Kindertransport: Second generation digs up Holocaust baggage

We have all been exposed to unspeakably horrific pictures of concentration camps. Often they were taken by members of liberating Allied armies, of piles of bodies and emaciated survivors, some of whom, no doubt, did not live long after being documented for painful – hopefully – enlightening posterity.

So, we know what a Holocaust survivor looks like, right?

Indeed, for many years, that epithet was attached exclusively to those who had been interned in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Mathausen, Bergen-Belsen, or any the other hundreds of camps where millions of Jews, and others, were murdered by the relentlessly efficient Nazi death machine.

Recognizing Kindertransport survivors

It took a while for the Kindertransport survivors to gain official recognition, who were primarily from Germany and Austria. My mother escaped from Vienna to the United Kingdom on a Kindertransport, together with her two older sisters, in December 1938. In the latter years of her life, she received an Austrian pension and various other one-time grants.

She said that for a long time, she did not feel she had “earned the right” to be considered a Holocaust survivor because she had not “been through the [concentration] camps,” but she was grateful when it was eventually sanctioned. She could finally, officially – not just emotionally – consider herself to have taken on life-changing psychological baggage as a result of events that overtook her as a child.

It is not only a matter of acknowledgment from the folks who apply the stamps to the forms and dole out the taxpayers’ money. Even as the offspring of a kind (child), it was something I was aware of from an early age. It took me many years to fully take on board the ramifications of the seismic event my mother underwent at the tender age of seven.

My mother was one of the younger ones, of a full complement of around 10,000 children admitted by the United Kingdom, primarily from Germany and Austria, with some from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig, between November 1938 and the outbreak of WW II. The trauma of being wrenched from the only place and culture they had known, from their home and family, and being sent – mostly without any other family members – to a foreign country whose language and societal etiquette they did not understand must have been a shattering schism.

And that was only the physical relocation stage. What about the experiences the kinder (children) had after making it, safely, to the Liverpool Street train station in London, where they were collected by a foster parent or a representative of a hostel or some other institution? Some were fortunate to be taken in by loving, caring people. Others, my mother included, were not so lucky. Basically, her childhood ended abruptly and irrevocably at the age of seven.

THE EMOTIONAL fallout of such trying circumstances in their earliest formative years must have not only plagued many a kind for the rest of their lives, but it surely must have impacted on their immediate offspring and, in all likelihood, the next generation as well.

Nevertheless, there are numerous nuances to the emotional scarring handed down to the next lot on the family tree. Shlomit Lipshitz, for example, says her mother, Betty Eder (née Feinkuchen), displayed no outward signs of anguish or angst from her enforced teenage transplant from Kotbus, Germany, to London on a Kindertransport in 1939 together with her older sister Sonja. “My mother didn’t talk about her experiences on the Kindertransport and, before that, in Germany.” That impacted on the way Shlomit and her three siblings grew up on Kibbutz Kfar Hanassi. “My mother suppressed all of that. And she was warm and loving. We did not grow up under a shadow. So maybe my mother’s way of dealing with all that worked.”

Possibly, but without trying to take on the faux psychologist role, perhaps the dark backdrop was left lurking somewhere and filtered through imperceptibly here and there. “Perhaps,” Lipshitz concedes. “If we children grew up under some sort of shadow, it was a subconscious one.” Whether that is a healthier state of affairs, as opposed to the open wound type, is something for the professionals to decide.

The apparent absence of damaging parental emotional detritus may have also been the result of the then-widespread kibbutz practice whereby children spent the majority of their day apart from their parents and slept in a communal children’s building.

As such, Lipschitz and her siblings grew up as largely separate entities from their parents. She says that when her mother eventually got around to enlightening her offspring about the lifesaving upheaval she endured at the age of 16, a delicate maturity juncture at the best of times, there were no fireworks or thunderbolts. “I must have been around 12 or 13,” she recalls. “I knew my mother was from Germany, but we children led a very different life from our parents. Hebrew was not their mother tongue. They knew Hebrew, but my mother’s Hebrew writing wasn’t good. They were different from us [children].”

David Schreiber also doesn’t have the full lowdown on his mother’s Kindertransport passage of time and its ensuing fallout. Thankfully, Schreiber’s mother, Sara Schreiber, née Weinstock, is alive and well at the grand old age of 100 in London, from where British-born, longtime Jerusalem resident and his artist wife, Ruth, had returned in the wee hours of the day we met up. “We spent Seder night with my mum, just the three of us,” Schreiber recounts with a smile. “It was intimate and wonderful.”

