Holocaust

Just under 10,000 Jewish children fled to Britain from Europe from December 1938 to September 1939. Not much was known about their journeys, until recently.

By Claire Moses

Reporting from London

Published March 19, 2025Updated March 20, 2025 New York Times

When Hanna Zack Miley boarded a German train in July 1939, she did not know that the journey would permanently change her life.

She was 7 at the time, about to travel to Britain without her parents. She remembers saying goodbye to them on the platform of the train station in Cologne, Germany. “They told me it was a nice trip, and I believed it,” Ms. Miley, an only child, said. “I think they were trying to make it easy for me. I was the apple of their eye.”

As her short legs took her up the steep steps of the train, she wanted to take one more look at her parents. “I turned around, and I saw that they were crying,” Ms. Miley said. “It must have been awful for them.”

In that moment she realized that this was not, in fact, a nice trip.

She never saw her parents again.

Ms. Miley, 93, now living in Phoenix, Ariz., is one of almost 10,000 Jewish children who were part of the Kindertransport, a rescue mission that helped minors flee Nazi Germany to Britain, via the Netherlands, between December 1938 and September 1939.

Over time, many details have been lost about this part of Holocaust history. But in the fall of 2024, Amy Williams, a researcher, unearthed a trove of information about the mission: lists of names and other identifying information about most of the children and chaperones who made the journey to Britain, tucked away in the vast archives at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial.

For Ms. Miley and many descendants of people who were part of the Kindertransport, the emergence of the lists has helped shed light on a murky period in their family history and offered a sense of connection to others who were affected. For researchers, the findings provide a key puzzle piece, offering new information about the families and rescue organizations involved in the mission.

“I was always told, from when I started my work, ‘These lists don’t exist, they were destroyed,’” said Dr. Williams, who was doing research for her third book about the Kindertransport when she discovered the documents. “And they’re not.”

The lists she found were used by Dutch border guards to determine which children from other European countries should be let through to Britain and which should be sent elsewhere.

A majority of the children on the Kindertransport, which was funded largely by Jewish communities in Germany and Britain, arrived by boat, traveling from Hook of Holland to Harwich, England. From there, they boarded trains to Liverpool Street Station in East London. Refugee organizations helped to match them with foster families.

The Kindertransport has long been taught as a feel-good story, researchers said, but the mission itself was a complicated affair. The British government, for example, only allowed children to come into the country without their parents, deeply traumatizing many of them. The children had to be healthy, and they had to be from Nazi Germany (which included Austria and parts of the Czech Republic) rather than from other parts of Eastern Europe.

Dr. Williams also found documents that helped reinforce the story of how the Kindertransport ended. While many have suggested that it was the start of World War II in September 1939 that ended the mission, the British refugee organizations operating the Kindertransport actually had decided that no more than 10,000 children could come to the country because of the difficulty of housing them.

“The story is much more complex than the way we want to portray it,” said Laura Hobson Faure, a professor at Panthéon-Sorbonne University-Paris 1 who wrote a book about Jewish children who fled to France during the Holocaust.

“It’s not a feel-good story,” Dr. Hobson Faure said. “It’s a story, though, that did save lives.”

While thousands of children were rescued from the Nazis, many of them were traumatized by the experience and never saw their family members again. At the same time, several children of Kindertransport survivors said that their parents always felt a deep loyalty to Britain for the role it played in their survival.

Ms. Miley had long known that thousands of other German children had also been on the Kindertransport, but she said that seeing her name in black and white on an official list gave her a sense of belonging. “Suddenly, it wasn’t me alone,” she said.

Through Dr. Williams’s research, Ms. Miley has connected with the descendants of other children on the Kindertransport. Among them is Richard Aronowitz, 55. His mother — Doris Aronowitz, who died in 1992 — was on the same train as Ms. Miley in July 1939.

For Mr. Aronowitz and other descendants of the Kindertransport children, the lists of names, dates and numbers have led to complicated emotions. “It gave me much more of a profound context,” Mr. Aronowitz said in an interview last month. But, he added, “I don’t think there’s ever any closure.”

