Survivors recall Kindertransport flight from Nazis

By NAOMI KOPPEL for AP

LONDON (AP) — The operation was called Kindertransport — Children's Transport — and it was a passage from hell to freedom.

Kristallnacht had just rocked Nazi Germany. The pogroms killed dozens of Jews, burned hundreds of synagogues and imprisoned tens of thousands in concentration camps. Many historians see them as the start of Hitler's Final Solution.

Amid the horror, Britain agreed to take in children threatened by the Nazi murder machine.

Seventy-five years ago this week, the first group of kids arrived without their parents at the English port of Harwich, and took a train to London's Liverpool Street Station.

Some 10,000 children, most but not all Jewish, would escape the Nazis in the months to come — until the outbreak of war in September 1939, when the borders were closed.

From London the children went to homes and hostels across Britain. But their parents — the few that eventually made it over — were placed in camps as "enemy aliens."

Many of the children settled in Britain, having found their families wiped out by the Nazis.

Monday is World Kindertransport Day, with events to mark the anniversary in many countries. These are the stories of five Kinder in their own words. The AP has removed some sentences for purposes of condensing their accounts.

OSCAR FINDLING, 91

My father was not a German citizen. On the night before Kristallnacht, he was arrested by the Gestapo.

That was the last I saw of my father.

As soon as we found out (about the Kindertransport), my mother went to where the committee was and put my name down. She wouldn't put my brother down because, she said, "I don't want to lose both my sons on one day."

I'll never forget the last words my mother said: "Will I ever see you again?"

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