November marks the 85th anniversary of the Kindertransport project, in which 10,000 Jewish children between the ages of eight and 16 were sent by their parents to Britain in the 10 months after the Nazi pogrom known as Kristallnacht. This article is dedicated to the kinder (children), their families, and all who made this truly humanitarian project possible.
I was born in London, a few years after the Holocaust ended. My parents were among the 10,000 Jewish children evacuated to Britain from Germany, Austria, Holland, and Czechoslovakia between the end of 1938 and August 31, 1939. My mother was 11 and my father 16.
The leaders of the Kindertransport were tireless in creating the frameworks and overcoming the obstacles that saved many lives. While the British, and almost everyone else, did not want thousands of Jewish adult refugees, they agreed to accept the children – perhaps to counter pressure to open the gates to the Land of Israel (mandated Palestine). In contrast, the US Congress rejected a similar plan, and Canada’s policy was summarized in the book by Irving Abella and Harold Troper titled None is Too Many.
After their arrival, most of the Jewish children, including my mother, were scattered among sponsoring families (some Jewish, most not) and youth hostels. They grew up in an unfamiliar country where even basic communication was difficult, and some of the children were exploited by unscrupulous adults. As the German threat increased, they were evacuated to the countryside with their British contemporaries. Initially, they received periodic letters from their families, but the letters stopped and news reports were infrequent and devastating.
The Jewish leadership, government officials, and volunteers worked hard to look after the welfare of the kinder. As detailed by Judy Baumel-Schwartz in Never Look Back: The Jewish Refugee Children in Great Britain (2012), five organizations were involved.
In addition to the thousands of individual experiences, some of the kinder were in frameworks organized by the Zionist Youth Aliyah, Habonim, and Bnei Akiva-UK movements.
Two recent books tell the stories
The most challenging of these efforts is the subject of two recent books that tell the stories of some 200 child refugees, including my father, who were sent to a dilapidated castle on the north coast of Wales in September 1939.
The Castle that Saved Lives (Jerusalem, 2020), published in English and Hebrew, was lovingly assembled by Dr. Hanna Seligmann-Prokocimer in tribute to her father, Erwin Seligmann, who at the age of 28 was placed in charge of the noar (young men and women) at Gwrych Castle. The core of this publication is the hand-illustrated yearbook prepared for Rosh Hashanah 1940, a year after they arrived, by the noar, their slightly older counselors (madrichim), and volunteers (chaverim) at Gwrych Castle.
The original text had sections in Hebrew, German, and English – translated by Seligmann-Prokocimer. She added photographs and extensive explanatory notes, making the noar and their experiences come alive. (Copies of her publication were provided to Yad Vashem, university libraries, and to the families. The book is not available for purchase.)
IN THEIR own words, these pages convey the enormity of the challenges, as well as their courage and determination in restoring their lives. The first group, including my father, was sent to prepare the castle for the others. They found a massive stone structure on grounds covering 200 acres, with a crumbling interior abandoned for many years, and no running water, sanitation, functioning kitchen, or even beds and other essential furnishings.
Self-sufficiency was central. Gwrych was a hachshara (preparation) project of the Bachad (Alliance of Religious Pioneers) movement; an aspirational kibbutz to prepare Jewish youth for aliyah. In his introduction, written in Hebrew, editor Erich Roper wrote “The work ahead of us is great; very, very great. We have to continue and expand the building of a Jewish Eretz Yisrael …”
In the yearbook, sections titled “Arrival,” “The First Weeks,” and “Health and Hygiene” (by the resident volunteer doctor Julian Handler) detail the obstacles and the work to overcome them, facilitated by generous donations. The food supply gradually increased, although the daily breakfast fare was limited to bread, butter, and onions.
Religious backgrounds provided the social glue for the Gwrych hachshara. On Shabbat and holidays, they tried to rise above the difficulties as movingly described in the different essays. On Purim, they made themselves costumes, and a month later they sat together for the Passover Seder – a makeshift replacement family of over 200 youngsters far from home.
In reading the yearbook entries and the accompanying explanations, we can see the Jewish teenagers gradually gaining their own voice and moving from victims to active participants in shaping their lives, despite the obstacles. For example, the yearbook describes their rebellion against the socialist ideology that directed the occasional monetary gift from relatives, and payments for hard work on nearby farms, into a communal kupa (fund).
The noar wanted to be able to buy an occasional chocolate in town or to purchase a bus or train ticket to explore beyond their immediate surroundings. The kupa controversy was the center of a long battle, in which the youths eventually prevailed.
THIS RICH book is complemented by Andrew Hesketh’s Escape to Gwrych Castle: a Jewish Refugee Story (Blackwell, 2023), which expands the focus, including the background leading to the Kindertransport project, the experiences of the children in Hitler’s Germany, and sudden separation from their parents and families. In agonizing detail, he recounts the fear accompanying the transit of the final group, whose train was stopped by the Nazis at the Dutch border.
