<p>I was motivated to post this article by some of the responses in my thread in the Parent’s Forum about my son’s hopes to study abroad in Vienna during the fall term next year, as part of the University of Chicago’s program there.</p>
<p>I wrote the article about 10 years ago. It was published in Kinderlink, the newsletter of the Kindertransport Association. For those not familiar with the Kindertransport (literally, “children’s transport”), it was the program instituted by the British government, after Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, to take in as refugees Jewish children from Germany and Austria. </p>
<p>From the time the program began on December 1, 1938 until the summer of 1939 (obviously, it didn’t continue after the War began on Sept. 1, 1939), approximately 10,000 Jewish children, aged approximately 5-17, were rescued in that way. My mother, who grew up in Berlin, was one of them; she was 15 years old when she left her home, her parents, and the only country she had ever known, as part of the first Kindertransport on December 1, 1938, three weeks after Kristallnacht. Some lived in group homes in England, some were fostered in private homes, and although they didn’t all have wonderful experiences (some were treated as little better than servants, and all or most of them were considered “enemy aliens,” even though they were Jewish, once war broke out, and many were interned at that point), at least they survived. The vast majority never saw their parents again. My mother was a fortunate exception to that rule, since she was reunited with her parents after spending five years on her own in England, although she did lose 11 members of her immediate family in the Holocaust.</p>
<p>(Legislation to authorize a similar program, to take in 20,000 children, was proposed in the United States early in 1939, but it never even came to a vote. There wasn’t enough support for the proposal in Congress – particularly given the testimony against it by representatives of various institutions such as the American Legion and the D.A.R., characterizing the children who would be taken in as “thousands of motherless, embittered, persecuted children of undesirable foreigners,” etc. – even though the legislation had the support of leading Catholic and Protestant clergy, the Federal Council of Churches of Christ, the Quaker community, Eleanor Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Alf Landon, Rabbi Steven S. Wise, and others. Shameful. It would have been a drop in the bucket compared to the one million Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust, but at least some might have been saved. Britain did something. The United States did nothing.)</p>
<p>Since the article isn’t posted on the Internet, I’m reproducing it here, with some corrections and additions. (Don’t worry, I own the copyright!) Actually, even if it were available, I wouldn’t post the link, because it was published under my former first name, which, as I’ve said elsewhere, is a state secret! </p>
<p>When my son reached the age that my mother was when she left Germany, I tried to imagine how difficult it would have been to send him away, for his own safety, like my mother’s parents did, and how hard it would have been for him to be completely on his own from that day forward, not knowing if he would ever see his parents again. It’s very hard, almost impossible, to imagine. And, yet, it happened with my mother. I also can’t help being impressed with the sophistication of the letters my mother wrote to her parents at such a young age; I know I didn’t write like that at 15! </p>
<p>Those letters (a couple of which form part of the article) were the basis for much of the information in the article; her parents saved them and brought them to the U.S. with them. I had them translated in the early 1990’s after my son was born, feeling that even though he would never know my mother in person (she died in 1975), at least someday he’d be able to know what she was like, at least a little bit, through her letters. He’s read all of them, and I’m very glad that he’s had at least that glimpse of his grandmother, and her life.</p>
<p>An excerpt from one of the letters was actually read as part of the voiceover narrative during the Kindertransport documentary Into the Arms of Strangers, which won the Academy Award for best documentary for 2000. (My mother’s name, and mine, are both in the credits.)</p>
<p>So here it is:</p>
<p>*Letters From My Mother<a href=“from%20%5BI%5DKinderlink%5B/I%5D,%20Vol.%209%20No.%202,%20Spring%201999”>/I</a></p>
<p>My mother, Marianne L----- (nee M-----), was born in Berlin in April 1923. She was an only child, and left Germany on December 1, 1938 as part of the very first Kindertransport. She was probably in that group because of my grandfather’s position as head of the migrant welfare and passport office for the Jewish congregation of Berlin. Undoubtedly, his job gave him the opportunity to almost certainly save his child’s life, when many other parents didn’t have that opportunity. But I would have done the same.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, my mother did not live long enough to be involved in any Kindertransport reunions. She died in June 1975 (when I was 20 and she was 52), from injuries suffered in a car accident when she was driving me home from college at the end of my senior year.</p>
