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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

In 1938 and 1939, some 10,000 children and young people fled to the UK to escape Nazi persecution. Known as the ‘Kindertransport’, this effort has long been hailed as a wartime success story – but there are uncomfortable truths at its heart.

The Kindertransport was a complex visa waiver scheme, and its organizers did not necessarily act with altruism. The British government required a guarantee to indemnify itself against any expenses, and refused to admit the child refugees’ parents. The selection criteria prioritized those who were likely to make the best contribution to society, rather than the most urgent cases. And some children and young people were placed in unsuitable homes, where many arrangements irrevocably broke down.

Written with striking empathy and insight, Andrea Hammel’s expert analysis casts new light on what really happened during the Kindertransport. Revelatory and impassioned, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of migration and refugees, and offers thought-provoking lessons for how we might make life easier for children fleeing conflict today.

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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

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Leseprobe

Cover

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

1 Myth

Notes

2 Persecution

Notes

3 Escape

Notes

4 Organization

Notes

5 Placements

Notes

6 War

Notes

7 Death

Notes

8 Together/Apart

Notes

9 Life

Notes

10 Memory

Notes

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1

Eva Mosbacher

Hedwig Mosbacher

Otto Mosbacher

Chapter 2

Dr Michael Siegel

Chapter 3

Visa Waiver Document of Kindertransport refugee Renate Collins

Chapter 4

Kindertransport refugees on the Warszawa

Chapter 5

Gwrych Castle, near Abergele

Chapter 6

HMT Dunera

Chapter 7

Renate Collins in 2021

Chapter 8

William Dieneman at his boarding school in 1941

Chapter 9

Retired nurse Lia Lesser in 2022

Chapter 10

Lord Alf Dubs

Frank Meisler’s The Arrival. Kindertransport memorial, London Liverpool Street

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Begin Reading

Index

End User License Agreement

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The Kindertransport

What Really Happened

ANDREA HAMMEL

polity

The right of Andrea Hammel to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2024 by Polity Press

Polity Press 65Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5378-5

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023934601

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Acknowledgements

This book is the culmination of nearly 25 years of research, conferences, communication, writing, re-writing, networking and interviewing. I am especially grateful to Stephanie van Limpt-Homer, Nick Hubble, Julia Davies and all at Polity Press for their faith in my ideas and my writing.

I am grateful to all the Kindertransport refugees who were willing to talk to me. I learnt so much.

I would also like to thank the following:

Tasha Alden, Sylvia Asmus, Ruth Barnett, Wolfgang Benz, Martha Blend, Monica Bohm-Duchen, Charmian Brinson, Morris Brodie, Renate Collins, Michael Couchman, Claudia Curio, Winifred V. Davies, Ellen Davis, Sylvia Degen, Rachel Dieneman, William Dieneman, Lucy Duncanson, Clive Evans, Tony Friedlander, Christoph Gann, Gábor Gelléri, Anthony Grenville, Anita H. Grosz, Melissa Hacker, Gale Halpern, Alex Hammel, Max Hammel, Sara Hammel, Andrew Hesketh, Joanne Hopkins, Gaby Koppel, Tony Kushner, Bea Lewkowicz, Ingrid Lumfors, Alex Maws, Tamara Meyer, Bill Niven, Gloria Ogborn, Christoph Ribbat, Angelika Rieber, Matthias Schirmer, Barbara Schreiber, Ruth Schwiening, Anne Senchal, Rose Simpson, Elena Spagnuolo, Monja Stahlberger, Karen Stuke, Janet Thomas, Moira Vincentelli, Godela Weiss-Sussex, Heidi Wiener, Norbert Wiesneth and Amy Williams; the members and trustees of Aberaid; my students and colleagues at Aberystwyth University, and especially at the Centre for the Movement of People (CMOP) and the Modern Languages Department; the members of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies and the Gesellschaft für Exilforschung e.V.; the members and elders of St David’s Church in Aberystwyth.

