The candles were lit for the Jewish festival of Hanukkah as 10-year-old Ruth Heber and her seven-year-old brother Harry left their family’s rented rooms in Vienna for the last time, almost 75 years ago. “Our father blessed us and we went to the station,” she remembers. “It was in the evening so the public would not know what was going on. My parents were not allowed on the platform. They said: 'Be a good girl and we will be writing and thinking of you and we will be coming very soon.’”
Ruth, whose small suitcase contained only clothes and her beloved drawing pencils, kissed her parents and grandmother, and went with her brother and other children to board a train whose doors were sealed shut before it departed for the Hook of Holland.
Leaving Vienna’s Westbahnhof on December 18 1938, with soldiers patrolling the corridors, it was only the second train of what was to become known as the Kindertransport – the evacuation of nearly 10,000 mainly Jewish children to Britain from Nazi-occupied Europe. In the months that followed, dozens more trains brought unaccompanied children, aged from three to 17, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland until the eve of war in September 1939.
Seventy-five years on, this remarkable episode in Britain’s wartime history is being marked with what organisers say will be the “last big commemoration”. The “Kinder” (German for children) who journeyed here are mostly in their eighties, often frail, and their numbers are, inevitably, now much diminished. But next month, this special anniversary will nevertheless bring over 400 together for a reunion, featuring tea in the House of Lords with the Labour peer Alf Dubs (himself a Kinder refugee from Prague) and a reception at St James’s Palace hosted by Prince Charles.
“There is always a bitter-sweet element to these events,” says Michael Newman, director of the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), the body organising the commemoration and which represents Kindertransport in Britain. “It comes from a tragic history but it is an opportunity to be together.”
The rescue operation finds its origins in one of the most brutal waymarks on the road to war. Kristallnacht (“The night of broken glass”), on the night of November 9 1938, saw synagogues and Jewish businesses across Germany and parts of Austria systematically destroyed in a pogrom claiming the lives of at least 90 Jews, and marked a seismic shift in the Jewish community’s perception of its future.
Amid pressure from British Jewish groups and, importantly, from the Quakers, a Westminster debate on November 21 1938 led, amid some opposition, to a Bill allowing up to 10,000 refugee children to be temporarily admitted to Britain. A group of agencies, operating under the umbrella of the Movement for Care of Children from Germany, promised to find homes for the children, together with sponsorship so that there would be no burden on the public purse.
With permission granted, the rescue agencies acted fast. The call went out for host families, and links were made with contacts in Germany and Austria to arrange trains and draw up lists of children. In less than a fortnight, on December 1, the first Kindertransport left Vienna, each child carrying their small suitcase and identified by a manila label.
For Ruth Heber (now Jacobs), whose family had been forced to abandon their small draper’s shop in Innsbruck and move to Vienna after Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, the journey was yet another event that left her “completely and utterly bewildered”, she told me. “Our parents had put on a brave face and done their best to shield us. We just didn’t know what had happened to our lives.”
Crossing the border from Germany into Holland – the German government had refused to let the trains use the country’s own ports – Mrs Jacobs recalls “a jubilant hurrah” from the older children, aware that they had left persecution behind. Dutch women on the platform greeted the youngsters with smiles and passed milk and chocolate through the windows.
Erika Judge, born Erika Leiter in Vienna in 1925, also recalls the warmth of the Dutch welcome after her refugee train left Austria on May 14 1939. The 13-year-old had already witnessed the Anschluss – she and her schoolmates had been lined up to cheer the German army into Vienna, and had then slept on the floor of a rented room in the city’s Jewish ghetto after a Nazi soldier threw her and her parents out of their comfortable apartment near the Stadtpark. With her father, a maker of fine furniture, in a forced labour camp, her mother put her on lists of child refugees to go to Palestine or Britain, telling her she would take whichever came up first.
“It happened to be England,” recalls Mrs Judge, a petite, fine-boned woman sitting in her north London home amid shelves of books and photographs of her husband, daughter and grandson. “I had to queue up – first for a declaration that I didn’t owe any tax, then 10 hours for a medical. I was puny – I weighed only five-and-a-half stone when I got to England – and the doctor looked down at me and said: 'We won’t get you, but the English climate will.’”
German passport in hand – the document had added the name Sara to her own, as it did for all Jewish girls – she took the train, her teacher mother among parents now forced by the Gestapo to smile and wave on the platform as they bade farewell to their children, many for the last time. “Nobody cried... nobody,” she says.
