The Kindertransport was an organised rescue effort by Jewish agencies of children from Nazi-controlled territory that took place in 1938–1939 during the nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 children, most of them Jewish, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig. The children were placed in British foster homes, hostels, schools, and farms. Often they were the only members of their families who survived the Holocaust. The programme was supported, publicised, and encouraged by the British government, which waived the visa immigration requirements that were not within the ability of the British Jewish community to fulfil. The British government placed no numerical limit on the programme; it was the start of the Second World War that brought it to an end, by which time about 10,000 kindertransport children had been brought to the country.
Miriam Winter was a notable Holocaust survivor. She was born in Lodz, Poland to Tobiasz (Tuvyeh) Winter and Majta Laja (Leah) Winter. Winter is perhaps best known for her authorship of Trains: A Memoir of a Hidden Childhood during and after World War II, which explores not only her survival of the Holocaust as a 'hidden child' but also the psychological toll of keeping her identity hidden, even to herself, in post-World War II Poland.
Zahava Burack was a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Poland who went on to become a well-known philanthropist, community leader and political activist in the United States. During her childhood, she survived the Holocaust by hiding with her family in a crawlspace beneath the home of a Polish Catholic family for two and a half years. After the liberation of occupied Poland in 1945, she was smuggled to Israel, where she lived for twelve years, two of which she spent serving with the Haganah paramilitary organization. In 1958, Burack moved to the United States, where she worked with both American and Israeli politicians for Jewish causes.
Holocaust survivors are people who survived the Holocaust, defined as the persecution and attempted annihilation of the Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies before and during World War II in Europe and North Africa. There is no universally accepted definition of the term, and it has been applied variously to Jews who survived the war in German-occupied Europe or other Axis territories, as well as to those who fled to Allied and neutral countries before or during the war. In some cases, non-Jews who also experienced collective persecution under the Nazi regime are considered Holocaust survivors as well. The definition has evolved over time.
The One Thousand Children (OTC) is a designation, created in 2000, which is used to refer to the approximately 1,400 Jewish children who were rescued from Nazi Germany and other Nazi-occupied or threatened European countries, and who were taken directly to the United States during the period 1934–1945. The phrase "One Thousand Children" only refers to those children who came unaccompanied and left their parents behind back in Europe. In nearly all cases, their parents were not able to escape with their children, because they could not get the necessary visas among other reasons. Later, nearly all these parents were murdered by the Nazis.
Goodbye Holland is a 2004 documentary about the extermination of Dutch Jews during World War II. The film debunks the accepted notion that the Dutch were 'good' during the war, exposing how Dutch police and civil servants helped the German occupying regime implement massive deportations, which resulted in the death of 78 percent of the Jews in the Netherlands.
Johanna Reiss is a Dutch-American writer whose work focuses on her experiences as a Jewish child during the Second World War. Her books have been compared to the writing of Anne Frank.
Hannah Elisabeth Pick-Goslar was a German-born Israeli nurse and Holocaust survivor best known for her close friendship with writer Anne Frank. The girls attended the 6th Montessori School in Amsterdam and then the Jewish Lyceum. They met again at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Goslar and her young sister were the only family members who survived the war, being rescued from the Lost Train. Both emigrated to Israel, where Hannah worked as a nurse for children. They shared their memories as eyewitnesses of the Holocaust.
Tina Strobos was a Dutch physician and psychiatrist from Amsterdam, known for her resistance work during World War II. While a young medical student, she worked with her mother and grandmother to rescue more than 100 Jewish refugees as part of the Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Strobos provided her house as a hiding place for Jews on the run, using a secret attic compartment and warning bell system to keep them safe from sudden police raids. In addition, Strobos smuggled guns and radios for the resistance and forged passports to help refugees escape the country. Despite being arrested and interrogated nine times by the Gestapo, she never betrayed the whereabouts of a Jew.