Abbreviations

AJEX

Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen

AJR

Association of Jewish Refugees

BCRC

British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia

CBF/WJR

Central British Fund for German Jewry /World Jewish Relief

IKG

Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (Jewish Community in Vienna)

KTA

Kindertransport Association (North America)

PJRF

Polish Jewish Refugee Fund

RCM

Refugee Children’s Movement

1Myth

There is history and there is myth, and they are not the same thing. In the category of myth come those tales nations tell themselves to feel virtuous, even heroic.1

In the night between 9 and 10 May 1939, at 2.50 a.m., 12-year-old Eva Mosbacher said goodbye to her parents Hedwig and Otto Mosbacher and joined a group of three boys and two other girls on a train at Nuremberg Station. In Munich, she joined another train, and they all changed again at Frankfurt for a long journey to London. While still travelling, Eva started writing a long letter to her parents left behind at home. She asked them whether they managed to get back to sleep after seeing her off and described the dialect of the children who had joined her on the way. Eva seems a very astute girl, showing unusual reflection and empathy towards her parents, almost indicating a role reversal in her letter. She writes: ‘The worst must be over for you now, you were very brave. I did not manage quite without tears.’ And goes on to describe that she saw some more goodbyes between children and their parents ‘that were dreadful’.2

Eva Mosbacher was fleeing National Socialist persecution in Germany on a Kindertransport. The term ‘Kindertransport’ describes both the individual transports and the overarching scheme that allowed over 10,000 unaccompanied minors, mainly with Jewish backgrounds, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, to escape Nazism and find refuge in the UK between December 1938 and September 1939.

The Mosbachers were a Jewish family, and their life had changed dramatically after Adolf Hitler became German chancellor on 30 January 1933 and the subsequent rapid National Socialist takeover of Germany. The well-established family had been ostracized, and both Hedwig’s family and Otto had to close their respective family firms because of discriminations and policies that robbed Jewish businesses of their opportunities and their assets. From 1937 onwards, Eva’s parents tried to find a way to leave Germany and find sanctuary elsewhere. Hedwig and Otto Mosbacher applied for a visa to the USA, which had a quota system for immigrants from different countries. This meant that Jewish refugees from Germany were given a number on a list. The couple also looked into the possibility of fleeing to Cuba or South Africa. In 1938, they thought that it might take at least another two years before they would be granted a visa to the USA. Like most in Germany on 9 and 10 November 1938, the family were shocked by the widespread violence of the November Pogrom against Jewish people and Jewish property. Sometimes called ‘Kristallnacht’ on account of the large amount of broken glass that it left in the street, this state-sponsored violence included the destruction of synagogues and other Jewish institutions and businesses, numerous arson attacks, and the incarceration, beating and even murder of Jews, mainly men. This happened in Vienna and Berlin and other German towns and cities such as Nuremberg, where the Mosbachers lived, and also in villages and rural communities.

In Nuremburg alone, nine Jews were murdered by Nazi thugs, and the Orthodox synagogue, which had been used by the other Jewish congregations as well, was attacked by arsonists and burnt down. All over the German Reich, Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. Otto Mosbacher’s older brother Kurt, a lawyer in Munich, was arrested and taken to Dachau concentration camp where he was imprisoned for four weeks. For many Jewish families, the experience of the November Pogrom acted as the last straw. They were now willing to consider any measure that might enable family members to leave Germany, even under previously unthinkable conditions, such as separating children from parents. Eva’s parents decided to send her to the UK on a Kindertransport in the hope that eventually the whole family would be able to make it to the USA together, and that Eva would stay in the safety of the UK in the meantime. The Mosbachers had more connections to the UK than most: Eva’s cousin had lived in Cambridge since 1936 and was in a position to contact the Cambridge Refugee Committee to help her find foster parents.

Eva reports that the youngest refugee on the train was a 6-month-old baby and wrote to her parents: ‘You can count yourselves lucky that I am already 12.’ Her foster placement was with two Christian women in Cambridge, women with professional careers in healthcare and academia, and the means and the desire to help a young refugee. They lived in a large house just outside Cambridge and were warm, insightful and caring. Soon after her arrival, on 15 May 1939, Eva started attending the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge and got moved up a year immediately. Over the next years, Eva kept up an intense correspondence with her parents and continued to hope that Hedwig and Otto would join her soon, writing in one letter ‘when we are together again, we will have achieved a lot’. In other letters, Eva described a happy and educationally quite successful life of a teenage girl, while her parents’ emigration attempts were always foremost in her mind: ‘Hopefully your Cuba plans will work out. School holidays. Report good, I am busy. Got invited to the theatre by my best friend. You are always in my thoughts, and I wish you all the best.’

