The story of the Kindertransport, which in 1938/1939 enabled nearly 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Europe to escape to Great Britain, entered factual history through the news reels of the time showing smiling children holding the hands of policemen – children brought to safety, end of story. For more than five decades, society’s collective failure to recognize and address the emotional effects of the separation and losses the »Kinder« had suffered held up their coming to terms with the trauma of the Holocaust and survivor guilt. With the first Kindertransport reunion in 1989, the dialog on the child refugee experience was finally opened, memoirs of »Kinder« began to be published and testimonies recorded. Using autobiographical narratives of »Kinder«, I will explore this landscape of remembrance and the ›telling‹ of stories, drawing attention to themes symbolically anchored within. Based on a case study examination of the memory of the trauma suffered, I will argue that despite the challenges of childhood recollections, and the incompleteness of memory transmission, any attempt to convey experience through recorded recollections is surrounded by values and lessons that can be passed on from person to person, from generation to generation.
The Kindertransport is regarded today as one of the greatest humanitarian events of the twentieth century. Nearly 10,000 Jewish children up to the age of sixteen were brought to Great Britain under this rescue operation from Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia within nine months between the November Pogrom of 1938 and the outbreak of the Second World War. The organization of the Kindertransport was taken over on the British side by the Council for German Jewry, and by the Refugee Children’s Movement (RCM), the former Movement for the Care of Children from Germany. On the German and Austrian side, individual communities took charge of announcing the possibility of emigrating and organising the children’s departure. Upon arrival in England, the children became the responsibility of reception camps until they were placed with foster families or in youth homes. Transports were hastily organised from Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia, lastly also from the Netherlands, and an exact number of these transports has not been established.
The overwhelming tragedy of the Kindertransport experience was that the children and adolescents had to leave without their parents. All hoped to be reunited with their parents after the war; for most of them it was a final farewell. Despite the tragic implications, the story of the Kindertransport entered factual history through the news reels of the time showing smiling children holding the hands of friendly policemen – children brought to safety, end of story. For more than five decades, society’s collective failure to recognize and address the emotional effects of the separation and losses the children had suffered held up their coming to terms with the trauma of the Holocaust and survivor guilt. In the face of the horrors of the concentration camps, the children themselves could not allow themselves to grieve over their experiences and losses. With the first Kindertransport reunion celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Kindertransport in 1989, the dialog on the child refugee experience was finally opened, memoirs of »Kinder«1 began to be published, testimonies were recorded and a great number of documentary films brought their story into collective public awareness. Following the first Kindertransport reunion in London, psychotherapist Ruth Barnett, a Kindertransport member herself, wrote:
The 50th anniversary of the Kindertransport stimulated the inner experience of many Kindertransportees, causing a sort of psychic encrustment to dissolve, allowing them to reflect on their early experiences and face the ways in which it had changed their lives.2
In almost every account however, the gap between the past and the present memory of it, compounded by a sense of incompleteness, of difficulties with language, of not being heard or fully understood emerges. If transmission is so difficult, how will memory survive?
The attitude of the New Zealand government towards the fate of Jews in the years 1933-’46, a time frame that encompasses the height of European ethnic, political and social upheaval in the twentieth century, was primarily based on a restrictive immigration policy reinforced by the Immigration Restriction Amendment Act of 1920. The more restrictive a receiving country’s immigration policy, the more stringent the necessity for refugees and evacuees to have the right connections – this was especially true for New Zealand that regarded itself as the most remote British outpost in the South Pacific.
Among the estimated 1,100 refugees and post-war displaced persons, who gained sanctuary in New Zealand between 1933 and 1946, were five »Kinder« who migrated from Britain in 1939 and 1946, and twenty orphaned Polish children from Bialystok, brought out in two groups in 1935 and 1937. The relocation of the »Kinder« involved travel costs and the required landing money of £ 200, and was mainly based on family sponsorship and organisational support from the Refugee Children’s Movement. The resettlement of the Polish children at the Deckston Home in Wellington was entirely sponsored by Annie and Max Deckston, a childless couple from Lachowicze, Poland, who had settled in New Zealand in 1900. Although few obstacles were encountered for the first group of eight children, the second group of twelve was costly, with a £2,000 guarantee required for each child. The stories of these children and adolescents give access to entangled lives reflecting that exile trajectories were facilitated by ethnic or religious sources of solidarity, family and kinship relationships. Their narratives of ›survival‹ have recently entered public consciousness with the initiatives of the New Zealand Holocaust Centre. Their near ›escape‹ from historical attention, to some extent explained by the small number of the relocated children and the relative obscurity of their sponsors, exemplifies the need for further interpretive pathways into the histories and immigrant geographies of Second World War refugee children.