At Aachen, soldiers searched their cases, but parents had learnt from stories of others who had unsuccessfully tried to smuggle out jewellery or other valuables. Erika’s case contained only clothes intended to do for two years, her schoolbooks, and a note from her mother in English, asking that her bright daughter be allowed to study at a Gymnasium – a grammar school. A small sewing box had been lost already, knocked out of the window by a friend pointing enthusiastically at the Lorelei rock on the Rhine.
Registered in Harwich with other refugee children, Erika travelled to Liverpool Street station in London, and the next day journeyed on alone to Camborne in Cornwall, where she spent much of the war moving between host families.
The girl from Vienna was shocked at the outdoor lavatory and gas lamps in the first home (where she shared a bed and bathwater with the family and was fed fish and chips every day); was deeply unhappy staying after that with a Wesleyan mother and step-daughter who occasionally slapped her; but adored the elderly lady who hosted her while she trained in legal book-keeping.
Children arriving at Harwich without a pre-arranged billet were sent to holding accommodation, including at nearby Dovercourt holiday camp. In the snowy 1938-9 winter, the camp was freezing, but there was heating in a central hall where the children ate, amusements were laid on, and there were efforts at schooling.
“None of us spoke a word of English,” recalls Mrs Jacobs, 85, widowed almost four years ago after 60 years of happy marriage. “There was a blackboard in the hall with the words of the song Underneath the Spreading Chestnut Tree to help us learn.”
While the children waited for host families to arrive and select them, local people funded a trip for the refugees to the cinema. “On each seat there was a bar of chocolate,” she adds. “To this day I think that was so wonderful.”
After a week, Ruth and her brother (the two refused to be separated) were taken by a well-off family in East Sussex, and were eventually reunited with their parents, who – like those of Erika Judge – managed to secure visas to travel to Britain as paid domestic staff. But the two Heber children nevertheless continued to move around host families and boarding schools, with Ruth’s excellent English eventually winning her a scholarship to a girls’ grammar school in Stroud.
Her host family there, the Whites, were poor but loving, and she is still in touch with them. “They opened their home to me, they treasured me and built up my confidence. It was a perfect life with an English family.”
Others arriving at Dovercourt were not so quickly chosen: 16-year-old Rolf Penzias, leaving with his younger brother Walter on the first transport from Munich on January 4 1939, remembers staying there at least six weeks because few wanted older boys. The young apprentice motor mechanic, whose training had been interrupted by the Nazis, moved first to a vicarage in the village of Frankby, on the Wirral, but after pleas from a local Jewish family that his religious education was being neglected, he moved to a boarding school for refugees in Liverpool.
There, and later in London, he worked and studied throughout the war, eventually qualifying as a mechanical engineer – his lifetime profession. “We had to do it the hard way, but the opportunities were there if you wanted them,” says Mr Penzias, now 90. “Most of us did quite well, some got to university. Very few fell by the wayside.”
The Kinder, indeed, have made a significant impact on their adopted country and beyond: four are Nobel prize-winners, and others have contributed to industry, education, the arts and politics. Lord Dubs, a former Labour MP, left Prague at six on transport organised by the English stockbroker Nicholas Winton (who has just celebrated his 104th birthday).
The Kindertransport, says Michael Newman of the AJR, was an exceptional event. “It was uniquely British. It was a response that other countries did not make... It is in the public discourse of what Britain did and part of our Holocaust history.”
This is not a simple story: it includes, Newman adds, the uncomfortable view that the Jewish community in Britain “did not do enough” to support the incoming refugees, while the Quaker role has been too long unsung. Moreover, he says, there has been tension around the perception that, compared with Nazi camp survivors, Kinder refugees did not suffer.
The stories of the Kinder, however, are hardly the stuff of fairy tale: while Erika, Ruth and Rolf all saw their parents again, the majority of the young refugees did not. Mrs Judge lost family members at Auschwitz, the grandmother Mrs Jacobs left behind in Vienna died in the same camp, and Rolf returned to Munich after the war to find that few of his schoolfriends had survived. While they did not understand the dangers their parents had hidden from them, they knew the reality of separation from their family and all that was familiar to them.
All the Kinder express nothing but thankfulness for Britain’s contribution. Holding her British identity card, with its picture of her 10-year-old self in a black velvet dress with a white satin collar, Ruth Jacobs says: “I have the greatest admiration for England and the English people. They were the only country that took us in.” Erika Judge is equally clear: “To my dying day, I will be grateful to this country.”
For information about events to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Kindertransport, visit ajr.org.uk
