Ackerman Chronicle
October 30, 2019
Newsletter for the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies at UT Dallas
"Rescuing the Children: Remembering the Kindertransport”
Twelve days after Kristallnacht, the British government initiated legislation creating the Kindertransport program, which allowed Jewish children from Europe to be housed with British citizens for the duration of the war.
She mentioned that stories about survivors, rescuers and heroes are popular with audiences, and this popularity usually stems from the fact that they either deliver us from a sense of despair or restore a hopeful sense of the future. Many Kindertransport memoirs mention a reluctance to share their experiences because they felt their story did not fit within the categories of survivor.
Dr. Lassner stated that the children of the Kindertransport may have escaped the experiences of deportations and camps, but they did not avoid the lasting psychological and emotional effects of the Holocaust. In fact, she mentions that almost ninety-nine percent of the children lost their entire families, including their parents who sacrificed their lives to save them.
Many Kindertransport memoirs mention how warmly they were accepted into British families, but alongside this many note a tension between tolerance and understanding about the best and quickest way to assimilate these children into British society. Survivors have written often about the conflicting reality of watching the events of the Holocaust unfold from afar, while at authorities pressed them to forget their Jewish pasts and identities in order to conform to British standards of society.
The Kindertransport (Children's Transport) was the informal name of a series of rescue efforts which brought thousands of refugee Jewish children to Great Britain from Nazi Germany between 1938 and 1940.
It was the first museum in Britain to celebrate the moral fiber of the British people during the war instead of military service and national commitment to the war effort. She stressed that the integration of the Kindertransport story into the British historical narrative could also serve to combat the modern day antisemitism that has erupted in the United Kingdom as well as all over the world.