Kindertransport-A Light in the Darkness
by Kevin Oliver-Krohn
May 19, 2001
Here we are this morning to celebrate my becoming Bar Mitzvah and to mark the Bas Mitzvah celebrations of my classmates. We can do this freely in this beautiful auditorium with no interference from anyone. Jews haven't always been so free to celebrate their becoming Bar and Bas Mitzvah.
Jack Hellman, a survivor of the Holocaust, recalled, "My Bar Mitzvah was a month after Krystallnacht. It was held in an attic, with either young boys who were below the age of sixteen or old men who were beyond the age of sixty-five. My father was not there. He was still in a concentration camp, and it was just my mother. I felt terrible. It's still painful, since a bar mitzvah is a fairly big thing in a religious household. There was no celebration afterwards, there was nothing. You read your part from the Torah, did your haftorah and you were finished. We were lucky a minyan showed up altogether."
I'm lucky that I'm able to become a Bar Mitzvah without being scared of being arrested and that I'm able to be here with the people I care about the most. Jack Hellman, the survivor I just spoke about, was also lucky. He was lucky enough to participate in a brief program that saved his life and the lives of a few thousand other children.
The Kindertransport was a program to rescue children from the Nazis and get them out of Austria, Germany and other countries occupied by Nazi Germany. This program began in 1938 and ended in early 1939. The children were sent to England. Approximately 10,000 children were rescued in this way. My grandmother was on the Kindertransport along with her brother and sister.
The events leading up to the Kindertransport are important in understanding how extraordinary it was. In 1933, Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany. Later that year he opened the first concentration camp, then started the Gestapo and began a propaganda campaign that stereotyped Jews. In Austria, Germany and other countries later occupied by Nazi Germany, books and posters were printed depicting Jews as ugly dwarfs with black hair, big noses and hands filled with money.
These stereotypes were picked up by the children. Lorraine Allard told how this propaganda affected her.
"It was at school that I had my first personal experience with anti-Semitism. Even today, if I talk about it or think about it, I can still feel the pain. I had a friend who was in nursery school with me and later went to the primary school next door because boys and girls were separated then. Our parents were very friendly and we used to play 'mums and dads' and 'doctors' as little children. One fine day, I was eight or nine, he chased me into the street throwing stones at me and calling me a 'Juden stinker', which means 'you smelly Jew'. That's my first personal pain, which I will never forget."
It wasn't just kids who changed and became cruel. Local officials also followed what the Nazis said to do. Another survivor, Alexander Gordon, recalled an incident when bullets came flying through the window of the orphanage where he lived.
"At eleven o’clock that night, there were bullets being shot through the windows and all kinds of noise. I said, ‘What’s going on? Everybody get dressed.’ I knew we had to get out of the building. There was a farm behind our building, so we all went into the fields and hid in between the rows of asparagus. Twenty of us were sitting there in the cold, all spread out, and we didn’t know what to do. I said, ‘The first thing we should do is go and call the police.’ Somebody finally got through, but when the police heard ‘We’re being attacked’ and where the call was coming from, they laughed and hung up".
Many people just couldn't take what was happening. Bertha Leverton remembered, "That day my father came home ashen-faced because one of the customers he had gone to deliver laundry to had committed suicide, both he and his wife."
In 1934, Hitler appointed himself dictator. In 1935, Hitler's government passed the Nuremberg Laws.
These laws prevented Jews from being citizens and forbade them to marry anyone of German blood. They could no longer serve non-Jews and all Jewish children had to leave German schools and enroll in Jewish schools. All property owned by Jews had to be listed with Nazi authorities who would then take them over. Jews couldn't hold public office or vote and were not considered citizens any longer. In 1938 things got much worse. By this time, the Germans had taken over neighboring territory including the Rhineland, Austria, and Western Czechoslovakia (also known as the Sudetenland).
On November 9, 1938 an organized program 
of terror and destruction against Jews was carried out in all of the Nazi occupied territory. This was known as Krystallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. That night 200 synagogues were destroyed, 7,500 Jewish businesses looted and 30,000 male Jews sent to concentration camps. There had never been such an organized pogrom in so many countries before. This violence sped up the implementation of the Kindertransport.
Stories about the Kristalnacht violence alarmed Jews in England. Many Jews and church organizations, together with the Quakers, lobbied the British government to allow children from Nazi-occupied countries to enter England without all of the usual formalities. The government agreed to let these children enter England without passports if the children were between the ages of five and seventeen, came without their parents, and had some sponsor in England to post a 50 pound bond and assure that they would have a place to live. The British proposed this to the Nazis who agreed as long as the rescued children took no valuables out of Germany and the Nazi-occupied countries. The Nazis did not originally plan to exterminate the Jews - only to clear them out of Germany - and were glad that some could be sent out of the country at no cost to the Germans. The trains started six weeks later. Similar programs were proposed in every other non-Nazi country in Western Europe, as well as in the United States.