Autobiographical interviews with a small number of »Kinder« who settled in New Zealand3 form the basis of this essay.4 Of the four existing oral history interviews with former »Kinder«5, two are of particular interest with regard to objects of memory featured in the narrative. Drawing on methodologies of such fields as exile psychology, conversation and narrative analysis, the essay explores the landscape of remembrance and the ›telling‹ of stories in these interviews, drawing attention to central themes symbolically anchored within. The point made is that despite the challenges of childhood recollections, and the incompleteness of memory transmission, any attempt to convey experience through recorded recollections is surrounded by insights that can be passed on from person to person, from generation to generation. Each of the personal oral interviews offers a voice to hidden histories, which collectively form the narrative history of the Holocaust.
In an autobiographical interview of December 1997, completed in Auckland, New Zealand, as part of the Survivors of the Shoah Testimonies Series, Eva Hayman, born Diamantova, stresses the tremendous importance of her diary writing during the war. Eva was one of the 669 children and adolescents brought to Britain from the former Czechoslovakia on a Kindertransport arranged by the British stockbroker Nicholas Winton. The diary was a gift from her father when, as a fifteen-year-old, she left Prague in June 1939. During the war years, Eva kept a diary, because her father had told her to write everything she did and thought so she wouldn’t forget and so he could read it after the war.6 Although she stopped writing when, in 1945, she received the news of her parents’ death in the Nazi camps, Eva took her diary everywhere she went, and later on she translated and condensed her notes into a little book titled By the Moon and the Stars, which she published in New Zealand in 1992.7
Why does an essay on the culture of memory in a former Kindertransport member open with the story of a diary that travelled all the way from Prague to New Zealand? Because Eva’s diary can be regarded as a »comfort object«8 that carries memories of her parents, and often plays a major role in the recollections of »Kinder«. The significance of such objects is well described by Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham, who in 1939 had set up a centre for juvenile war victims in London, called the Hampstead War Nursery. Their Reports on the Hampstead Nurseries 1939–1945 include detailed observations on children who, for a long period of time after arrival at the nursery, held on to an object like a handkerchief or a toy which their mother had placed in their hand just before departure. Freud and Burlingham interpreted such objects as a means of overcoming the separation shock these children had experienced, arguing that what at first glance seemed a rather flimsy thing may have been the only way for the children to maintain continuity between life before and after separation from their parents, and, in so many cases, to gain a sense of continuity beyond the death of the parents.9
While studying the autobiographical narratives of »Kinder«, I have noticed that their ruptured story is often told held together by references to such a beloved object. The adult’s rational voice may say that the object has no other value but a sentimental one. Nevertheless, the way in which a former Kindertransport member recounts their memories indicates that an object such as a handkerchief or a toy, clothing, a diary, even the suitcase itself, may be invested with »a symbolic function in relating to the many, barely imaginable losses.«10 Not only does the object present a connection to family and home, but later it becomes an aid in the act of remembering and mourning, extending its message through time. In other words, what in the process of transition functioned as a link to a recent past and a substitute for absent parents is transformed over time by the realisation of the losses experienced and the death of parents, presenting the »Kind« with the task to remember and mourn these losses. Alongside such objects one may find sentence fragments, snippets of a conversation or a word spoken by the parents, in German or Czech, symbolically integrated in the cycle of life and death.
Walter Freitag, who escaped to Britain on a Kindertransport from Berlin in July 1939, recounts his memory of his preparation for departure as follows:
I remember the train journey from Königsberg to Berlin and think that it was a time of closeness that I had with my father. Maybe at that time he was trying to explain to me what was going on, but without worrying me in any sense, by assuring me that »We’ll join you in England and we’ll travel to New Zealand.« […] He asked me to conduct myself, to be orderly and not to cause burdens for other people – his last lesson. It stuck with me for all my life.11
