Kindertransport Saved Children

The Kindertransport (German for children transport) is a rescue mission that took place during the nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingiom took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig. The children were placed in British foster homes, hostels, schools and farms. Often they were the only members of their families who survived the Holocaust.

World Jewish Relief (then called The Central British Fund for German Jewry) was established in 1933 as a direct result and to support in whatever way possible the needs of Jews both in Germany and Austria. Records for many of the children who arrived in the UK through the Kindertransports are maintained by World Jewish Relief.

Organization and Management

Within a very short time, the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, later known as the Refugee Children's Movement (RCM), sent representatives to Germany and Austria to establish the systems for choosing, organising, and transporting the children.  World Jewish Relief (formerly the Central British Fund for Germany Jewry) was  involved in the rescue operation.

On 25 November, British citizens heard an appeal for foster homes on the BBC Home Service radio station from Viscount Samuel. Soon there were 500 offers, and RCM volunteers started visiting possible foster homes and reporting on conditions. They did not insist that prospective homes for Jewish children should be Jewish homes. Nor did they probe too carefully into the motives and character of the families: it was sufficient for the houses to look clean and the families to seem respectable.

In Germany, a network of organisers was established, and these volunteers worked around the clock to make priority lists of those most in peril: teenagers who were in concentration camps or in danger of arrest, Polish children or teenagers threatened with deportation, children in Jewish orphanages, children whose parents were too impoverished to keep them, or children with a parent in a concentration camp. Once the children were identified or grouped by list, their guardians or parents were issued a travel date and departure details. They could only take a small sealed suitcase with no valuables and only ten marks or less in money. Some children had nothing but a manilla tag with a number on the front and their name on the back, others were issued with a numbered identity card with photo: "This document of identity is issued with the approval of His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom to young persons to be admitted to the United Kingdom for educational purposes under the care of the Inter-Aid Committee for children. / This Document requires no Visa. / Personal Particulars. / (Name; Sex; Date of Birth; Place; Full Names and Address of Parents)"

The first party of nearly 200 children arrived in Harwich on 2 December, three weeks after Kristallnacht. In the following nine months, 10,000 unaccompanied, mainly Jewish, children traveled to England. Initially the children came mainly from Germany and Austria (by then part of the Greater Reich). In March 1939, after the German army invaded Czechoslovakia, transports from Prague were hastily organised. In February and August 1939 trains from Poland were arranged. Transports out of Nazi-occupied Europe continued until the declaration of war on 1 September 1939. One very last transport left on the passenger-freighter Bodegraven on 14 May 1940, from IJmuiden, Netherlands, organized by Mrs Wijsmuller, who could have joined the children but chose to remain behind.

During the war years many Kinder served in the British armed forces, the nursing professions, in food production and in war related industries. Several thousand remained in Britain when the war ended, and as adults made considerable contributions to Britain's services, industries, commerce, education, science and the arts, for the defence, welfare and development of their country of adoption. No fewer than four Kinder were Nobel Prize winners; two of whom had gone from Britain to America.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindertransport