Byers - Saving children from the Holocaust : the Kindertransport

Who will look after me and why cant we all go together?

Kurt Fuchel asked his father these questions, as the young boy prepared to embark on a journey to England alone. Fuchel was one of ten thousand children, who made this journey shortly before World War II began. In 1938, as the dark cloud of Nazism spread across Europe, Jews searched for a way out of Germany. But anti-Jewish laws and nations unwilling to accept fleeing refugees made escape difficult or impossible. England made an exception: save the children. This effort came to be known as the Kindertransport, and author Ann Byers discusses the heroes who organized the transports and the children who were saved from the Holocaust.

Saving Children From the Holocaust: The Kindertransport is a very well-written and often moving book. It will make a wonderful addition to the series.

About the Author

Ann Byers has been a teacher and curriculum writer for over twenty-five years. She has written many books about the Holocaust for Enslow Publishers, Inc.

She tried to look at it as an adventure. It would be, after all, another country she could add to her collection. Lore Groszmann was keeping track of all the places she had been in her ten years. She called it collecting countries. Austria was her home, and she had visited Hungary and Czechoslovakia. England would be number four.

This adventure, however, would be very different. This time, she would be going alone. Not exactly alonesix hundred other children would be going with her. But she did not know any of them. She had loving parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. But none of them would be coming with her.

Lores Aunt Trude and Uncle Hans had already moved to England. They had left shortly after the Anschluss nine months earlier. On March 12, 1938, Adolf Hitler, the chancellor of Germany, had taken over Austria in a move called the Anschluss, uniting the two countries. He stationed troops in Austrian cities. In fact, German soldiers had set up one of their operations in Lores grandparents yard. Trude and Hans had left before the worst of Hitlers changes came to Austria.

Lore had felt many of those changes. She was Jewish, and Hitler hated Jews. His political party, the Nazi Party, was violently antisemiticprejudiced against Jews. The antisemitic laws and practices that Hitler had begun in Germany were becoming part of life in Austria. Lore had to leave her school and go to a school for Jews only. Her Uncle Paul had been expelled from the University of Vienna because Jews were no longer permitted there. Lores father lost his job, and her grandparents had their business taken from them. But through those changes, she was not alone.

Even on Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, her parents were there to comfort her. On the evening of November 9, vicious mobs attacked Jewish businesses, synagogues, and homes throughout Germany and Austria. At age ten, Lore was frightened:

The wife of the elderly neighbor sat on a chair crying, in a thin voice, without intermission. The Nazis kept turning the lights off, sometimes for as long as half an hour, then off and on, and off and on. Into the middle of this walked Tante [Aunt] Gustis brother, hoping to hide out because his own apartment was being raided, but he was intercepted by the guard at the entrance and taken away. Tante Gusti stood in the doorway and wept. I sat down and howled for my mother.

Lore Groszmann witnessed Germanys takeover of Austria and the antisemitic laws the Nazis put in place. In this photo, Austrian Nazis and local residents look on as Jews are forced to scrub and clean the pavement of a street in Vienna.

But in that madness, at least Lore had her mother and father. Today, she would have no one.

Her father had tried to keep them all together. He knew they were not safe in Austria. He had made the rounds of all the foreign embassies in Vienna, seeking permission to go to another countryany other country. America, England, France, Panama, China, SwitzerlandLores father put his familys name on every list. But it was of no use.

Residents in Ober Ramstadt, Germany, watch as the towns synagogue is burned to the ground. The German fire department is preventing the fire from spreading to other buildings but allows the synagogue to burn.

Representatives of thirty-two countries had held a conference in Evian, France, the previous July. They had talked about the hardships of the Jews in Nazi countries. Jews were trying to leave Germany and Austria. But the Nazis would not let them take any of their money with them, and no country wanted to accept penniless refugees.

There was one exception. Less than two weeks after Kristallnacht, Great Britain said it would receive some who were fleeing Nazi oppression. The offer was only temporary and only for those under the age of seventeen. They would be safe in England and would return home when the persecution ended. The project was called the Kindertransport (Kinder is German for children). If Lores father could not get his entire family out of Austria, he could save at least his only child. He registered his daughter for one of the Kindertransports.

That is how Lore happened to be alone on the night of December 10, 1938. She was at the train station outside Vienna:

There was a confusion of kissing parentsmy father bending down, my mothers face burning against mine. Before I could get a proper grip on my suitcase, the line set in motion so that the suitcase kept slipping from my hand and bumping against my legs. Panic-stricken, I looked to the right, but my mother was there, walking beside me. Go on, move, the children behind me said. We were passing through doors. I looked to my right; my mothers face was nowhere to be seen.

Evian, France, is shown in this postcard in 1938. Representatives from thirty-two countries held a meeting in the town to discuss the plight of the Jews in Nazi-controlled territory.

A young Jewish girl rests on a staircase shortly after her arrival in Harwich, England, on December 12, 1938. Her number, 247, on a tag hanging from her waist, identifies her as a child from a Kindertransport.

Alone in the midst of hundreds of other frightened children, Lore carried, or rather dragged, her one small but heavy suitcase through the doors of the station. On her back was a rucksack (backpack), lovingly stuffed with bread, sausage, and candies. These were the only items she was allowed to bring aboard the train. A cardboard label around her neck and tags on her suitcase and rucksack identified her as Kind (child) number 152.