<p>One of the many things I’ve always regretted about my mother’s early death is that I never had the chance to talk to her as an adult about her experiences in Nazi Germany and England. As a child, we had many conversations about her experiences, usually while we looked through the suitcase of old family photographs her mother had brought from Germany. But although I learned the basics, my memories of what she told me are less a coherent narrative than a series of disjointed stories: how much the Germans adored Hitler (whom she saw on several occasions); the time she was walking in the Black Forest with several younger children and a couple of Hitler Jugend tried to drown them by throwing them in a stream (she had to fish them out); the time when she was still in a regular school, before all the Jewish children were expelled, and a Nazi official who came to address the class pointed her out as a example of Aryan girlhood (much to his chagrin, he was later told my mother was a Jew); hating the food and absence of central heating in England; not being treated very well by the first family she stayed with after her arrival; being in London during the Blitz and getting so sick of running to the Underground when the sirens went off that she just stayed in bed and figured that if a bomb dropped on her head then so be it; her work experience as a “nurse,” mostly scrubbing floors in an insane asylum; sewing uniforms together (she was such an awful seamstress she hoped her lack of skill wouldn’t result in a uniform falling apart in the middle of a battle). </p>
<p>My mother did save a collection of letters she wrote to her parents during the five years they were apart, but I didn’t read them until long after she died. I started having the letters translated as a kind of tribute to my mother’s memory after my son was born in 1990, realizing that he would never know her. To do the translation, I hired a German graduate student through the Columbia University Tutoring and Translating Service. After learning about plans for a KTA archive in an article about Melissa Hacker’s My Knees Were Jumping [a documentary about the Kindertransport that came out a couple of years prior to Into the Arms of Children], I have sent copies of those letters and other family mementos to Melissa for inclusion in that archive.</p>
<p>It’s nice to know from My Knees Were Jumping that my mother wasn’t the only one who complained about the cold cottages where the kids were initially housed after their arrival in England. I also didn’t realize how fortunate my mother was, given her advanced age of 15-1/2, to be “picked” right away to be taken in by a family, and not to have to stay there indefinitely.</p>
<p>One of the things about the documentary that most surprised me was the newsreel of what was apparently the first Kindertransport — the one my mother was on. I watched it frame-by-frame several times to see if I could glimpse her, but the images are so fleeting that I couldn’t tell. There were one or two girls who looked a bit like her, but it’s probably just wishful thinking.</p>
<p>My mother lived in England for 5 years (with two different foster families and then on her own), until her “number” came up and she was able to join her parents in New York in September 1943. (Her parents, who had remained in Berlin, were fortunate to be able to escape in June 1941 and go to the U.S. via Lisbon, almost exactly at the time of the German invasion of Russia, and shortly before the Nazi government began to “deport” most of the Jews of Berlin to the East and escape became impossible. During the weeks before their departure, they stopped sleeping at home, because the Gestapo always came at night.)</p>
<p>Whatever complaints my mother had about England, she always considered herself extremely lucky to have escaped Berlin when she did. Despite comments in one of her letters about the English being anti-Semitic, I remember her being quite the Anglophile — she used to speak fondly of Churchill and sing the song that the English “never never shall be slaves.”</p>
<p>In contrast, my mother felt intense anger towards the Germans, even after more than 30 years. She had lost two grandparents, seven uncles and aunts, two first cousins, and innumerable more distant relatives. Occasionally she’d make remarks like “Germany is beautiful — except for the people.” The one time she returned was in 1972, when we were in Switzerland and took a side trip to Baden to visit Sulzburg, the village near Freiburg where her own mother had grown up, where she used to spend summers with her grandparents, and where the family had lived since before 1720. We went with her uncles Max and Bernard, and Bernard’s wife Lily (she was seeing Bernard and Lily for the first and last time since her childhood). I remember how difficult it was for her to be in Germany again: to have to speak German, to visit the house in Sulzburg where her family had lived, to see the synagogue the Nazis had used as a stable (it has since been restored), to have to listen to an old woman who leaned out a window when she saw us and talked about how yes, she remembered the village’s Jews very well (or so it was translated to me). </p>
<p>Being in Germany wasn’t easy for me either. I remember giving dark looks to everybody over 50, thinking about what they probably used to be. </p>
