The Kindertransport rescue programme was a huge achievement — yet it wasn’t a complete success. Catherine Hokin writes about this and other responses to the refugee crisis before and during the Second World War.
“When a country crosses all the lines, the person should be able to cross just one border.” Lyeb Kvitko.
One of the key threads in my new novel, The Train That took You Away, concerns the impact of the Kindertransport refugee rescue programme on the German Jewish families forced to resort to it in the wake of increasing antisemitic violence in Nazi Germany.
Between December 1938 and May 1940, in the wake of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, 10,000 Jewish children between the ages of five and 17 were evacuated from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia to Britain. It goes without saying that this was an incredible achievement.
But, as noted by Dr Andrea Hammel, Professor of German at Aberystwyth University, in her 2018 article on the subject, “it is too simplistic to see the Kindertransport purely as a success story.”
Public dialogue regarding the children (as seen around the recent film, One Life) too often stops at the point of rescue, at the perceived happy ending. Unfortunately, for many of the children involved, this was far from the whole story and any hope that their stay in Britain would be temporary was quickly dashed.
Data on the number eventually reunited with a family member post 1945 is inconclusive and varies widely – estimates run from 10 per cent at the lowest (and most likely) to less than 50 per cent at the highest. What can be concluded is that all the families involved suffered the trauma of separation and loss and too many lives were irredeemably broken by the Holocaust.
Despite this, the Kindertransport is rightly remembered as a positive humanitarian effort and is often referred to as being unique. In many ways it was: a call for help led to a call to action which thousands of ordinary people responded to and lives were saved.
But it also wasn’t. Limits and conditions were placed on the rescue initiative by a government nervous of the antisemitic and xenophobic attitudes held by a vocal section of its electorate. Only healthy children were admitted: any with special needs or illnesses were excluded.
The £50 guarantee the British Government demanded for each child to cover their supposedly short-term living costs had to be raised by volunteers, who were also made responsible for the scheme’s administration so that no costs fell at the Treasury’s feet. It was as much a truism in 1938 as it appears to be now that opening the doors to refugees wasn’t a vote winner. And that attitude wasn’t confined to Britain.
“There was a tragic element of truth in the statement circulated among Europe’s Jews in 1938 that the world was made up of two types of countries: the kind where Jews could not live and the kind where Jews could not enter.” (No Haven for the Oppressed, Saul S Friedman).
The Kindertransport was only one of a number of refugee programmes under discussion during and in the run up to the war. On 6 July 1938, representatives of 32 nations and 39 private organizations gathered at a conference in Évian-les-Bains, a French spa town on the shores of Lake Geneva, to address the problem of the growing number of Jewish families desperate to escape increasing Nazi persecution.
Considerable sympathy for their plight was expressed by a number of speakers. Unfortunately, that sympathy was outweighed by the excuses which were as eloquently offered. The United States had set up strict immigration quotas in 1924 and, although President Roosevelt had convened the conference, he wasn’t prepared to risk his Presidency by lifting them.
Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and France pronounced themselves already saturated with refugees. Latin America was reluctant to involve itself in Europe’s problems. In the end, the only country who offered any spaces was the tiny Dominican Republic.
As then delegate Golda Meir put it: “Listening to the representatives of 32 countries standing up one after another and explaining how terribly glad they would be to receive a larger number of refugees and how terribly sorry they were that they unfortunately could not — it was a shattering experience.”
The Evian Conference was a failure. The attempts to follow it up were no better. The Bermuda Conference in April 1943 was convened in response to growing demands by Jewish groups in Britain and the US that action be taken over the Nazi atrocities which were by now coming to light.
It was deliberately held in a location out of the public eye and virtually in secret, with severe limits on what could be discussed, including the central Jewish aspect of the crisis. Nothing was accomplished and no one was saved. Szmul Zygielbojm, a member of the Jewish advisory body to the Polish government-in-exile, killed himself in protest at the conference’s failures.
The statement which opens this article was made by Leyb Moiseyevich Kvitko, a prominent Yiddish poet and member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee which formed after the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941. He was executed in Moscow on 12 August 1952, in a massacre known as the Night of the Murdered Poets.
I read it at the Museum of the Riga Ghetto and Holocaust, at an exhibition about the failures of the two conferences to take the action that was so desperately needed.
Kvitko’s words were particularly poignant there because he was born in a Ukrainian shtetl, the Yiddish term for a little Jewish town which existed in Eastern Europe before but not after the Holocaust. Ukraine is very present in Riga – most buildings carry the distinctive blue and yellow flag and a number of exhibitions in the city link back there. That is hardly surprising given that Latvia too shares a border with Russia and the fear that Riga could share Kyiv’s fate is an ever-present undercurrent.
Ukraine’s refugees were, rightly, welcomed across Europe. Too many others are not. Perhaps the best hope we can have going into 2025 is that hearts and borders can stay open.
The Train That Took You Away by Catherine Hokin is published on January 20, 2025.
See more about this book.
Catherine has written several Historia features about the background to her books with a Second World War setting, including:
Concentration camps and the politics of memory
Making room for the master race: the true scope of Himmler’s Lebensborn programme
The legacy of the village of Lidice
An appearance of serenity: the French fashion industry in WWII
The Minister for Illusion: Goebbels and the German film industry
Language and the Nazi propaganda machine
Features on similar topics include:
Building better humans? Eugenics and history by Louise Fein
Finding the spark: one author’s inspiration for a second novel by Gill Thompson
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by Elisabeth Gifford
Torn from home and Picking up the Pieces by Jason Hewitt
Images:
- Identity document for travelling to the UK, used during the Kindertransport by Helga Beck: Wikimedia (public domain)
- The children of Polish Jews from the region between Germany and Poland on their arrival in London on the Warsaw, February, 1939: Deutsches Bundesarchiv (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)
- Royal Hotel, Evian-les-Bains, 1938: photo of original taken by the author at the Riga museum with permission for reuse
- Jewish refugees in Sosúa [Dominican Republic] work in a straw factory making handbags for export to the United States, 1943–4: Wikimedia (CC0 1.0)
- Museum of the Riga Ghetto and Latvian Holocaust, 2014: Laima Gūtmane for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