Her parents back home suffered under the intensified persecution from the Nazis and continued to try to get out of Germany. In the following years, they bought ship’s passages twice: from Kobe to the USA, due to depart on 17 November 1940, and from Lisbon to New York, due to depart on 10 October 1941, but in neither case did they manage to get the necessary visa for entry to the USA. After Eva had left, the Mosbacher parents had moved to Hedwig’s home town of Meiningen in Thuringia, and in October 1941 they were forced to move to the ghetto house, or ‘Jew house’, in Meiningen. They wrote to their daughter: ‘We have to put up with a lot that cannot be changed, but we still hope that we will get an opportunity to travel before it is finally too late.’ Three years to the day after their daughter fled on a Kindertransport to the UK, however, they were deported from Thuringia to Belzyce together with 1,000 other German Jews of all ages. There, Eva’s parents were murdered. Their last message to Eva was dated 3 May 1942, and they said that they were ‘trying to be brave’ and that they ‘were with her in their thoughts’.3

Eva did not find out about the death of her parents until years later. The sudden cessation of correspondence affected her badly. But, of course, she had no choice but to carry on with her life in the UK. Despite the tragic loss of her parents, in the 1940s and 1950s, Eva seemed to be doing well: she got on with her foster mothers, she stayed at the Perse School for Girls until 1944, and planned to train as a nurse. She delayed the start of her training, taking care of one of her foster mothers, who had become ill. Eventually, Eva trained at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge and at North Cambridgeshire Hospital in Wisbech, successfully completing her training in 1950. Her final report describes her as very caring towards her patients but sometimes lacking in self-confidence. In the post-war years, Eva worked as a registered nurse, moved to London, and eventually lived in Wimbledon, renting a room in the house of a German Jewish lawyer.

Eva Mosbacher

Hedwig Mosbacher

Otto Mosbacher

With permission from Christoph Gann

On 10 November 1963, Eva Mosbacher took her own life in a hotel near Victoria Station in London.

The Kindertransport is often discussed and remembered as a generous, humanitarian rescue scheme, and the emphasis of public discussion is on escape, survival and a successful life in the UK. It is cited by the media as a heroic scheme and used as evidence for a history of generous humanity towards refugees. In March 2022, for example, after Russia invaded Ukraine and many Ukrainians, especially women and children, were looking for refuge in European countries, including the UK, the commentator Simon Heffer said on the BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House programme: ‘We have a noble tradition of looking after refugees: I think back to the Kindertransport.’ But is this true?

Eva Mosbacher had to leave her parents behind in Germany, as the UK did not allow them to seek sanctuary with her, and their desperate attempts to escape came to nothing. Eva had to live with the fact that, while she was saved, they were not and were murdered in the Holocaust. Eva clearly could not cope with this; she took her own life on the anniversary of the November Pogrom – the day when it became clear to many Jews of the German Reich that they had to escape urgently. Eva’s parents did not manage to escape. Had the family been able to flee to the UK together, things might have been different.

Like Eva, the large majority of child refugees who fled on a Kindertransport were not orphans. They had parents and families. In most cases, the families initially tried to escape National Socialist persecution as a family unit, or at least in a way that one parent could accompany the child. But the UK government (and most governments around the world) made it very difficult for refugees to find sanctuary in their respective countries. In the case of the Kindertransport, the UK stipulated that only those under 18 years of age could be admitted. This fact is often forgotten.