<p>Until I learned of My Knees Were Jumping, the thought never occurred to me that anyone else of my generation could possibly have an interest in such matters. Although I do not think my mother was a “Holocaust survivor” in the commonly-understood meaning of that term, the events of 1933-1945 were probably the central factor of her existence, and, in some way, of mine, since I was very close to her.</p>
<p>The following are translations of two of Marianne’s letters. Her first, written to her parents upon her arrival in England, was dated December 2, 1938.</p>
<p>Friday, 2:30 pm</p>
<p>Dear Parents:</p>
<p>I assume you must have received my postcard from Hanover by now. But let me start my description of the last two days from the beginning. The trip on Thursday was very nice. The kids in our train compartment were all first-rate kids, as are, by the way, 95% of all the kids. Dear Mutti, you gave me much too much to eat; like almost all the other kids, I was able to finish only about half the food I had with me. The border check at Bentheim functioned precisely and without problem for all of us. At about six pm we had a splendid reception in Holland. Huge train cars with warm, excellent food (a thick soup of beans, meat, and potatoes) with cold drinks and sweets were positioned right at the border. We were most cordially received by the committees. There were delegations at all train stations (Utrecht, Rotterdam), to force fruit and sweets on us, although we were already stuffed, and to wish us good luck. The people from the Dutch and English press kept pestering us during the entire passage through Holland, and even after that, with their constant flash photographs. In Holland we already had to set our watches back forty minutes. At Hoek van Holland, the Dutch checked our names, and then (at about 9 pm) we went on board. The ship was very nice (about 2000 tons). If we had wanted it, they would have served us another good dinner. We had two-bed cabins (second class). We left at 11. </p>
<p>And this is the start of our barfing tragedy. The ship sailed for about 7 hours in very agitated water. During this time, only about three of the 200 kids did not get seasick. I wasn’t one of those three. From 11 pm to 6 am, I didn’t get a minute’s sleep, because about every eight minutes I threw up. Throughout the ship you heard nothing except the crying, groaning, and gargling of people throwing up. We threw up in sickness bags that were provided. I personally used up 6 bags, plus the floor, the chamber pot, the bed sheet, and I staggered to the toilet three times, where I alternately threw up and had diarrhea. In the morning we were all examined by a British doctor and were given number tags. I have number 6013. — By the way, the blue blanket is priceless; without it I would have frozen to death on the ship, and here in the camp, too, it’s unbelievably cold. — There were English people and press people already on the ship. I had a conversation with a very upper-class British Jew, who stared at us inquisitively and didn’t speak a word of German. He said he wanted to take a German child into his home to keep his 16-year-old daughter company. He said he’d love to take me. (He was impressed with my excellent English.) He wanted to know my age, education, plans for the future, my father’s occupation, and provenance. He gave me his London address and told me to write a letter to his daughter, because he wanted to see if my written English was also good. I’ll discuss the matter with the director of the camp today, and then, once I’m sure the man is honest, I’ll write immediately. I asked this gentleman, among other things, whether he thought my plans for the Matric exam were realistic. He thought finishing my Matric by July 1939 would be feasible, but he didn’t think I could become a teacher. Well, all right. </p>
<p>They had sent our suitcases to Harwich; we didn’t even have to touch them. We were driven to the camp in a bus. First of all, my address here:</p>
<pre><code>Marianne M----- (room 16B)
Holiday Camp
Dover Court Bay, Essex
England
</code></pre>
<p>It’s wonderful here!!! We arrived at nine o’clock, and we were immediately led to the living quarters (enormous, gigantic hall; kitchens; lounges). They had set long, colorful tables with flowers. There was porridge, bread, butter, jam, and a hot milk drink. After that we were assigned rooms, and then we were allowed to do whatever we wanted until 1 p.m. The sleeping quarters are delightful one-story rows of cottages made of corrugated sheet metal and cardboard (they are really meant to be summer cottages). The bedrooms are on the ground level; you walk right into them as you enter. All the older people, including me, have little rooms of their own. [A drawing of the floor plan follows.]</p>
<p>Everything is very cheerful and colorful: there are red curtains on the closet and bedside table; green door, green linoleum floor, green broom; a washbasin with running water, electric light, a mirror, a pretty folding chair, an armchair with green trimmings, and a bedside rug. The bed is as wide as a double bed, with only two thin blankets on it. No heat. I’m terribly cold. Food is good. I must close — post is leaving.</p>
<p>Marianne</p>
<p>[PS:] They are paying for my postage.</p>
<p>[More to come]</p>