Once upon a child

We all have our very own narratives. However homogenized we seem to become by the seemingly ever-shrinking virtual global village, we all come with cultural, religious, ethnic, and highly personal baggage. By now the story of the Kindertransport is pretty well known: a series of rescue operations that ran from the end of 1938 up to the beginning of World War II, in which some 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig were admitted by the United Kingdom. The children – or Kinder – were taken in by foster families, not all of them Jewish, all around the country or placed in hostels, schools and farms. On the face of it, the Kindertransport sounds like a highly successful, nay miraculous, operation which enabled thousands of children to escape the clutches of the Nazi regime and the fate of the family members they left behind. However, the lifesaving venture reveals some darker elements that left indelible marks on the lives of the young refugees and the next generation, and possibly also the third. Consider a nine-year-old child in Vienna going with one or both parents to the Westbahnhof railway station. It is nighttime, the air is cold, and the child is really too young to fully comprehend where this is leading. Why, the child may wonder, is he or she being sent away by their parents? He or she has probably been told that it is in the family's best interest, and that the parents will follow “as soon as we can.” The child spends several hours, along with a bunch of other kids of various ages, standing in line on the freezing station platform surrounded by armed Nazi soldiers. Their parents, meanwhile, wait on another platform, on the other side of the railway tracks. The child might wonder why their mother or father is not waiting together with them for the train that will take the child away to freedom in far-off Britain. The time to board the train comes. There is no fond goodbye. The kids just board the train – some have their suitcases roughly checked by soldiers and, possibly, their coat pockets too – and then they are off. The first sense of relief, that the dread of the Nazi regime has been left behind, comes when the train crosses the border into the Netherlands, and the children are offered hot chocolate by some compassionate Dutch women. That is just part of the physical and emotional odyssey undertaken by those thousands of children, the vast majority of whom would never see their parents, grandparents or siblings again. Some of the Kinder were in Jerusalem recently to attend a conference organized by the US-based World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors and Descendants, which took place at the Dan Hotel on Mount Scopus. “I don't think my story is particularly dramatic,” says Ilse Melamid when we retire to the hotel lobby. “Dramatic” is clearly a relative term. After a comfortable early infancy in Vienna's well-heeled district of Hietzing, the then 10-year-old's world was turned on its head after the Anschluss in March 1938. Melamid, then Hoenigsberg, escaped on a Kindertransport in July 1939, almost at the last moment. Her father had previously been incarcerated in the Dachau concentration camp for a year, before Melamid's mother managed to get him out. Her father subsequently got across the border into Italy, but her mother and sister perished in Auschwitz. After arriving in Britain, Melamid was placed with a childless Methodist couple in northwest England, where she spent two and a half years. Although the arrangement began pretty well, the couple soon realized they'd made a mistake but also felt they couldn't lose face by admitting it to the authorities. “I was more or less relegated to the kitchen,” Melamid recalls. “And eventually they found an excuse for me to go. They told the authorities it was important to make me self-sufficient – self-supporting, I think, was the word they used.” To that end the 14-year-old was taken out of school and given live-in employment at a childcare facility. “I could have had a good education but, presumably, I was too traumatized to learn,” Melamid notes. “Since I didn't make any trouble, I was allowed to just sit in the classroom. I called it being a passenger at school. So I didn't learn very much.” Although Melamid's father survived the war in a concentration camp in Italy, she never saw him again. That was largely down to financial circumstance, a sense of estrangement that had developed over the war years. He knew his daughter was alive and living in the UK, but didn't get on a plane to go over and see her. “There was some communication between us, but he didn't have the means to come to visit,” Melamid explains. What about the Red Cross? Couldn't they help to facilitate a reunion? “I have my own theories,” she proffers. “Maybe it's my imagination, but he and I no longer felt able to act as father and daughter. “I didn't want to open up that chapter – not that I was so happy at the time. I assumed that he might have felt the same. That he didn't really feel able to be a father, with all the duties and responsibilities. And he probably felt a failure, for not having gotten my sister and my mother out [of Austria].” Hoenigsberg's father emigrated to Australia, where he had a sister. Melamid, too, settled Down Under, but her father had developed health problems and he died in surgery shortly before she got there. At the age of 25, Melamid found herself living in Sydney. At long last, things took a turn for the better. “I liked my life in Australia,” she says. “I met a wonderful family there called Davis. One of my cousins had married into the family. They embraced like a sister or a cousin.” All those years after separating from her parents and sister, forever, Melamid rediscovered what it was like to be part of a family. She also liked the new society to which he had relocated. “It was less class conscious there [compared with the UK] and you felt you could do anything you wanted, if you set your mind to it.” Melamid set her mind to taking a degree in psychology and fine arts, lack of high-school education notwithstanding. “What does a child from Vienna study?” she asks rhetorically. “It's in the blood,” she laughs. Despite her happy existence in Australia, it was another branch of her extended family that led to Melamid's third migration, this time to New York. “I had an aunt there, whom I wanted to see before she died, and the other half of my family sort of twisted my arm and said, why don't you stay?” Melamid is clearly an optimist, despite everything she has been through. “I see moving to different countries and experiencing life in different places as an advantage,” she states. “I can look at situations from different angles.” We all deal with adversity in different ways. Arthur Weil appears to have adopted a no-nonsense, robust philosophy of life after escaping Nazi Germany to New York in 1938 at the age of 12. Now 