After a tense and sleepless night, they were rescued when a Dutch refugee group hired two buses to take them across the border into Holland, and from there by train and boat to safety. Their initial relief was interrupted when they arrived at the rundown castle (built by an eccentric owner and later abandoned) that was to be their new home.
Based on extensive published sources, interviews, and materials from the participants, including the 1940 yearbook, Hesketh chronicles the lives of the Gwrych community. Going back and forth between the testimonies, the reader develops a familiarity with the different personalities and responses of the teenage chevra to the immense complexities of their situation.
We read about the joys, as well as the difficulties, ranging from the agricultural work to the educational programs (in English and Hebrew) run by Rabbi Shmuel Sperber and his wife, Miriam (described as the house mother and fondly remembered by many of the noar), that were in competition with the nearby beach and other attractions.
Some of the best examples of the complexities come from encounters between the Jewish refugee children and the locals from the nearby town of Abergele. Shortly after their arrival, 15-year-old Henry Glanz and unnamed friends were looking at the store windows when they saw a policeman and immediately scattered. Policeman Sam Williams chased after one of them, and Henry ran back to help his friend. Williams asked why they ran away, and Glanz (who spoke some English) replied:
“In Germany, if a police officer approaches Jewish children, that means trouble.” The policeman assured the children that Wales “is not Germany. Here, a policeman is your friend.” A few days later, Williams and two other policemen paid a courtesy visit to the castle, bringing a cake baked by his wife. They were invited in for tea, although the book does not tell us what happened to the non-kosher cake.
In parallel, the war and its hardships were never far away. The warm bonds of mutual support and overarching collective responsibility are intermingled with painful reading recalling the pre-war Shabbat meals with the families which had been torn apart, and the Nazi thugs marching below their balconies (p. 72).
The sadness in descriptions of Erwin Seligmann reading to the noar from the British press and adding his own commentary is palpable: “Destruction, executions, imprisonment, coercive measures, etc. A bitter fate for the Jewish people… no one is able to break the prevailing, almost solemn mood” (p. 101).
They understood that they would not expect to see their parents for a long time, and for many, probably never. My father’s mother, Chana, and his sisters Miriam, Penina (Pepi), Sophie, and Gerda perished; he and two of his brothers, Emil and David, were protected by the Kindertransport, while his father and fourth brother, Willy, also escaped and eventually arrived in Israel. Shortly after my mother was sent to Britain, her parents and brother were able to reach the relative safety of the Shanghai ghetto.
ALTHOUGH THE noar had escaped from Germany, the war followed them in the form of occasional attacks by Nazi bombers and the automatic classification of anyone with German or Austrian passports as enemy aliens, including the Jewish refugees from Hitler. (Many German-born “eastern Jews,” whose parents came from Poland or Russia years earlier, were not given German citizenship, including my father, who was classified as stateless and exempt.)
In October 1939, tribunals were created throughout Britain. From the Gwrych group, “aliens” over 16 were brought before the local version, which cleared them of suspicion. However, in June 1940, after the fall of France to the Nazis, and preparing for the expected invasion of Britain, fear of spies among enemy aliens increased. A number of the older boys and chaverim were deported to Canada and Australia on the infamous Dunera transport ship.
The departure of several friends and hachshara members, the realization that the terrible war was unlikely to end in the foreseeable future, and the increasing difficulty in obtaining the necessary resources combined to bring a gradual end to the Gwrych Castle experience.
By the end of the first year, most kinder had gained a reasonable command of the English language (and some words in Welsh), and many anglicized their names. For example, Wolfgang Billig became Walter Bingham, familiar to many Anglo-Israelis as an accomplished journalist still active and approaching his 100th birthday.
As the prospects of getting to Eretz Yisrael faded, many of the teenagers found other opportunities to create lives for themselves. My father went to Manchester to take care of his younger brother Emil, who had also come through the Kindertransport. A few years ago, during a trip to Manchester, at the Jewish boarding house where they lived, I had tea with the proprietor and his mother, who remembered Emil’s bar mitzvah. After the war ended, my father moved to London, where he met my mother. In 1948, they were married – one of many Kindertransport families.
The experiment ends
At the end of 1940, the leaders acknowledged that the obstacles to maintaining Gwrych’s hachshara had become insurmountable and would be wound down. Alternative frameworks were arranged for those who remained, and by the end of April 1941 the experiment had ended. Some eventually made it to Israel, including the founders of Kibbutz Lavi. Many stayed in touch with each other.
For the noar and everyone else involved, the brief time at Gwrych was an essential part of their lives. Amid the inhuman brutality of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, the story of the Kindertransport and the dedication of the adults who invested their lives in overcoming the obstacles and ensuring its success will continue to be told from generation to generation.
The writer is professor emeritus of politics at Bar-Ilan University and president of the NGO Monitor.