Kindertransport Event at United Nations

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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.