Kindertransport

by

Diane Samuels

15th, 17th - 22nd Apr 2006

In November 1938, after nights of violence against Jews across Germany and Austria, the British government introduced a program called the Kindertransport (children’s transport), which gave Jewish children—and only children—safe passage to the UK. Spared the horrors of the death camps, the Jewish “Kinder” were uprooted, separated from their parents and transported to a different culture where they faced, not the unmitigated horror of the death camps, but a very human mixture of kindness, indifference, occasional exploitation, and the selflessness of ordinary people faced with needy children.