Eighty-five years on, the memories come in flashes. A mother’s last glance through a smudged train station window. A few belongings held in tiny hands. An anxious wait for a new home in a foreign city.
In the months after Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi pogrom widely remembered as the start of the Holocaust, thousands of Jewish families sent daughters and sons abroad to safety. Some 10,000 children arrived in Britain and a handful went to other European countries.
Without their parents, and despite language barriers, they built varied and often remarkable lives. Many of them eventually settled in the United States.
As this extraordinary rescue mission, known as the Kindertransport, has gained recognition, researchers continue to unearth new information about these journeys in archives, newly discovered papers and interviews with the last living survivors.
Only a few hundred who were part of the Kindertransport, which ended in September 1939, are believed to still be alive, and as memories fade, the push to record their experiences has gained urgency.
Here, seven survivors tell their stories.
‘Life Changed Overnight’
Anne Kelemen, 100
Anne Kelemen was born into an upper-middle-class family in Vienna, living in a nice apartment and enjoying a comfortable life at age 13.
Then came Kristallnacht, and “life changed overnight,” she recalled.
Ms. Kelemen remembers little of her Kindertransport journey. Her train rolled through woods late at night and stopped somewhere in the Netherlands, where Dutch women greeted her and the other children with hot chocolate and grapefruit, a fruit she had never tasted before.
When she finally arrived at London’s Liverpool Street Station, her older sister, who had emigrated to Britain earlier, rode up an escalator to meet her.
One memory remains distinct.
“I recall seeing my mother, in particular, for the last time behind the locked door of the train station, behind a very, very dirty glass,” Ms. Kelemen said.
Many years later, when she returned to the station during a trip to Austria, she found the window covered in dust, and felt she could still make out her mother’s handprint.
She did not see her mother again. Ms. Kelemen’s parents died in the Holocaust, a personal tragedy that remains too raw to talk about. In a recent meeting in her Manhattan apartment, her eyes welled up when asked to talk about them.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I think I really can’t.”
From Vienna to Internment
Josef Eisinger, 101
When 15-year-old Josef Eisinger joined the Kindertransport from Vienna, it started a journey that would see him become a farm hand, dishwasher, corporal, seaman, Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and ultimately a physicist at Bell Laboratories.
Before that, however, he spent time in three internment camps in Britain. The British government had supported the Kindertransport, but fears of Nazi infiltration prompted the authorities to classify hundreds of the older children as “enemy aliens” and send them to internment camps starting in 1940.
In one of the camps, Mr. Eisinger forged a friendship with fellow prisoner Walter Kohn, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Then Mr. Eisinger was shipped off to Canada, where he was briefly held as a prisoner of war.
The experiences showed that although Mr. Eisinger had found safety from the Nazis, he was not fully welcomed in the countries that took him in. Still, sitting at home in Manhattan this spring, he counted himself lucky. His parents and older sister survived the Holocaust.
Looking back at his diary entries while he was in Britain, Mr. Eisinger said he wrote that he “missed home” in Vienna, mostly unaware of the horrors unfolding there.
“I, and most refugees, didn’t know that in the same period all Jews were being murdered,” he said. “I found out after the war.”
Letters to Germany
Paul Kester, 99
While most of the children on the Kindertransport went to Britain, Paul Kester ended up in Sweden, which had agreed to take in a small number of Jewish refugees.
Mr. Kester grew up in a middle-class family in Wiesbaden, Germany. His family ran a clothing store in the center of town.
That typical German childhood ended abruptly with Kristallnacht, not long before his 13th birthday. Two months later, on Jan. 15, 1939, Mr. Kester got on a train by himself to Sweden.
“I had this tremendous sense of relief that I could escape the country where now it was a crime to be Jewish,” he said.
In Sweden, he enrolled in a Jewish boarding school, where he had a bar mitzvah and met a girl, Susanne, who would become his wife. They were married for 68 years, until she died in 2017.
His parents stayed behind in Germany. They exchanged letters, many of which Mr. Kester saved. That correspondence, Mr. Kester recalled in a phone interview recently, showed the “slow decline and hardship that my family was exposed to” as Nazi Germany began to eradicate Jews.
In August 1942, his parents wrote in a letter that they were being sent to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. After that, the letters became more sparse. Then, the letters he wrote were sent back.
His parents, along with about 2,000 other Jews, were sent from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz on Jan. 23, 1943. “That transport was upon arrival in Auschwitz immediately sent to the gas chambers and murdered,” Mr. Kester said.
Mr. Kester spent 10 years in Sweden. In 1948, he and Susanne moved to Los Angeles, where his sister was living, and settled there for good. Mr. Kester said he still looked back fondly on his time in Sweden.
“Sweden became my destination,” he said, “but also my destiny.”
At Home in England
Lisl Malkin, 99
Even though she had been born and raised in Austria, by the time Lisl Malkin left Britain for the United States in 1945, she felt completely English.