92, the Piedmont, California, resident appears hale and hearty. When I remarked that he had covered some distance to make it to the conference, he immediately put things in perspective – his perspective. “You might say I have come from the other side of the world. It depends how you look at life,” he laughs. Weil, who came to the conference with his son and daughter, Jeff and Judy, says he was part of “the other Kindertransport.” “Not many people know there were two Kindertransports,” he explains. “There was the one with the 10,000 children, which went directly to England. The other one started in 1934. We call ours 'the 1,000 children,' but there were between 1,200 and 1,300.” Weil says the US-bound Kindertransport was a very different operation. “We went in small groups. We had to go only to Jewish families, whereas the English kids went to dormitories,” notes the nonagenarian, many fostered by non-Jewish families. “At the end of the war, all of us [who went to the States] remained Jewish, but many of the English kids were converted.” There was no pining for his original hometown of Hannover when Weil got to the States. “I didn't want to go back to Germany,” he says. “I came on a German ship and the lower deck had lots of swastikas and that stuff. I was already scared to be in Germany, so when I went down to that deck and saw all of that, forget it, I wasn't ever going back.” Some Holocaust survivors talk about their traumas, while others don't share their experiences, not even with their own kin. “The first I knew about all this was when I went with my father to where he grew up, in Steinheim in Hannover, and there was a memorial and it said his great-uncle had died in Auschwitz,” says Judy. “I knew my dad was from Germany, but I didn't know about all the Holocaust stuff.” “Yeah, I never talked about it,” says Weil. “I didn't talk about it until I became very active.” At some stage he decided it was time to get his story out there, to all and sundry and, thus, also to his offspring. “I didn't know about it until he started giving speeches about it, at schools and places,” Jeff notes. “I was always very active,” Weil recalls. “I was so active I didn't have time to think. I was selling newspapers, I was going to school. I had seven or eight jobs, but I still managed to graduate from school. I also went to college.” He was also determined to stand on his own two feet financially. “You can't do anything without money,” he states. “Having money means you have independence,” Herbert Neuwalder, 84, now of Fort Lee, New Jersey, and Stamford, Connecticut, resident Susanne Flodstrom, his junior sibling by two years, originally from Vienna's seventh district, were among those who were baptized in the UK. Neuwalder and Flodstrom left for Britain in June 1939. “I believe it was the second last one to leave Vienna,” says Flodstrom. “They were killing Jews in the streets.” “Our father was picked up after Kristallnacht, and taken to an SS kaserne (barracks) and he got out of there,” Neuwalder adds. Although they went through the trauma of being separated from their parents and being sent to a strange country with a language they did not initially understand, Neuwalder and Flodstrom could be considered to be among the fortunate Kinder. Their parents survived the war and the four were eventually reunited. Like Melamid, their father managed to get over the border into Italy and spent the war years in a concentration camp there. Their mother was a Catholic and, as such, was able to carry on working in Vienna, despite being fired from her first job for being married to a Jew. Amazingly, according to Neuwalder and Flodstrom, their parents were in touch during the war through the Red Cross and were reunited in Italy in 1947. The siblings were placed with different foster families on their arrival in the UK and, although they were both in Cumbria in the far northwest of England, they met only on a couple of occasions during all their time in Britain. Both foster fathers were vicars, and Neuwalder and Flodstrom were baptized. “We were converted with our father's permission,” says Flodstrom. “He didn't know if he'd ever see us again,” notes Neuwalder. It was a default line of survival. “He felt we'd be safer if the Germans ever took over Britain,” Flodstrom adds. While Neuwalder's years with his foster family were reasonably harmonious, Flodstrom tells a very different story of her fostering experience. “The mother of the family was very unhappy person. I was always getting blamed for things. “I think I overshadowed my older [foster] brother, with whom I got on very well,” she says. “And the mother was always getting rid of dogs and getting new ones, so I guess I was just another dog. But no one knew what to do with me.” The young girl was passed on to a couple of elderly unmarried sisters in another part of England – Flodstrom does not remember where – which didn't work out too well either. Eventually she went to live with the sister of the original foster mother. “I liked her a lot,” says Flodstrom. This was her third home in the space of two or three years, and since she was only five or six at the time this must have been unsettling in the extreme. “I was just a kid,” says Flodstrom philosophically. “When you're a kid you just accept things.” After the war, Neuwalder and Flodstrom made their separate ways to Italy to rejoin their father and mother. Naturally, after being so long apart, and after leaving them when they were so small, it was not an easy reunion. “Our father was much more affectionate than I was,” Neuwalder recalls. And the accommodation logistics were trying, too. “We shared the place with a family of about 13 people,” says Flodstrom. The family had to leave Italy as their visas ran out and they made their way to the States via Vienna. Neuwalder and Flodstrom remember that as a happy homecoming of sorts. “I didn't remember anything of Vienna as a small child,” says Neuwalder, although his younger sibling says the visit did evoke early memories. “We had a good old time,” says Flodstrom. “Everyone was so pleasant to us – all our Christian friends who survived the war.” After a brief return to Italy, the family made its way to New York and settled there. Both Neuwalder and Flodstrom were happy to be at the conference and especially in Jerusalem. “I've met some Kinder before, and it's always been part of my life,” says Flodstrom.

Once upon a child

The ‘Kindertransport’ starting in 1938 enabled thousands of children to escape the clutches of the Nazi regime, but was the lifesaving venture all positive for those who lived it?

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Once upon a child

The ‘Kindertransport’ starting in 1938 enabled thousands of children to escape the clutches of the Nazi regime, but was the lifesaving venture all positive for those who lived it?

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