The conversation with his father on the way to the Kindertransport departure point in Berlin was the most important thing that the ten-year-old boy took with him into exile. Laden with meaning through the farewell scene, it preoccupied the boy during the trip on the Kindertransport train, upon his arrival in England, after his relocation to New Zealand in 1946, and up to the time that he spoke about it in his autobiographical interview, in December 1997. In describing his schooling during the war years in the English countryside, Walter points out that he first excelled in class, following what his father had told him about the importance of studying and conducting himself; he then talks about the difficulties of adapting there, and explains that he felt »like an oddity, as all other kids came from farming backgrounds, and we had nothing in common.«12 The first feelings of guilt appear at the time he decides to purposely start getting lower marks »to become one of them.«13 Such narrative passages make evident how memories of parents’ values are internalised, especially when the parents are lost. Repeated separation from family as well as repeated adjustments to new locations due to evacuation procedures during the war can be seen as reasons for Walter’s pressing need to be with others of a similar background after migrating on to his closest surviving relatives, his aunt and uncle in New Zealand. In his interview, Walter emphasises above all the significance of the shared experience in the circle of his benefactors in Wellington, the Eichelbaums and Levinsons, originally from Königsberg like himself, and the Lemchen family from Berlin:
Dr. and Mrs. Lemchen epitomised my parents. I saw in them the values that my own father and mother had […] Their Seder tables reminded me of my own. There were the grandparents like my grandparents, and the father explaining to the children like my father would have explained. It was wonderful, as if we had been back home in Germany.14
The story of his resettlement in New Zealand concludes with the realization that he made every effort to pick up the pieces of a painfully disrupted life, to diligently fit in and to succeed, not only for his own sake but also for his lost parents. Interestingly, at the end of the interview, Walter once again articulates the significance of his father’s values and expectations, which he considers to be binding:
And the values […] even in my career: Gründlichkeit [he uses the German word for thoroughness], stood me in good stead in my work. And when I see now examples of German workmanship, […] this is done absolutely correctly, that is what my father would have wanted me to do.15
With this closing statement Walter re-enacts a key moment in his life that was evoked at the beginning of his narrative – the farewell from his father –, and his father’s »last lesson«. At this point, it becomes apparent that Walter’s last conversation with his father forms the fragile backbone of his entire life narrative; it not only offers a temporal structure and a backdrop for the arrangement of experience, but it also provides elements of explanatory power to work out the genesis of »the sort of person I have become.«
Anyone listening to the interview will be impressed by the great linguistic effort, the various rhetorical activities and narrative strategies used by Walter to make his own person understandable and accountable in his life story. One of the striking features of child survivor autobiographical interviews is that they occur many years after the events, placing the emphasis not only on the variety of individual experiences but also on how they are remembered, retrospectively interpreted and narrated. At this point, I propose that it is as personal, subjective expression that the experiences of former child refugees can most memorably be communicated. This means that there is a privileged place for the ›telling‹ of the story, and generally for the kind of work on language and thought that produces the autobiographical narrative. I will briefly discuss the narrator’s orientation toward communication and dialogue, and the relationship between the narrative and the argumentative discourse, as they both indicate the actual biographical significance that a particular theme has for the speaker at the time of the interview.
Whereas collective memories like the Novemberpogrom of 1938, the very cold winter of 1938 and the arrival at the Dovercourt camp are recounted in monologue sections, functioning as historical signals, other events and experiences invested with biographical significance are narrated in dialogue-oriented passages. This is especially true of the sequences centred on the father–son relationship in Walter’s interview, which stand out for their strong interactive dimension. The narrator consistently seeks to encourage his listener’s emotional engagement and verbal interaction by means of an emphatic speech style, repeated appellations and various speech signals prompting further enquiry or cueing inferences. I will quote some of Walter’s reflections on family, home and belonging:
Going back to the forests and various places, I suddenly realised this is my homeland; these were the mountains where my father took me bird-watching. […] Am I fortunate to have three homes? You see Ruben … I’m wrestling with this question still. New Zealand is my adoptive land that has given me sustenance, […] it’s a land to which I have contributed significantly […]. But I know, when I go to Israel, it’s also my land. […] And I still have some roots in Germany…16
In this passage, aposiopesis convey the impression of a speaker so overwhelmed by emotions that he is unable to continue speaking. But the use of silence also summons the imaginative empathy and affinity with the other; it creates a bond of some sort between the narrator and his interviewer Ruben, as the narrator seems to be saying ›In effect, I don’t need to spell everything out for you; I trust you’ll understand‹.