Examining the history of the first half of the century shows that the UK became increasingly restrictive to sanctuary seekers. Until early in the twentieth century, entry into the UK by foreign nationals was largely unregulated. The Aliens Act of 1905 sought to regulate immigration and demanded that those coming to the UK should be in possession of sufficient means to support themselves. However, it privileged those claiming to flee persecution for religious or political reasons, and stated that such persons should not automatically be refused entry even if they could not prove that they could support themselves. This was the so-called ‘asylum clause’. Internationally, this was the first law to define refugee status. The Aliens Act 1905 was introduced in large parts in response to an increase in Russian and Eastern European Jews wishing to come and settle in the UK to escape anti-Semitic pogroms and persecution after 1880. Anti-foreign sentiments, fears about too many poor immigrants, and anti-Semitism all played a part in the introduction of this law. The hostilities of the First World War moved the UK Parliament to introduce the Aliens Restriction Act 1914 in response to security fears regarding German and Austrian immigrants. This meant that refugees fleeing National Socialism, the majority of whom were Jewish and German or at least German-speaking, were met with ingrained antipathy from some members of the public, sections of the media, parts of the government, and other political groups. Subsequently, the 1919 Aliens Restriction Act removed the ‘asylum clause’ of the 1905 Act, and therefore refugees could not claim special status and were treated like other immigrants and subject to general immigration policy.

It is a fact that in the 1930s the UK government’s policy was not laying the foundation for a noble tradition: it was mainly concerned with keeping refugees fleeing Nazism away from the UK, rather than aiding their escape. There were, of course, exceptions among Parliamentarians, such as Eleanor Rathbone MP and Josiah Wedgwood MP, who both campaigned tirelessly on behalf of refugees. There was also the Anglo-Jewish community who tried to assist Continental Jewish refugees and lobbied on their behalf, and initially assured the government that they would cover the cost of those arriving without any means of support. Last, but by no means least, there were thousands of ordinary citizens who viewed the persecution on the Continent with great concern and wanted to assist its desperate victims in any way they could. They organized and raised money, they fostered child refugees and assisted in different ways.

Rather than a UK government-led scheme, the Kindertransport was a hastily assembled visa waiver scheme, restricted to those under the age of 18. It was introduced following the November Pogrom on 9 and 10 November 1938, which was widely reported on in the British media. Ordinary citizens put pressure on the government and urged it to come to the aid of the persecuted Jews of the German Reich. But rather than relaxing the visa rules, the government would only agree to an exception for minors.

One reason why the Kindertransport scheme was restricted to minors was over fears that adult refugees might compete with British people on the labour market for jobs in this period of high unemployment. Children were not likely to seek jobs soon after their arrival. Children who were accommodated in foster families were also not likely to pose a financial burden to the UK state. The Kindertransport scheme was not funded by the government but financed by charities and donations. In fact, the government demanded that a guarantee of £50 be lodged for every child refugee admitted to the UK to indemnify the UK government against any future expense: child refugees ‘should not become a burden on the public purse’. This was a large sum of money at the time, roughly equivalent to £3,500 today. The requirement to raise this guarantee was the main reason why it was not possible to get more children to the UK at the time.

More than 10,000 child refugees were part of a Kindertransport between December 1938 and September 1939, a short period of ten months. On the one hand, this is a remarkable achievement. On the other hand, the lack of government support in funding and organizational terms also resulted in issues that led to serious problems for some Kindertransport refugees once they had arrived in the UK. There was little support for the child refugees themselves to cope with the experience of being persecuted, uprooted, and separated from their parents. Even those who arrived with siblings were often separated from them. There was little attempt to match the child refugees and the foster placements using clear criteria. There was insufficient effort made to match religious and cultural backgrounds of children and foster placements. Most of the children chosen were Jewish, but the vast majority of potential foster families were not (as the Jewish population in the UK was small). There also was a lack of vetting of the placements with disastrous consequences for some. Many had to change placements several times: some children were neglected, some were exploited, and some were physically or sexually abused. Some foster parents thought that they would be able to adopt the child refugee and did not acknowledge that the children had birth parents who just wanted them to be looked after for a period of time and had not agreed to such a move.

There was also little initial support for the foster parents and others in charge of caring for the Kindertransport refugees, and very little preparation for the complicated task all of them faced. Nor was there sufficient ongoing support. Many had envisaged that the children’s placements would be needed for a matter of months; however, in most cases, they were needed for years.