That is heartwarming, and it was also gratifying to hear that Sara – who lived very close to my own mother in Vienna’s Second District – found a warm safe harbor when she got to London. Her brother, who was on an earlier Kindertransport to the UK, found a Jewish family to host Sara while she took care of their blind daughter. Schreiber learned about this in his early teens, along with his mother’s recollections of the trauma of Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) – that took place on November 9-10, 1938, which she remembers in great detail.

SCHREIBER SUBSCRIBES to the notion that parental scars do inform the development and subsequent lives of the next genealogical rung down, regardless of the conditions in which they found themselves following their escape from Nazi-controlled Europe. “Ruth and I are very much on the same page in that regard,” he notes. “Her father was also on Kindertransport, from Germany. I think we share a problem journey as the second generation. I think it sat very heavily on both of us. It has a lot to do with why we are here [in Israel].”

Sara’s Holocaust-related scree may also have had a direct effect on Schreiber’s childhood path. “My mother was very warm and emotional; although, having said that, what has had an ongoing major impact on my life – I think it was a response to her having been a [Holocaust] survivor – was that I was sent away, at a very young age, to a boarding school. I was six years old,” he recalls. As my mother was sent away herself from Vienna to England at the age of seven, and as a parent myself, I could appreciate just how tender and vulnerable Schreiber must have been at that point. “I think that had a lot to do with my parents’ inability, emotionally, to cope with the relationship,” he adds.

For many years, Schreiber wondered whether he was too much of a handful and was a difficult child. “I was told it was either me going to a boarding school or my mother going to an insane asylum,” he says. That must have left a heavy cloud of guilt on the six-year-old.

Schreiber has had time to mull over that watershed turn of events. “It was only when I was in my 50s, after many hours and professional people helping me, that I sat down with my mother and I said to her that I had children and grandchildren that had been through the ages of six and seven. Some had been pretty boisterous. I said to her: ‘Are you telling me I was so difficult that I had to be sent away’? She said: ‘Oh no. Daddy thought it would be for the best, and that you’d get a good British education.’ My mother was emotional and warm, but it could be a very mixed bag.”

Being sent away on the Kindertransport to physical survival at the age of seven left my mother living the next 85 years with the feeling that her mother had rejected her. Sara Schreiber was 16 when she left Vienna for London, certainly old enough to appreciate the existential threat she was escaping from. But she was also at a highly sensitive stage of life, with plenty of accrued vivid childhood memories and an acute sense of loss and separation.

ONE OF the children who did not end up in Israel was Rita McNeil, née Strassman, who escaped Nazi terror from Hanover, Germany, on a Kindertransport. She was dispatched to Glasgow, Scotland, at the age of nine. She was fostered by a loving couple and became the inspiration for a book by Dana Rosenthal Brandeis titled Navo Lakachat Otach (We Will Come Back for You), published in 2020. In fact, McNeil – Greta in the book – became Christian, although she did visit her surviving family members in Israel on several occasions.

McNeil was Rosenthal Brandeis’s mother’s cousin, but the author only heard the full story from her father – after her mother’s death – when she was 45. The book is a charming read and, crucially, depicts all the sides to the multifaceted Kindertransport story. Rosenthal Brandeis portrays the child’s anguish at being sent away, and her dismay when her mother did not “come back for her.” In fact, her mother did not survive. There are also the challenges of the foster family, tasked with caring for a child who is traumatized and does not know the lay of the local cultural land, and doing so with the knowledge that their young charge may be reclaimed by his or her biological family at some stage.

“It was very important for me to show the great complexity of a child being sent away in such a situation, and a family that breaks apart completely – some stayed in Europe, some came to Palestine-Israel,” Rosenthal Brandeis notes. “It is very important to relate to – primarily but not exclusively – the mother in the family that takes the child in.”

She was keen to unfurl the story, particularly in view of the dearth of similar offerings here. “When I started working on my book, I looked for others that had been written, in Hebrew, about the Kindertransport. I was amazed to discover there was nothing.” Today, she goes to schools to tell unknowing children about the Kindertransport.

Rosenthal Brandeis also points out that the emotional ripples, if not tidal waves, of the Kindertransport are still very much with us. She referred me to the Gathering The Voices website, which collates audio and video testimonies from Holocaust refugees about their lives before they ended up in Scotland. McNeil, who passed away in 2018, is in there, too. “She was over 80 at the time, and you can hear the pain in her voice that they did not come back for her. She still did not take on board why her mother never came back for her.” That is nothing short of incredible. McNeil knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that her mother did not survive the Holocaust.

The abandoned child in her was still there, as it probably was for all the kinder and, in some form or other, was conveyed to the next generations. 