Some learned information about their parents or grandparents for the first time through the lists. For others, the documentation serves as a harrowing piece of evidence of the atrocities their parents survived, and an explanation of why so many of them grew up without grandparents or extended family.

“It’s that last, final parting document,” Dr. Williams said. “It really sealed people’s fates.”

For researchers, the discovery of the lists may provide new insight into how the Kindertransport was organized and how desperate parents came to their decisions.

“The Kindertransport has never been investigated so much from the continental point of view,” said Andrea Hammel, a professor at Aberystwyth University in Wales and the author of a book about the Kindertransport.

For Bobby Lax, whose father came to Britain on the Kindertransport, the documentation helped fill gaps in his family’s story. He found out that his father first went from Berlin to the Netherlands before being sent to Britain, leaving his brother and parents behind in Amsterdam, never to see them again, Mr. Lax said.

“While I had discovered most of my dad’s story, it’s absolutely overwhelming to see these original lists,” Mr. Lax, a filmmaker living in Tel Aviv, said. “There’s something incredibly empowering about that. It’s the final piece of the puzzle to me.”

More than eight decades on, the lists have brought Ms. Miley a renewed sense of grief. “One of the big losses when you’re taken away from your family so suddenly,” she said, “is that you don’t know the personality of your parents.”

On the other hand, she said, she feels gratitude. The discovery has helped give her “a deeper thankfulness for the gift of life,” Ms. Miley said. “My name and details on that list were the means of my escape.”

She fled Nazi Germany in 1939 with her husband and baby only to be forced into a Jewish ghetto in Shanghai. Still, she would often say, “Aren’t we lucky?”

Rose Girone was eight months pregnant and living in Breslau, Germany, in 1938 when her husband was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. She secured passage to Shanghai, only to be forced to live in a bathroom in a Jewish ghetto for seven years. Once settled in the United States, she rented whatever she could find while supporting her daughter with knitting. Despite the hardships, including two pandemics, Ms. Girone embraced life with urgent positivity and common sense. “Aren’t we lucky?” she would often say. Ms. Girone was believed to be the oldest survivor of the Holocaust. She died at a nursing home in North Bellmore, N.Y., on Long Island, on Monday, her daughter and fellow survivor, Reha Bennicasa, said. She was 113. Her secret to longevity was simple, she would say: dark chocolate and good children. There are about 245,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors alive around the world, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which supports survivors. “This passing reminds us of the urgency of sharing the lessons of the Holocaust while we still have firsthand witnesses with us,” said Greg Schneider, the organization’s executive vice president. “The Holocaust is slipping from memory to history, and its lessons are too important, especially in today’s world, to be forgotten.” “Rose was an example of fortitude,” he said, “but now we are obligated to carry on in her memory.”

Rose Raubvogel was born on Jan. 13, 1912, in Janow, Poland, to Klara Aschkenase and Jacob Raubvogel. The family later settled in Hamburg, Germany, and started a costume business. She married Julius Mannheim in 1938 in an arranged marriage. The couple moved to Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) that year, not long before Mr. Mannheim and his father were arrested and sent to Buchenwald. A year later, now with an infant, Ms. Girone received a document written in Chinese from family members who had escaped to England. It appeared to be a visa for safe passage to Shanghai, but “it could have been anything,” Ms. Bennicasa said; the family later learned, she explained, that it could have been a fake document. Mr. Mannheim’s father agreed to hand over his shipping business plus a payment to the Nazis in exchange for their release from the concentration camp. With the visa, Ms. Girone, her husband and 6-month-old Reha set sail for Japanese-occupied Shanghai along with 20,000 other refugees.

