The Kindertransport was an organised rescue effort 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.
Winfried Georg Sebald, known as W. G. Sebald or Max Sebald, was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was according to The New Yorker ”widely recognized for his extraordinary contribution to world literature.”
Sir Nicholas George Winton was a British stockbroker and humanitarian who helped to rescue Jewish children who were at risk of being murdered by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. Born to German-Jewish parents who had emigrated to Britain at the beginning of the 20th century, Winton assisted in the rescue of 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II. On a brief visit to Czechoslovakia, he helped compile a list of children needing rescue and, returning to Britain, he worked to fulfil the legal requirements of bringing the children to Britain and finding homes and sponsors for them. This operation was later known as the Czech Kindertransport.
Dan Jacobson was a South African novelist, short story writer, critic and essayist of Lithuanian Jewish descent.
Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003, Best American Short Stories 2008 and Best American Short Stories 2019. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House. A collection of her short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020 and won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2022.
The Emigrants is a 1992 collection of narratives by the German writer W. G. Sebald. It won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize, and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal. The English translation by Michael Hulse was first published in 1996.
Alison Pick is a Canadian writer. She is most noted for her Booker Prize-nominated novel Far to Go, and was a winner of the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award for most promising writer in Canada under 35.
Arnošt Lustig was a renowned Czech Jewish author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays whose works have often involved the Holocaust.
Anthea Bell was an English translator of literary works, including children's literature, from French, German and Danish. These include The Castle by Franz Kafka, Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, the Inkworld trilogy by Cornelia Funke and the French Asterix comics with co-translator Derek Hockridge.
Jean Patrick Modiano, generally known as Patrick Modiano, is a French novelist and recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is a noted writer of autofiction, the blend of autobiography and historical fiction.
Ilse Weber, née Herlinger, was born in Witkowitz near Mährisch-Ostrau. A Jewish poet, she wrote in German, most notably songs and theater pieces for Jewish children. She married Willi Weber in 1930. She was voluntarily transported to Auschwitz with the children of Theresienstadt and murdered in the gas chambers, along with her son, Tommy. Her most popular book was "Mendel Rosenbusch: Tales for Jewish Children" (1929).
The Koret Jewish Book Award is an annual award that recognizes "recently published books on any aspect of Jewish life in the categories of biography/autobiography and literary studies, fiction, history and philosophy/thought published in, or translated into, English." The award was established in 1998 by the Koret Foundation, in cooperation with the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, to increase awareness of the best new Jewish books and their authors.
University over the Abyss is a book about the educational and cultural life in the Terezín ghetto. Authors Elena Makarova, Sergei Makarov and Viktor Kuperman have searched available archives, interviewed survivors worldwide and compiled the definitive summary of this nominally illegal but extensive phenomenon that included formal lectures, poetry readings, concerts, storytelling sessions and theatrical and opera performances, all in a setting that was a holding place for prisoners who were ultimately on their way to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
Hans Günther Adler was a German-language poet and novelist, scholar, and Holocaust survivor.
The Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize is an annual British literary prize inaugurated in 1977. It is named after the host Jewish Quarterly and the prize's founder Harold Hyam Wingate. The award recognises Jewish and non-Jewish writers resident in the UK, British Commonwealth, Europe and Israel who "stimulate an interest in themes of Jewish concern while appealing to the general reader". As of 2011 the winner receives £4,000.
Frank Meisler was an Israeli architect and sculptor. Meisler was born in the Free City of Danzig and grew up in England, before moving to Israel in 1956. In 1953 he married Batya (Phillis) Hochman with whom he had 2 daughters: Michal Meisler Yehuda and Marit Meisler. He died in Jaffa in 2018.
TSS Prague was a passenger and freight vessel built for the London and North Eastern Railway in 1929. The first group of Kindertransport refugees to arrive in the UK did so aboard the Prague, in December 1938.
Gertrud Cohn was a German victim of the Nazi regime. The fate of her family was published as a children's book. The book became the basis for an exhibition, a play and a film. The book is used in German primary schools for children between ten and twelve.
Whitehall and the Jews, 1933-1948: British Immigration Policy, Jewish Refugees and the Holocaust, is a book by Louise London, first published by Cambridge University Press in 2000. It details the British government's response to refugees fleeing persecution in Nazi Europe between the years 1933 and 1948.
