Kindertransport Memory Quilt

"The Kindertransport Quilts are a form of folk art which allows multiple artists, each with their own artistic expression, to produce a work with a unifying theme. Each square expresses its creator's view of the Kindertransport experience: pictures of the past, fears and nightmares, memorials to lost family. They express traumatic childhood experiences, as recalled with the perspective of maturity ... We are grateful to Kirsten Grosz for having produced these quilts, touching and artistic reminders of the Holocaust."--p. 7

The first transnational study of the memory of the Kindertransport and the first to explore how it is represented in museums, memorials, and commemorations.The Kindertransport, the rescue of ca. 10,000 Jewish children from the Nazi sphere of control and influence before the Second World War, has often been framed as a "British story." This book recognizes that even though most of the "Kinder" were initially brought to the UK and many stayed, it was more than that. It therefore compares British memory of the Kindertransport to that of other host nations (the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). It is the first book to ask how the Kindertransport is remembered both in the countries of origin, particularly Germany, and in the host nations, as well as the first to analyze how it is represented in museums, memorials, and commemorations. Seeing memory of the Kindertransport in the host nations and in Germany as significantly different, the study argues that the different national memory discourses around the Nazi persecution of Jews shape the respective countries' images of the Kindertransport, and that those images in turn shape the discourses - especially in Britain. Yet while national memory frameworks remain crucial to how the Kindertransport is remembered, the book also documents the increasing significance of transnational memory trends that link the host nations with each other and with the countries fzi persecution of Jews shape the respective countries' images of the Kindertransport, and that those images in turn shape the discourses - especially in Britain. Yet while national memory frameworks remain crucial to how the Kindertransport is remembered, the book also documents the increasing significance of transnational memory trends that link the host nations with each other and with the countries from which the children originated.zi persecution of Jews shape the respective countries' images of the Kindertransport, and that those images in turn shape the discourses - especially in Britain. Yet while national memory frameworks remain crucial to how the Kindertransport is remembered, the book also documents the increasing significance of transnational memory trends that link the host nations with each other and with the countries from which the children originated.

Between December 1938 and September 1939, nearly ten thousand refugee children from Central Europe, mostly Jewish, found refuge from Nazism in Great Britain. This was known as the Kindertransport movement, in which the children entered as "transmigrants," planning to return to Europe once the Nazis lost power. In practice, most of the kinder, as they called themselves, remained in Britain, eventually becoming citizens. This book charts the history of the Kindertransport movement, focusing on the dynamics that developed between the British government, the child refugee organizations, the Jewish community in Great Britain, the general British population, and the refugee children. After an analysis of the decision to allow the children entry and the machinery of rescue established to facilitate its implementation, the book follows the young refugees from their European homes to their resettlement in Britain either with foster families or in refugee hostels. Evacuated from the cities with hundreds of thousands of British children, they soon found themselves in the countryside with new foster families, who often had no idea how to deal with refugee children barely able to understand English. Members of particular refugee children's groups receive special attention: participants in the Youth Aliyah movement, who immigrated to the United States during the war to reunite with their families; those designated as "Friendly Enemy Aliens" at the war's outbreak, who were later deported to Australia and Canada; and Orthodox refugee children, who faced unique challenges attempting to maintain religious observance when placed with Gentile foster families who at times even attempted to convert them. Based on archival sources and follow-up interviews with refugee children both forty and seventy years after their flight to Britain, this book gives a unique perspective into the political, bureaucratic, and human aspects of the Kindertransport scheme prior to and during World War II.

The present volume is the result of an interdisciplinary oral history research project, which was carried out at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex. It focuses on the Kindertransport, the British rescue operation saving 10,000 predominantly German-Jewish children from Nazi Germany, and is based on in-depth case studies of five child survivors of the Holocaust. Looking at human development over the life cycle as mediated by intervening trauma was at the heart of the project, which examined the making and breaking of a child's close ties to significant others, processes of identity formation under acculturative stress as well as the creation and recall of traumatic memories. The study is thus one of the few in the field of attachment research which sheds light on the lifelong influence which early attachment has on coping with massive cumulative trauma. The former child refugees' narratives are enriched by letters, diaries, or articles written by them and their (host) families as well as by interviews conducted with family members and friends. Consequently, we can look at individual lives and collective destinies from more than one perspective as we are provided with rich, multi-layered accounts of people's whole-life trajectories. While each Holocaust survivor's developmental story is unique, it is, however, linked to the others' by the common experience of negotiating an identity between two countries, cultures, and religions against the background of unparalleled political upheavals, and as such also sheds light on, and offers ways out of, the traumata suffered in present-day contexts of enforced migration and displacement.

This important book tells the story of how ten thousand Jewish children were rescued out of Nazi Europe just before the outbreak of World War 2. They were saved by the Kindertransport — a rescue mission that transported the children (or Kinder) from Nazi-ruled countries to safety in Britain. The book includes real-life accounts of the children and is illustrated with archival photographs, paintings of pre-war Nazi Germany by artist, Hans Jackson, and original art by the Kinder commemorating their rescue.

Nora Huppert was flown out of Prague on the first Kindertransport, on the eve of World War II. This rescue mission, initiated and organised by Nicholas Winton, saved the lives of hundreds of children. In Home without a homeland, Huppert tells her own fascinating story and those of other survivors of those terrible times. Her father, an anti-Fascist journalist from a cultured German Jewish family, foresaw the rise of the Nazis and escaped to the safe haven of England, where both he and Huppert spent the War. Her mother, brother and other family members were not so fortunate. Loss, rescue, the web of connections and the idea of home for someone who has experienced five migrations, are the book's compelling themes. If Nora Huppert lost the country and culture of her birth, her message is that she could make new homes in places beyond Europe and Israel, in benign Australia which is friendly to Jewish people and other migrants. Home for her is a quality of being, about blending in and making a contribution wherever she finds herself living. Read this book to relive the experience of one child refugee and to gain an insider's view of Europe before the War and Britain and Australia afterwards.

This important book tells the story of how ten thousand Jewish children were rescued out of Nazi Europe just before the outbreak of World War 2. They were saved by the Kindertransport — a rescue mission that transported the children (or Kinder) from Nazi-ruled countries to safety in Britain. The book includes real-life accounts of the children and is illustrated with archival photographs, paintings of pre-war Nazi Germany by artist, Hans Jackson, and original art by the Kinder commemorating their rescue.