00

The second production of the New Jewish Theatre's 2007-2008 season will be the Diane Samuels play Kindertranport. The production will run from November 28 through December 16, 2007.

As reported by Robert A. Cohn in Jewish Light Online,

The play is described as "a powerful and resonant study in dislocation, denial, abandonment and the guilt of survival through one woman's journey" as part of the Kindertransport, the separation of 10,000 European Jewish children from their families so that they could be transported to Great Britain to escape the Holocaust.

[New Jewish Theatre Artistic Director Kathleen] Sitzer said that following performances of Kindertransport, "we will not only have local St. Louis Holocaust survivors who were actually part of the Kindertransport, but also psychologists and psychiatrists discussing the many issues of family separation, issues of abandonment and guilt which resulted from that traumatic but necessary experience."

Here is a Q&A with Samuels.

A Blog Begins

2007-09-16T14:35:00.000-04:00

Well, this is the start of a Kindertransport-related blog.

Let's see how it goes....