Selma Engel-Wijnberg was one of only two Dutch Jewish Holocaust survivors of the Sobibor extermination camp. She escaped during the 1943 uprising, hid in Poland, and survived the war. Engel-Wijnberg immigrated to the United States from Israel with her family in 1957, settling in Branford, Connecticut. She returned to Europe again only to testify against the war criminals of Sobibor. In 2010 she was in the Netherlands to receive the governmental honour of Knight in the Order of Oranje-Nassau.
Bloeme Evers-Emden was a Dutch lecturer and child psychologist who extensively researched the phenomenon of "hidden children" during World War II and wrote four books on the subject in the 1990s. Her interest in the topic grew out of her own experiences during World War II, when she was forced to go into hiding from the Nazis and was subsequently arrested and deported to Auschwitz on the last transport leaving the Westerbork transit camp on 3 September 1944. Together with her on the train were Anne Frank and her family, whom she had known in Amsterdam. She was liberated on 8 May 1945.
Marion Philippina Pritchard was a Dutch-American social worker and psychoanalyst, who distinguished herself as a savior of Jews in the Netherlands during the Second World War. Pritchard helped save approximately 150 Dutch Jews, most of them children, throughout the German occupation of the Netherlands. In addition to protecting these people’s lives, she was imprisoned by Nazis, worked in collaboration with the Dutch resistance, and shot dead a known Dutch informer to the Nazis to save Dutch Jewish children.
Children were hidden in various different ways during the Holocaust in order to save them from the Nazis. Most were hidden in Poland, though some were hidden in Western Europe. Not all attempts to save them were successful; for instance, Anne Frank was eventually captured in Amsterdam.
Judith Ida Kestenberg was a child psychiatrist who worked with Holocaust survivors. She founded the International Study of Organized Persecution of Children (ISOPC) an organization that coordinated the psychologically informed interviews of over 1500 child survivors throughout much of the world. She was also the lead creator of the Kestenberg Movement Profile (KMP), used to create a psychological profile based exclusively on movement patterns.
Ruth D. Lechuga (1920–2004) was an Austrian-born, naturalized Mexican citizen who became a physician and a collector of Mexican folk art. Her interest led her to produce anthropological studies on the cultures of the different states of Mexico. She gave up her medical lab work to work in anthropology, curating several museum collections. Lechuga published research on indigenous Mexican culture and craftwork. Her ethnographic photographs earned her notice as one of the major professionals in the field. Her private collection of 20,000 ethnographic photographs and over 10,000 artifacts were donated upon her death to the magazine Artes de México and the Franz Mayer Museum. Several posthumous showings of the collection have taken place and in 2016, a research center bearing her name was opened in the former basement of the Franz Mayer Museum.
Alice Cohn (1914–2000) was a German-Jewish graphic artist and master forger for the Dutch resistance during World War II.
Gerritdina Benders-Letteboer (1909–1980) was a member of the Dutch Resistance, who actively protected multiple Dutch Jewish citizens from Nazi persecution and deportation during World War II. Posthumously declared with her husband, Johan Benders (1907–1943), to be Righteous Among the Nations on 27 March 1997 by Yad Vashem, she and her husband were also honored by The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, which placed their names on their “List of Dutch Saviors.”
Toby Fluek was a Jewish artist born in Poland who survived the Holocaust by avoiding capture by the Nazis before emigrating to the United States after World War II. After settling in New York in 1949, Fluek began her career as an artist, painting and illustrating her memories of life before, during, and after the Nazi invasion. She published two books and is featured in two films, one of which she is the subject of. After her death in 2011, Fluek's daughter, Lillian Fluek Finkler, donated her mother's body of work—over 500 drawings, paintings, photographs, and ephemera—to the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida where it is held as part of the museum's permanent collection.
Nelly Toll was a Polish-born American Jewish artist, writer, and teacher, and was a survivor of the Holocaust. Toll, and her mother Rose, were the only members of their family to survive the Holocaust, and spent over eighteen months in hiding during 1943 and 1944. Toll's childhood water color paintings, in which she recorded her experiences of the Holocaust form a significant record of the period. They are archived in museums in the United States and Israel, and have been exhibited internationally, as well as being recorded in the form of a book by Toll. As an adult, Toll immigrated to the United States and settled there, teaching art and the history of the Holocaust at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.
