In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter Five Rescue and Trauma Jewish Children and the Kindertransports during the Holocaust Eric J. Sterling Although the Nazis wished to liquidate all Jews, they especially targeted the children, who represented the future and the potential of Judaism. The Nazis considered the children special threats because unlike the middleaged and the elderly, Jewish children had many years ahead of them in which to produce more offspring and renew the ethnic group, thus hindering the Nazi “Final Solution.” But the Nazi war against Jewish children was more than physical extermination; it also involved emotional and spiritual attacks against both children and parents. James E. Young observes that because “the greatest test for Abraham’s faith had been his aborted sacrifice of Isaac, the least bearable kind of suffering in Jewish tradition seems always to have been that of children.”1 Elie Wiesel adds that Jewish history“continues with Jewish children being massacred by Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar and Titus, Haman and Hitler—all our enemies saw our children as the primary target.”2 According to Jewish law, bearing children was a blessing, a responsibility , and a gift to God. In Genesis 1:28, God told Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply.Psalms 127:3 reads,“Lo,children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is His reward.” Therefore, by destroying Jewish children, the Nazis attempted to break a spiritual bond between Jews and God while devastating the parents psychologically. Despite the refusal of the United States and other countries to provide refuge within their borders for Jewish children, England arranged for 10,000 Jewish children to emigrate from Nazi Germany and Austria via 63 train—the Kindertransports—from November 1938 through September 1939. Although 10,000 Jewish children were saved, the onset of World War II prevented more trains from carrying children to safety in England, which was unfortunate considering the dire circumstances that Jews endured. As anti-Semitism prevailed in Germany and Austria during the 1930s, Jewish children watched in horror as their parents were beaten up in the streets,harassed , murdered, or sent off to die in concentration camps. These children also became embittered as their Aryan friends shunned or taunted them, and as they were expelled from schools because of their religion and ethnicity . Although many people living in 1938 could not have foreseen the slaughter of 6 million European Jews, the horrors of Kristallnacht (November 9–10, 1938) manifested the need to save Jews from the growing antiSemitism in Nazi Germany and Austria. When an appeal by the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany in November 1938 requested urgently that at least the Jewish children should be saved, most countries steadfastly maintained closed borders, refusing to allow Jewish children to enter their nations in order to survive. However, on November 21, 1938, England’s House of Commons agreed to save 10,000 Jewish children. Germany consequently permitted England to rescue Jewish children under the following conditions: the Germans would receive fifty pounds sterling ($250) per child; the children, called Kinder, would be under eighteen and possess a health certificate and a photograph for identification; the move to England would be temporary; and the refugees would travel without their parents. From 1938 to 1939, Jewish parents shipped 10,000 children to England, even though they were not allowed to accompany them and suspected that perhaps they would never see their children again. Their fears were justified, for 80 percent of the parents, in fact, never saw their children again. An eleven-year-old Kind, who left with several hundred other children in December 1938, remembers the devastation his mother (the Nazis only allowed one parent to see the children off) felt at the train station: “My mother insisted on kissing me over and over again, and I got impatient with her demonstrativeness, not realizing of course that this was to be the final parting. I have often wondered since what she must have felt as the result of my impatience.”3 Another Kind, Peter Morgan, remarks: “imagine my parents ’ predicament, as well as that of thousands of other parents. Mine had to choose between putting two young children, ages eight and ten, onto a train, knowing only that they were going to England and might never be seen by them again, or keeping the children with them, thus hindering their 64 e r i c j . s t e r l i n g [3.141.202...

Share