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When the word ‘Kindertransport’ is heard, one name often comes to the fore: Sir Nicholas Winton. Made famous by British TV’s ‘That’s Life’ programme in the late 1980s and the recent film ‘One Life’ starring Anthony Hopkins. Winton’s name has become synonymous with the rescue of unaccompanied Jewish children from Nazi-controlled Europe in the late 1930s. But Winton did not, could not have, acted alone. The rescue of nearly 10,000 young Jews from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia involved hundreds if not thousands of people. I once asked Sir Nicholas, when he was 103 years of age, why his name is so well known and the others forgotten. Ever humble and self-deprecating, he replied, ‘That’s easy to explain, I’ve outlived the others’.
So let’s go back a bit here and look again at the history. On December 2, 1938, just 86 years ago, a group of 200 young people descended a ship’s gangplank in the Essex port of Harwich. They came from Germany without their parents, siblings, family, friends; they came alone. These 200 were the vanguard of one of the largest acts of rescue in the Holocaust era. They were Jewish children from orphanages and homes that had been torched, battered or smashed by Nazi thugs on the night of November 9/10, 1938 – so called ‘Kristallnacht’, the Night of Broken Glass, now more accurately dubbed ‘November Pogroms’. The children had witnessed SS and Hitler Youth beating up their parents, wrecking their homes and businesses, arresting men and carting them off to be brutalised in concentration camps. It was after this terrible night that parents in Germany decided to send their children to safety. The British government had decided to waive visas for fleeing children under the age of 17.
Arrival
The children had no one in Britain to look after them; homes and support had to be found for them. Their arrival was entirely in the hands of volunteers – the British government took no part in their rescue from persecution. Enter an army of British helpers among whom, very prominently, were the Rotarians.
The children who arrived on that sunny December day had come on a train that left Germany the day before, travelled across the border into the Netherlands, on to the Hook of Holland and the night ferry to Harwich. This was the preferred route of most of the 10,000 children who came to Britain on the ‘Kindertransport’. The last such transport arrived in Harwich on September 2, 1939, one day before war was declared, all borders were closed, the fate sealed for the Jewish children, and their families, left at the mercy of the murderous Nazi state.
The nerve centre of this massive rescue operation was at Bloomsbury House in central London. Here committees were hurriedly set up by Jewish, Quaker, Church of England, Methodist and many other relief bodies. The building (now the HQ of Arts Council England) was packed with desks, telephones, filing cabinets and queues of anxious relatives or refugees already in Britain, desperate for help, news, financial support and more. The central committees in London totally relied on the goodwill of voluntary bodies throughout the length and breadth of the UK. This was after all, years before the Welfare State came into being. Voluntarism was key to the success of the Kindertransport rescue – the largest of its kind in the whole of the Holocaust era.
Many unsung heroes
The landscape of care in Britain involved a wide spectrum of ‘unsung heroes’. Winton and his team rescued 669 Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Prague in the spring of 1939.
But who helped rescue the other 9,300 young refugees who fled persecution from Germany and Austria? Winton had no dealing whatsoever with the children from the German Reich.
The answer is a whole raft of forgotten figures. There were German Jews who played a key role in organising the emigration of the children from Berlin, Vienna, Frankfurt and Cologne. Wilfred Israel, British by birth but German by nationality was in 1938, de facto head of the benighted Jewish community under Hitler’s cosh. After the November Pogroms, Israel and his team worked round the clock to secure the paperwork and finances to help get the children out. He was aided by a group of formidable German Jewish women including Hannah Karminsky who often acted as a chaperone for the smallest children travelling alone on the fateful trains to safety. Despite pleas for her to stay in Britain at her journey’s end, she insisted on returning to Nazi Germany to bring out more children. After war broke out her fate was sealed and Karminsky was eventually murdered in Auschwitz.
Care
Once in Britain, who cared for the 10,000 children? Up and down the country, local refugee committees were hurriedly set up to seek out foster families, raise money or secure places in hurriedly created hostels. My ongoing work on the UK Holocaust Map (created by the Association for Jewish Refugees) shows at least 50 such refugee hostels from Glasgow to Cornwall. Many more are being uncovered by research.
Foster families were urged in national and regional newspapers, in the pulpits of local churches and synagogues, in local clubs and societies such as the Rotarians, and by word of mouth, to offer a bed or two to a needy German, Czech or Polish-speaking Kindertransport child. Thousands came forward. Some were genuinely touched by the plight of the Jewish children and the fracture of their family life under the Nazis. Aubrey and Winifred Chadwick, both young teachers in Cambridge, offered a bed to five-year-old Suzi Spitzer who had been put on a Winton train in Prague. She was never to see her natural parents again. To Suzi, the Chadwicks, including foster sister Ann, became her new family.
Some foster families offered their homes with less creditable motives. Some wanted to treat older children as unpaid servants; some wanted to show off to their neighbours that they were doing a good turn – others neglected or even abused the children. Yet it seems that the majority of the Kindertransport children were well treated and taken into the open arms of strangers.
Among the host families was Alfred Roberts, father of future prime minister Margaret Thatcher. He was urged to take in a Jewish German girl by dint of his leading role in the local Rotarians. Similarly, the parents of David and Richard Attenborough warmly welcomed the sisters into their home in Leicester. They too became lifelong members of the family. Among other well-known names was the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams who chaired his local Jewish Refugee Committee in Dorking, Surrey, and aided dozens of Jewish children to find homes in the area.
These famous names are the exception. As I say in my book, most of the people who helped the children were ordinary Britons who neither sought nor achieved fame. In my small way, my book helps, I hope, to sing the praises of some of these forgotten heroes.
Mike Levy is the author of the book Get the Children Out! : Unsung Heroes of the Kindertransport published by Lemon Soul and available as a book, audiobook, or e-book on Amazon US | Amazon UK or via lemonsoul.com.
Mike is also lead researcher for the UK Holocaust Map https://ajr.humap.site/map
He is also currently researching British families who took in Kindertransport refugees. If your family, or someone you know, did host a Jewish refugee from 1938, please contact Mike on kindertransport4@gmail.com