“I thought like an English person. I felt like an English person,” Ms. Malkin said. “I could pass as an English person. I didn’t have the accent then.”
It had not always been that way for Ms. Malkin. When she got out of the train at Liverpool Street Station in London in May 1939, Ms. Malkin, then 13, saw hundreds of children being picked up by foster parents. Her own foster mother was strict, and she found England much tougher than she’d expected.
“Everything was different. The clothes, the weather, the food, everything,” Ms. Malkin said during an interview in her living room in Tenafly, N.J. “A sense of belonging was missing.”
She found that belonging, in part, in the English language, which she learned so well that she could pass for a local teenager. In April 1945, when she was 18, Ms. Malkin left for the United States to reunite with her parents and sister.
Over the years, she has gone back to England. The place and its people still hold a special place for her, she said, “because they saved my life.”
Cared For by a Rabbi
Larry Salomon, 91
Larry Salomon and his twin sister, Silvia, were both supposed to flee to Britain on the Kindertransport in 1939. But when the day came, only Mr. Salomon got on the train. A foster family had changed its mind about taking in Silvia.
As a result, Mr. Salomon — by his own account a gloomy child — boarded the train in Frankfurt alone, bidding goodbye to his parents and sister through a dirty window. He remembers little of the journey, except that he cried much of the way.
“I just couldn’t believe what was happening,” Mr. Salomon said in a phone interview from his home in the Hudson Valley. “But then the train started to move and I must have sensed that I would never see them again. And so it turned out.”
Silvia died three years later in the Sobibor concentration camp. She was 8.
From London Mr. Salomon was brought to South Wales. A rabbi took him into his home in Tredegar, a small industrial town where he led a small congregation.
Mr. Salomon remembered having a narrow bedroom at the rabbi’s house that had books on the shelves. Reading those books, he said, is how he began learning English.
He recalled only one moment of conflict, when the rabbi wanted him to learn Hebrew because he would one day have a bar mitzvah.
“I hated it. I didn’t understand the Hebrew,” he said.
In the end, Mr. Salomon never had a bar mitzvah. He left Britain when he was 12 to live with his aunt and uncle in the Bronx, and went on to have a long academic career in African history.
‘I Always Look Ahead’
Helen Weil, 103
Helen Weil starts every day in a good mood.
“I am an optimist,” she said by phone from her apartment in Laguna Woods, Calif. “When I wake up in the morning now, I say: ‘Good morning, Helen, another day in your long life.’”
Ms. Weil was a studious 17-year-old in the small German town of Garzweiler with an interest in fashion design when she fled for Britain. While her younger brother, Erwin, was part of the official Kindertransport, Ms. Weil managed to escape Germany by writing to her hometown dentist, who had already moved to Britain. “Please find me a family,” she asked him.
Nearly nine decades on, Ms. Weil remembers the family who took her in, a woman and her son in the northern English city of Hull. After about a year and a half, Ms. Weil was able to emigrate to the United States.
“My parents were killed in the Holocaust, in a concentration camp. So was my sister Marianne,” Ms. Weil said. “I cannot get over that. But that’s how it was.”
Ms. Weil never returned to Germany — partly because her hometown had changed too much and partly because she did not have the means to take such a big trip from the United States.
“You know, this is so long ago, and I very rarely look back,” she said. “I always look ahead.”
Kindness of Strangers
Sanne DeWitt, 90
Sanne DeWitt did not take the same route to Britain as many of the other children.
She was born in Munich in November 1934 — the year after Adolf Hitler became chancellor — at a Jewish seniors’ home where her father worked. During Kristallnacht, she was at home with her parents when Nazi officers arrested staff members and residents of the home.
Ms. DeWitt was sent to Dachau, a concentration camp near Munich, which the Nazis were using for forced labor.
“I was a young child, I couldn’t work,” Ms. DeWitt said.
A woman at the camp whose daughter had died helped Ms. DeWitt escape Dachau by pretending she was her mother. She smuggled her to the Netherlands, where she hid in the homes of families willing to help her.
Her memories are incomplete, but she was later helped by another stranger, in Rotterdam, and sent to England on a ferry, she said.
Ms. DeWitt’s mother managed to reunite with her daughter in Britain, in 1940, where she became the director of a hostel in London for Kindertransport children. The children ranged in age from about 5 to teenagers and spoke a range of languages including German, Polish and Czech. Ms. DeWitt recalled.
“It was hard to communicate with them,” Ms. DeWitt said, adding that many bore the trauma of what had happened. Some children had trouble eating and sleeping, she said. “They were upset and frightened, separated from their parents.”
Claire Moses is a Times reporter in London, focused on coverage of breaking and trending news.
The post A Lifetime After Fleeing the Nazis, They Tell Their Stories appeared first on New York Times.
