Book Review: Commemorating the ‘kinder’

The latest addition to the canon of stories of Kindertransport children, ‘Memories That Won’t Go Away’ includes illustrations and artwork by a Holocaust survivor.

By BARRY DAVIS
Michele Gold (photo credit: WESTSIDE STUDIO)
Michele Gold
(photo credit: WESTSIDE STUDIO)
Over the last decade or so, an increasing number of books about the Kindertransport have come out.
The Kindertransport was a rescue operation that took place between December 1938 and the beginning of World War II, and facilitated the escape – to the United Kingdom – of around 10,000 Jewish children, aged up to 18, from Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Most of the books are compilations of the stories of various kinder (“children” in German), and include I Came Alone by Bertha Leverton, now 88 and living in Israel; her late sister Inge Sadan subsequently produced a similar tome, based on the accounts of kinder living here.
The latest addition to the burgeoning Kindertransport library is Memories That Won’t Go Away: A Tribute to the Children of the Kindertransport by Michele M. Gold, with illustrations and artwork by Gabriella Y. Karin, herself a Holocaust survivor.
The book was published by Kibbutz Glil Yam-based Kotarim International Publishing, and officially released at a moving gathering at the gallery of Danzig-born sculptor Frank Meisler. Meisler’s sculpture group, Children of the Kindertransport, is located at Liverpool Street Station in London, which was the kinder’s first stop in the UK before they were collected by their foster families. The work was unveiled by Prince Charles in 2006.
Gold’s book is subtitled “A Tribute to the Children of the Kindertransport,” but it is primarily a salute to someone much closer to home. “It is, first and foremost, a tribute to my mother,” says Gold, referring to Rita Berwald, who got out of Nazi- controlled Germany in March 1939 on a Kindertransport. “My mother was born in Leipzig in 1924 and spoke very little about her experience.”
In fact, the first story in the book is Berwald’s, as related in 1992, and is the longest in the book. The moving sevenand- a-half page account includes a copy of Berwald’s Oath of Allegiance to King George VI from 1947, and quite a few family photographs.
Berwald died in October 2008 and the seeds for the book were sown soon after that. “I am an educator at the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles,” explains the London-born Gold. “I was in the museum one morning when this woman came up to me – she is a Holocaust survivor and an artist – and said to me that she had this great idea of creating ceramic trains, as a tribute to the children of the Kindertransport.
I said it was a lovely idea and why don’t we cut out windows and I will get photos of kinder, taken when they were young, before they left for Britain or soon after they arrived at Liverpool Street Station.”
The die for the exhibition was well and truly cast and, little did Gold realize at the time, the idea for the book was beginning to germinate, too. As the exhibition concept took shape Gold set about contacting as many kinder, Holocaust researchers and historians, and Holocaust-related institutions as possible, all over the world, to ask for photographs.
Gold got everything she asked for, and then some. “I was getting inundated with envelopes containing letters and photographs,” she recalls. “I ended up with about 600 photos. About 100 of them came from the US Holocaust [Memorial] Museum in Washington, and the rest came from individual people, including Marian’s mother.”
The latter development brought Gold together with Marian Lebor, who it transpired had much in common with Gold. Lebor’s mother, Hilde Steinhart (née Auerhahn), was also born in Leipzig, in 1921, and also escaped to Britain on a Kindertransport.
Amazingly, the two mothers lived in the same district of London, Hendon, but never met. Steinhart never spoke about what took place in Germany, or her transition to England, and died suddenly in 1996 before Lebor, or Lebor’s children, could try to coax her into sharing something of her Kindertransport experience with them.
Gold and Lebor eventually made contact, and discovered their maternal common ground. When the idea for the book started taking shape, Lebor quickly got on board and ended up editing it.
The exhibition opened in February 2014 and, says Gold, was “hugely successful.”
“School kids and other groups came to see it, and they enjoyed its colorfulness and the hopefulness, and seeing the lovely faces of the children, as it were, looking out of the train windows.”
Some of the accounts in the book are lengthy, with very emotive content, while other kinder are noted only by a line or two, with only skeletal information available.
There is special mention of Sir Nicholas Winton, the now 105-year-old British man who was personally responsible for saving 669 children from Czechoslovakia.
His incredible efforts were recognized by Queen Elizabeth II when he was awarded an MBE (Member of the British Empire) in 1983, which was followed by a knighthood in 2002.
The generation of kinder is, by nature, dwindling – which makes books like Memories That Won’t Go Away all the more important.
Gold’s offering also includes forewords by Michael Berenbaum, professor of Jewish studies at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, and by Czech filmmaker Matej Minác. Minác made three films about Sir Nicholas, the 1999 drama All My Loved Ones; the 2002 documentary The Power of Good: Nicholas Winton, which won an Emmy Award; and the 2011 documentary Nicky’s Family (Nickyho rodina).
The book also contains some invaluable educational information about the events of Kristallnacht, which soon spawned the Kindertransport rescue operation, and a glossary which spells out various primary topics such as the meaning of terms such as “Holocaust survivor” and “Kindertransport.”
More crucially, perhaps, Gold makes it clear that the fact that those thousands of kinder survived does not mean that all the kinder lived happily ever after. Some went to loving foster families, a small minority were reunited with their parents after the war – in fact, a handful of parents miraculously made it to Britain while the war was still in progress – but some were taken in by families who used them as little more than unpaid servants.
Some suffered even worse conditions.
Regardless of where they ended up in the UK, and some subsequently continued to the US, Israel and elsewhere, all the kinder suffered the trauma of being torn from their parents, and many did not comprehend the reason why they were being sent away.
As Gold notes in her introduction, the kinder “will never forget what happened during the Holocaust. In the words of the former chief rabbi of Britain and the commonwealth Lord [Jonathan] Sacks: ‘We can’t change the past, but each of us, by challenging prejudice and intolerance, can help to change the future’.”
Memories That Won’t Go Away is clearly a labor of love for Gold, Karin and Lebor, and it is to be hoped that the stories of the kinder, and the messages they convey, will live on and be taken on board by future generations.