Categories: culture, germany, austria
Date: 07 April 2009 16:53:06
Whilst Christians are focusing on Holy Week this week, Jews are celebrating Passover. The BBC's nod to the festival is a 30-minute programme remembering the Kindertransport of 70 years ago. Gentle readers will be familiar with the story of 10,000 German and Austrian Jewish children who were sent to the UK to escape the ever-increasing restrictions on Jews under Nazi rule.
I have just watched the 30 minute programme on iPlayer and confess to being watery eyed. The story is indeed familiar but, as I am so often reminded whenever I encounter another story about these events, it was impressed upon me again that each person has their own story to tell in which the details and consequences are completely different for each person.
This programme showed a moving speech given by Lord Attenborough to a Jewish meeting. His parents took in two Jewish girls to join their family of three boys and they all became one big happy family. Three former refugee children were interviewed; now in their 80s, these young people had had very different experiences. The boy and his cousin were housed in a hostel until he was taken in by a devout Christian family in the North East, he never saw any of his immediate family again. One lady managed to trace her father after the war - but not her mother - and another lady was particularly fortunate because somehow her parents managed to join her in the UK in the 1940s (it didn't explain how - there must be an amazing story there, too). They naturalised as British citizens as soon as they could and the family stayed together.
Quite a mixture of emotions is evoked; on the one hand it is wonderful that so many children managed to escape - on the other it is terrible that it was necessary in the first place and that so many people perished.