Additionally, because there was no overall policy that governed the selection of children for a Kindertransport, and no rules regarding priorities and who was to be considered a suitable candidate or an urgent case, the scheme can be criticized for not sufficiently recognizing potential bias. The Kindertransport in general excluded children with additional needs, such as children with physical disabilities, learning difficulties, chronic illnesses (such as diabetes) and mental health problems. Even children with minor behavioural problems such as bed-wetting were often excluded. All the Continental organizations in the different countries had to make tough decisions, but it was the Refugee Children’s Movement, the umbrella organizing body in the UK, that had the final decision-making power.

This book will provide a critical history of the Kindertransport, drawing on a broad range of sources. It will outline how the policy framework for the Kindertransport was established, by looking at parliamentary records; it will look at the organization of the Kindertransport both on the Continent and in the UK by using the organizational archival material available and letters and other material from organizers. The book will also look at how the Kindertransport was experienced by individual child refugees, their birth parents and their foster parents and others involved in their placement in the UK, as revealed in archival material and personal recollections. Last, but not least, we will try to reflect the emotions and opinions of the Kindertransport refugees themselves, looking at their testimony. Many of them gave interviews and many wrote memoirs – some were published and some were given to archives or kept privately. Over the last forty years, different narratives of Kindertransport history have emerged. After the Kindertransport refugees got together in several organized reunions in the late 1980s and early 1990s, some very positive celebratory narratives of the Kindertransport were published or told. Many former child refugees felt that they wanted to express their gratitude for being saved in their recollections. It can be argued that this led to an exclusion of more critical narratives as, initially, few stories talked about the painful parts of their experiences. Nevertheless, all these voices have to be credited for bringing the Kindertransport scheme to the attention of researchers and the public.

Later academic accounts of Kindertransport history have been much more critical of the scheme. The earliest book-length publication in English was very uncritical of the organization of the Kindertransport: Barry Turner’s … And the Policeman Smiled: 10,000 Children Escape from Nazi Europe presents a very positive view of the Kindertransport experience and thus of the UK’s decision to admit only unaccompanied child refugees.4 Turner was commissioned to write this book by World Jewish Relief, the successor organization to the Refugee Children’s Movement that assisted the Kindertransport refugees in the 1930s and 1940s. He was able to use the archives of the World Jewish Relief Fund, which contain many case files of Kindertransportees. These files have since been closed to researchers and are only accessible to the former refugees and their descendants. Turner’s book allows no verification as he fails to include either references to the material used or any explanation as to the method of selection.

More critical books followed after the increase in public attention and the rise in the number of published memoirs from the early 1990s onwards. The first book-length research monograph was written by Rebekka Göpfert in German and published in Germany in 1999.5 The study uses 27 oral history interviews conducted by the author, and archival material available at the time. It maps out the field but is by necessity focused on the experience of a relatively small number of people. One of the most interesting aspects of this study is the different experiences it reveals for former Kindertransport refugees who eventually settled in the USA, in comparison to those who settled in the UK. Those living in the USA felt much more integrated in their community and country – which, after all, champions the immigration experience – than those who had lived in the UK since the Second World War, who continued to feel that they were outsiders and defined by their refugee experience. The first study of the Kindertransport from an organizational angle was published by Claudia Curio in 2006, also in German, which might have resulted in its findings not being analysed and built upon in further studies as they should have been.6

Over many years, the historian Tony Kushner consistently presented a very critical analysis of the government policy that led to the organization of the Kindertransport, and of the use of Kindertransport memorialization in public and political discourse in the UK. He published a number of articles and chapters in his works on refugees. Additionally, he supervised two doctoral theses which were eventually published as critical monographs: Louise London published the very detailed Whitehall and the Jews 1933–1948: British Immigration Policy and the Holocaust in 2000.7 London fits the Kindertransport scheme into her much larger remit of an investigation of British immigration policy and shows how the scheme fits in with ideological changes and newly developed regulations. She is highly critical of both the Kindertransport scheme and the wider policies of the time, as well as of the sectarian nature of the British Jewish community. Jennifer Craig-Norton’s 2019 monograph The Kindertransport: Contesting Memory derives from the same school of thought.8 It is very detailed, and especially comprehensive regarding lesser-known experiences such as the history of the Kindertransport refugees who escaped from the Polish border region to the UK. Her focus on this very specific – and smallest – group of Kindertransport refugees occasionally leads her to draw conclusions from a minority experience and generalize for Kindertransport refugees as a whole.

