The operation was called Kindertransport — Children's Transport — and it was a passage from hell to freedom.
Kristallnacht had just rocked Nazi Germany. The pogroms killed dozens of Jews, burned hundreds of synagogues and imprisoned tens of thousands in concentration camps. Many historians see them as the start of Hitler's Final Solution.
Amid the horror, Britain agreed to take in children threatened by the Nazi murder machine.
Seventy-five years ago this week, the first group of kids arrived without their parents at the English port of Harwich, and took a train to London's Liverpool Street Station.
Some 10,000 children, most but not all Jewish, would escape the Nazis in the months to come — until the outbreak of war in September 1939, when …show more content…
She arrived in February 1939 with her older brother Martin. Having worked as a psychotherapist, she speaks today in schools about the Holocaust and seeks to highlight the fate not only of Jews but also of the hundreds of thousands of Gypsies killed by Hitler.
EVE WILLMAN, 80
I was 5 when I came. My father was a doctor. My mother converted to Judaism when she married my father.
I came with another girl who was older than me. The only thing I remember about the journey is stopping at one point and people coming in and giving us a sweet drink. I don't remember saying goodbye to my parents.
I went to the first foster home — a Unitarian minister and his wife. They didn't have any children. I remember that she was very strict and precise.
After a year they couldn't keep me anymore and so I went to the next foster home ... to an extremely nice family. But one of my uncles who had been a rabbi was most concerned that I didn't have any Jewish instruction. And so I went to another family. It was not such a nice family.
My uncle and aunt were then established in West Hartlepool. I went there for a holiday. It was such a wonderful turning point in my life somehow. My aunt said, "when you come back, you will be with us forever." I was 11. I became one of their children. My cousins became my brother and
Kristallnacht had just rocked Nazi Germany. The pogroms killed dozens of Jews, burned hundreds of synagogues and imprisoned tens of thousands in concentration camps. Many historians see them as the start of Hitler's Final Solution.
Amid the horror, Britain agreed to take in children threatened by the Nazi murder machine.
Seventy-five years ago this week, the first group of kids arrived without their parents at the English port of Harwich, and took a train to London's Liverpool Street Station.
Some 10,000 children, most but not all Jewish, would escape the Nazis in the months to come — until the outbreak of war in September 1939, when …show more content…
She arrived in February 1939 with her older brother Martin. Having worked as a psychotherapist, she speaks today in schools about the Holocaust and seeks to highlight the fate not only of Jews but also of the hundreds of thousands of Gypsies killed by Hitler.
EVE WILLMAN, 80
I was 5 when I came. My father was a doctor. My mother converted to Judaism when she married my father.
I came with another girl who was older than me. The only thing I remember about the journey is stopping at one point and people coming in and giving us a sweet drink. I don't remember saying goodbye to my parents.
I went to the first foster home — a Unitarian minister and his wife. They didn't have any children. I remember that she was very strict and precise.
After a year they couldn't keep me anymore and so I went to the next foster home ... to an extremely nice family. But one of my uncles who had been a rabbi was most concerned that I didn't have any Jewish instruction. And so I went to another family. It was not such a nice family.
My uncle and aunt were then established in West Hartlepool. I went there for a holiday. It was such a wonderful turning point in my life somehow. My aunt said, "when you come back, you will be with us forever." I was 11. I became one of their children. My cousins became my brother and