England was the only country to actually act to modify its immigration policies to allow rescued children to enter.
Despite having a cheap and easy way to get Jews out of their territory, the Nazis made it as unpleasant as possible. The Nazis ordered many of the transports to leave on Saturdays. This was cruel because it forced Jews to break the Sabbath. Kurt, a boy from Germany, said:
"When I boarded the train, I settled myself in a window seat and looked around. Most of the children were much younger than I. There was a lot of loud crying and screaming, which annoyed me. The whistle blew and the conductor lifted his red flag, signaling that the train was about to leave the station, I leaned out the window to get a last glance at my parents who were waving goodbye. Suddenly a woman ran up and handed me a large bundle. 'Give her to my sister at the station.' she screamed, over the noise of the departing train. 'My sister will pick her up in Holland.' I sat down and started to unwrap the bundle and discovered that she had handed me a baby."
This shows just how desperate German Jews were to get their children safely out of the country. Lore Segal recalled, "My dad said when I get to England I should talk to all the English people I meet and ask them to get us out of Vienna." This also shows the degree of desperation: to put such a big responsibility on a small child.
Many of the parents told their children that the problems would blow over soon and that they would come back soon. They said this to convince their children to get on the train and to give them hope, even though they knew better. It is ironic that the same trains that took these children to safety would later carry their parents to their deaths.
Survivor Norbert Wollheim remembered, "The children went with the hope that their parents will follow or that one day they could come back. I couldn't realize that only a year and a half later the train would be going to Hitler's concentration camps."
Obviously it was hard to let the children go. Lory Cahn remembered, "My mother and dad went with me inside the train and put my suitcase up. My seat was right at the window. The German trains had great big windows, and a leather strap, like a belt, to position the window to whatever height you wanted it. My father pulled that all the way down so I could be leaning out of the window. They hugged and kissed me and then they went outside. The guy came and he waved the signal. When the train started to move my dad said 'Let me hold your hands' and I held out my hands, and I said 'I have to let go. I have to let go.' Then he pulled me out of the train."
The Nazis didn't want the children to take wealth and valuables out of the country and the people in charge of the program agreed that the children were not to have more than 10 marks.
Norbert Wollheim recalled that a kid once brought a very expensive violin and kids weren't allowed to bring more then ten marks with them. Parents sometimes sent valuable things with them that they could sell later. "I said 'Don't forget that these young people take music lessons. Obviously he likes music very much so he took his violin.' This didn’t sit well with the official. So I gambled I said to the boy 'Are you able to play something?' He said, 'Sure.' I asked the officer if he would like to see if the boy knew music. The boy started to play 'God Save the Queen' and when he was finished I asked if he could keep the violin. The officer said yes."
The children did not all end up in the same place after they arrived in England. 
Many went to orphanages and hostels and worked on farms. Some children were taken in only to become maids or babysitters. Others were sent to houses to become playmates for the hosts' children. Still others were only taken in so the hosts could show off to their friends that they had done a good deed. Still, the hardships were minor compared to the horrors that awaited the children's parents and the others who couldn't leave.
After Britain's entry into the war the refugee children, along with other British schoolchildren and vulnerable persons, were evacuated from London and other big cities to the Midlands and Wales. Most adult refugees were reclassified as 'enemy aliens' and many were interned or deported in early 1940. The Kindertransport children were looked upon just as suspiciously as the 'alien' adults. The British eventually cancelled the deportations. Many of the adults, as well as many Kinder who had turned 18, joined the British army and fought against the Nazis.
On January 20, 1942, the Nazis planned the "Final Solution", the name for their scheme to murder all the European Jews. The plan was to round up all the Jews in areas the Nazis conquered and send them on trains to death camps.
I learned from my research is that, even under the worst of circumstances, there are people who step forward to do kind, unselfish things. The hosts in England who took the children into their homes were remarkable. For no other apparent reason than wanting to help, they gave a home to 10,000 children from a foreign country who didn’t speak their language. This must have been very difficult. There are many other examples of people who stepped forward to help, like Wallenberg, Schindler or Gruber. Perhaps the greatest lesson from the Kindertransport is not the horrible conditions that made it necessary, but that there were good people to help make it possible and there’s always hope, even in the darkest of times.
THANK YOU’S
I would like to thank my parents for all their help and support. I would also like to thank Hershl for all his help and suggestions in critiquing my speech. I also thank my friends and family for being there for me.top