As I mentioned earlier, the relationship between the narrative and the argumentative discourse is also indicative of a theme’s biographical significance. The socio-linguist Anne Betten observes that passages extensively expanded upon by survivors represent problematic points in the process of self-understanding and personal construction of meaning.17 Stories with argumentative functions in this sense can be viewed as an expression of trauma-related guilt; they are developed by the narrator in order to argue against a latent voice of dissent or to raise consciousness and understanding. This again can be illustrated by some brief excerpts from Walter’s interview. The section preceding the last conversation with his father stands out for the tremendous linguistic effort made by the narrator to convey information about why his parents couldn’t immigrate whereas he did. Walter describes in great detail the tragic situation of his parents, who could not bear to leave the grandparents behind and delayed their application for immigration until it was too late. He repeatedly calls himself ›lucky‹ to have been able to escape on a Kindertransport and explains how relieved his parents were to get him and his sister, four years his junior, out of Germany. Arguing against a latent voice of dissent, so to speak, he refers to the fact that in his family it was commonplace to send the children on holiday overseas with their governess, and that his father sent him off on the Kindertransport train »like it was an adventure, an opportunity to travel with other children.«18 As further arguments to justify his willingness to leave, Walter mentions that a number of Kindertransport children were fortunate to have their parents following them to England after a short while, something he had thought his parents would do as well. Even when he came to New Zealand, he explains, he still hoped something like that would happen:
It had to be understood eventually that my parents were no longer there. It took me a very long time to accept this, always having the hope that they would show up and knock on my door; there was no proof that they died or what happened to them. Their last letter just said they were moving home.19
Despite the repeated emphasis on how ›lucky‹ the »Kinder« were to escape Nazi persecution, the effort of coming to terms with survivor guilt and working through the past is clearly evident in such passages. It therefore seems justifiable to conclude that the autobiographical narrative developed in relation to an object of memory, a conversation or a word of the parents’ contradicts the long-accepted view that the »Kinder’s« story ends with the rescue. In her powerfully moving book We Came as Children: A Collected Autobiography of Refugees, Karen Gershon described the »Kinder’s« wrestling with the desire to live by forgetting and the need to tell and to memorialise. Motivated by a desire of coming to terms with past experience, the autobiographical narrative built upon an object of memory or a word spoken by the parents provides powerful examples of a child survivor coping with the losses of times and people once bound with that object. As former Kindertransport member Ruth Barnett notes, the decision to break the silence and reveal something truthful about the fragmented self, about memory and trauma, has certainly led to the enrichment of the intergenerational relationships.20 While there are »Kinder« and Second World War child refugees still alive and physically able and willing to speak about their experiences, the project of collating the individual stories into collective narrative urgently needs further consideration. We might even speak of a collective project, or at least a widely shared one: to acknowledge their childhood traumas, often denied in a desire for ›normalcy‹ after the war, and to transmit their memories to subsequent generations.
As most of the former members of the Kindertransport still call themselves »Kind(er)« today, I will also use the same term. ↩︎
Ruth Barnett, »The Acculturation of the Kindertransport Children: Intergenerational Dialogue on the Kindertransport Experience,« in Shofar, 23/1 (2004), p. 104. ↩︎
According to information from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, 4% of the »Kinder« migrated on to Australia and NZ between 1939 and 1950 to be reunited with relatives or family friends. Their relocation to New Zealand involved travel costs and the required landing money of £٢٠٠, and was mainly based on family sponsorship and organisational support from the RCM. The author thanks Simone Gigliotti for facilitating access to documents of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, held at the USHM. ↩︎
The essay is based on findings of a collaborative research project with the historian Simone Gigliotti of the University of London, which aims to further memory work on the Kindertransports and other Second World War Jewish child refugees in New Zealand. ↩︎
Two of these interviews are part of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation series and another two were conducted by the author of this article in 2011. ↩︎
Interview with Eva Hayman, Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, 9 December 1997, Epsom, Auckland, New Zealand, Interviewer: Carol Klooger, Interview Code: 38765. ↩︎
Eva Hayman, By the Moon and the Stars, Auckland: Random House New Zealand Ltd, 1992. ↩︎
First mentioned by Anna Freud and Dorothy T. Burlingham in Infants without families: Reports on the Hampstead Nurseries 1939-1945 (The Writings of Anna Freud, Volume III), New York: International Universities Press, 1973, and further elaborated on by Donald W. Winnicott in »Transitional objects and transitional phenomena. A study of the first not-me possession«, in International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34 (1953), pp. 89-97. On this topic, see also the recent studies by Berthold Beck, Übergangsobjektentwicklung und deren Bedeutung, Berlin: Waxmann Verlag, 1995, and Tilmann Habermas, Geliebte Objekte: Symbole und Instrumente der Identitätsbildung, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996. ↩︎
Anna Freud, Dorothy T. Burlingham, Infants without families, p. 81f. ↩︎
Eva Lezzi, »Verfolgte Kinder: Erlebnisweisen und Erzählstrukturen,« in Menora: Jahrbuch für deutsch-jüdische Geschichte, Bodenheim: Philo Verlagsgesellschaft 1998, p. 185. ↩︎
Interview with Walter Freitag, Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, 13 December, 1997, Wellington, New Zealand, Interviewer: Reuben Zylberszpic, Interview Code: 38477. ↩︎
Interview with Walter Freitag. ↩︎
Ibidem. ↩︎
Ibidem. ↩︎
Ibidem. ↩︎
Interview with Walter Freitag. ↩︎
Anne Betten, »Rechtfertigungsdiskurse: Zur argumentativen Funktion von Belegerzählungen in narrativen Interviews,« in Angelika Redder (ed.), Diskurse und Texte. Festschrift für Konrad Ehlich zum 65. Geburtstag, Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag 2007, pp. 106–109. ↩︎
Interview with Walter Freitag. ↩︎
Ibidem. ↩︎
Ruth Barnett, »The Acculturation of the Kindertransport Children«, pp. 104–108. ↩︎