Between December 1938 and the outbreak of war in September 1939, around 10,000 Jewish children were sent from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to safety in Britain on what became known as the Kindertransport. Their parents were not allowed to come with them. Most of those parents would be murdered. The children, almost all of whom went on to lead full lives in Britain or to emigrate to other countries from Britain after the war, were the only members of their families to survive.
Why it happened
Kristallnacht in November 1938 made the situation of German and Austrian Jewish families desperate. The 30,000 men arrested and sent to the camps were, in most cases, the breadwinners of their families. The fines, the confiscations, the bans on Jewish economic activity meant that families that had still been hesitating about emigration could now not afford to leave. The international community had told the German Jews at Évian, four months earlier, that they would not be taken in. The American immigration quota was full. The British immigration quota was small. The doors were closed.
The argument that won the British government over was that children were a different case. A delegation of British Jewish leaders, supported by Quaker organisations and the Save the Children Fund, met the Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare on 21 November 1938. They proposed that Britain should admit unaccompanied Jewish children, on a temporary basis, until they could be resettled elsewhere or returned to their families after the situation had calmed. The British government agreed within days, on three conditions. The children would come without their parents. Each child would have a £50 guarantee posted by a sponsor in Britain to ensure they would not become a charge on the state. And the arrangement was understood to be temporary; the children would not be granted permanent settlement.
The first transport
The first train left Berlin on 1 December 1938 with around 200 children on board. They sailed from the Hook of Holland to Harwich and arrived in London the next day. From there they were taken to Dovercourt holiday camp on the Essex coast, which had been opened up for the winter to receive them. The youngest were two years old. The oldest were seventeen, the upper limit of the scheme.
Over the next nine months, around eighty trains made the journey. Children were collected from Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, Prague and other cities. Most went by rail across Germany and the Netherlands to the Dutch coast, then by Channel steamer to Harwich. Some came by direct ferry from Hamburg. The Dutch authorities cooperated despite their own restrictions on Jewish refugees, and the Dutch government later said that around 14,000 Jewish refugees of all ages had passed through the Netherlands en route to Britain.
The parents at the platform
The hardest material in the literature of the Kindertransport is the testimony of the parting at the German railway stations. The parents, mostly mothers, brought their children to the platform with a single small suitcase and a number on a string around the neck. They were not allowed onto the platform itself, only to the barrier. The children were told it was a holiday, that they would see their parents again soon. The parents knew they probably would not.
Many of the children remembered their last sight of their parents for the rest of their lives. The five-year-old who was lifted up to the train window so a hand could be held one last time. The boy who saw his father standing alone on the platform as the train pulled out and never saw him again. The sister who realised, only when she was on the boat, that her parents had given her their wedding rings to take with her because they would not be needing them any more. The Kindertransport literature is the closest the Holocaust comes to producing a corpus of farewell letters: most of the children received one or two letters from their parents in the months that followed, posted from the ghettos to which the parents had been deported. The letters always tried to reassure the child. They always avoided saying what was happening.
What happened to the children
The children were placed with British foster families, in hostels run by Jewish or Quaker organisations, on farms, or in boarding schools. Some had a happy time of it. Some did not. The youngest assimilated; the older ones often struggled with English, with the unfamiliar food, with the loss of their families, with foster families who turned out to be more interested in domestic labour than in mothering. Many ended up in agricultural work, or, when they reached 16, in factory work or domestic service.
Of the approximately 10,000 children who came on the Kindertransport, some were interned briefly in 1940 as enemy aliens before being released. Some volunteered for British forces and several hundred served in uniform, including the Special Operations Executive units that operated behind enemy lines in occupied Europe. After the war, many tried to find their parents. The great majority did not. The records compiled later by the Jewish refugee organisations show that around 90 per cent of the parents had been murdered.
Some of the children, when they reached adulthood, kept the name they had been given on the train, the name written on the cardboard tag around their neck. Others took their parents’ surnames back. Some never spoke about what they had been through. Some became famous: the publisher Lord Weidenfeld, the historian and biographer Sir Martin Gilbert, the artist Frank Auerbach, and the campaigner Sir Erich Reich are among the better-known former Kindertransport children. Most lived ordinary British lives. They were British citizens by 1947, when the temporary arrangement was made permanent.
Nicholas Winton and the Czech transports
The Czech section of the Kindertransport is associated particularly with the name of Nicholas Winton, a young London stockbroker who organised eight trains carrying 669 mostly Jewish children out of Prague in the summer of 1939. The last and largest train, which would have carried 250 more children, was scheduled to depart on 1 September 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland. The Czech borders were sealed. Almost all of those 250 children were murdered.
Winton himself never spoke publicly about what he had done until 1988, when his wife found a scrapbook of names and photographs in their attic and contacted the BBC. The television programme That’s Life reunited him with around 80 of the children he had saved, all of them now in their fifties. He died in 2015 at the age of 106.
The closing of the door
The last Kindertransport train left Germany on 31 August 1939. The next day Germany invaded Poland and Britain declared war. The doors closed behind it. The children who had not yet got out, did not get out. Around 1.5 million Jewish children would be murdered by the regime in the years that followed. The 10,000 who came on the Kindertransport were the rare exception. They are the reason the rescue is remembered. The story of those who could not be on those trains is the story of most of the rest of this site.
See also
Sources
- Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, Bloomsbury, 2000
- Vera Gissing and Muriel Emanuel, Nicholas Winton and the Rescued Generation, Vallentine Mitchell, 2002
- Barry Turner, And the Policeman Smiled: 10,000 Children Escape from Nazi Europe, Bloomsbury, 1990
- USHMM: Kindertransport