Both Vera K. Fast’s Children’s Exodus and Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz’s Never Look Back are especially informative regarding the experience of Orthodox Jewish children.9 The minority of Kindertransport refugees were from Orthodox families, and most placements in the UK were not run according to Orthodox traditions. The two books provide opposing interpretations of the appropriateness of the provision for such children, both during the organization of transports and after their arrival.

However, none of these books has managed to reach beyond the circle of experts in the field. Many interested members of the public still do not have an adequate grasp of the history of the Kindertransport. They do not have detailed knowledge of the extent to which it was a government scheme, how it relied on volunteers and charitable organizations, what happened to the birth parents of the child refugees and the challenges the refugees faced in the UK. This is why the Kindertransport is still sometimes referred to as a UK government humanitarian success, as part of a noble tradition. This book is trying to fill this gap in public awareness.

The 80th commemoration of the Kindertransport in 2018–19 resulted in increased attention for the historic events. It is likely that this will be matched in 2023–4 during the Kindertransport’s 85th commemoration, which will be the last time when we can realistically expect any involvement in events and public discussions from former Kindertransport refugees themselves.

Comparisons are often drawn between the Kindertransport and the UK’s handling of those seeking sanctuary in the UK today. This is understandable, but, if we want to compare, we need to understand Kindertransport history fully. This book combines research with readability, providing a critical analysis of archival sources and, at the same time, bringing a wide range of voices – voices of eyewitnesses and survivors – to the fore. Most readers are fascinated by the life histories of Kindertransport refugees and want to learn more about their experience and how it affected them.

But we also need to look at other sources that show us how the government and the organizations of the time acted. Thus, the self-reflexive narratives will be complemented by the results of my archival research conducted over more than twenty years. I have looked at organizational documents in both English and German, located in Austria, Germany, Israel and the UK. I am convinced that only by combined analysis of these different sources can we do justice to the complex phenomenon of the Kindertransport. I will start by discussing the context of the child refugees’ flight. I will examine the persecution and violence they experienced in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. I will look at the organization of the Kindertransport on both sides of the Channel, and the experience of the children who were selected – in contrast to those who were rejected – for a place on a Kindertransport to the UK, as well as what happened to their parents and families who could not flee with them. A central part of this book will document the very varied and difficult times the children had at their initial and subsequent placements in foster families, boarding schools, training camps and children’s homes. We also have to remember that many Kindertransport refugees and their descendants are our fellow citizens, in the UK but also in the USA (as many migrated farther). When the Kindertransport was first organized in 1938, almost everyone involved in the organization and the support of the scheme vastly underestimated the time the children would spend in their placements and in the UK. The children inevitably grew older and changed between 1938–9 and 1945, and the events of the Second World War also left their mark on everyone involved. The end of the war provided them with new opportunities and with new challenges. We do not have any reliable data to be able to say with certainty how many of those fleeing via the Kindertransport scheme saw their parents again after the war, and how many lost one or both of their parents. The experience of being separated, losing contact during the war, and finding out their parents’ fate, needs to be discussed in detail. Even those who were reunited with their parents, or other members of their family, had to cope with the rupture the events of the war and the Holocaust had caused. Most such reunions were far from easy, happy occasions.

A substantial number of Kindertransport refugees left the UK and migrated farther to other countries. The history of the Kindertransport is therefore not just part of British history, as it is sometimes believed, but part of other national histories as well, although I have to leave a more detailed discussion of those experiences to other colleagues and books. A very small number returned to live in the countries of their birth.

Some Kindertransport refugees have led very prominent lives, such as the Labour Peer Lord Alf Dubs, the artist Frank Auerbach, the entrepreneur Dame Steve Shirley or the Nobel Prize-winners Walter Kohn and Leslie Baruch Brent. As can be expected, most led more ordinary lives, though often succeeding professionally or in their private endeavours. However, there were also those who suffered from physical and mental ill health due to the trauma of their early years, and then there were those like Eva Mosbacher who decided that they could not continue and ended their lives. The positive stories have to be balanced with the tragic ones to show the real long-term consequences of the Kindertransport scheme.