Mr. Mannheim had a small taxi business at first, while Ms. Girone made money by knitting clothes. But once Japan declared war in 1941, Jews were rounded up into a ghetto. Ms. Girone had to beg the ghetto’s overseer for a place for her family to live, and the only arrangement they could manage was an unfinished, rat-infested bathroom in a house. The family of three would live there for seven years. Mr. Mannheim had to abandon his taxi business and turned to hunting and fishing, while Ms. Girone continued to sell her knitwear. She eventually made friends with other refugees, including a Viennese Jewish businessman who helped her turn her knitting into a business. It would be a lifeline for decades to come. By 1947, Ms. Girone’s mother and grandmother had already made it to the United States, and they sponsored the family to join them. Ms. Girone secretly stashed $80, and the family set off that year for San Francisco, where they lived for about a month before taking a train to New York. Within a few years, Ms. Girone had divorced Mr. Mannheim, and she and Reha bounced from furnished room to furnished room around Manhattan, where she “scrimped and saved” while working at knitting stores, Ms. Bennicasa said. Ms. Girone eventually saved enough to open a knitting store with a partner in Rego Park, Queens, and she opened a second store in Forest Hills, where “we actually had a real apartment, not just a furnished room,” Ms. Bennicasa recalled. Ms. Girone would continue to work and teach knitting until she was 102. In 1968, Ms. Girone married Jack Girone, who died in 1990. In addition to her daughter, Ms. Bennicasa, she is survived by a granddaughter, Gina Bennicasa. Gina Bennicasa remembered her grandmother’s frequent sayings, including “Growing old is fun, but being old is not fun.” One stood out among the rest: “You have to wake up and have a purpose.”

NYT published February 28, 2025 written by Remy Tumin.

From influential platforms, Mr. Turski, an Auschwitz survivor from Poland, warned the world of rising antisemitism and the perils of indifference to it.

Marian Turski, a Holocaust survivor who returned to his native Poland after World War II to give voice to fellow victims of the Nazis and their collaborators, warning the world in writings and speeches about the dangers of indifference to racial and ethnic injustice, died on Feb. 18 at his home in Warsaw. He was 98. His death was announced by the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which he had helped to establish and where he had been chairman since 2009. Speaking in 2020 at the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, where he was shipped from the Lodz ghetto when he was a teenager, Mr. Turski sounded an alarm about what he called “a huge rise in antisemitism.” “Auschwitz did not fall from the sky,” he said in a Polityka magazine podcast. “It began with small forms of persecution of Jews. It happened; it means it can happen anywhere. That is why human rights and democratic constitutions must be defended.” “The 11th Commandment is important: Don’t be indifferent,” he asserted. “Do not be indifferent when you see historical lies. Do not be indifferent when any minority is discriminated against. Do not be indifferent when power violates a social contract.” He added, “If you are indifferent, before you know it another Auschwitz will come out of the blue for you or your descendants.” Mr. Turski’s father and younger brother were killed at Auschwitz, and he lost 37 other relatives in the Holocaust.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft, an adjunct law professor at Cornell University, a son of Holocaust survivors and the author of “Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai After Auschwitz” (2025), said Mr. Turski had exemplified “those members of the survivor generation who, instead of turning inward and wallowing as they might easily have done in their suffering, devoted himself to the future, to making sure that nothing like the horrors he and European Jewry experienced in the Holocaust would happen again to anyone else.” Only weeks before his death, Mr. Turski returned to the camp where he had been a slave laborer to attend a ceremony commemorating the 80th anniversary of its liberation, in January 1945, by the Soviet Army. “We have always been a tiny minority,” he said, referring to himself and his fellow survivors. “And now only a handful remain.” For decades, Mr. Turski was a dominant sermonizer among them. He served as a firsthand witness to wartime atrocities as a columnist for the weekly Polityka magazine, where he went to work in 1958; as chairman of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland from 1999 to 2011; and as the editor of three volumes of eyewitness accounts, titled “Jewish Fates: A Testimony of the Living” (1996-2001). “Marian dedicated his life to ensuring that the world never forgets the horrors of the past,” Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics heir and president of the World Jewish Congress, said in a statement. He described Mr. Turski as “a man who led by example, choosing good over evil, dialogue over conflict and understanding over hostility.” Mr. Turski was born Mosze Turbowicz on June 26, 1926, in Druskininkai, a city that was part of Poland then and is now in Lithuania. His father, Eliasz Turbowicz, a coal trader who came from a family of rabbis, had planned to emigrate to Palestine but remained in Europe because of a recurring lung ailment, a result of a wound sustained while serving in the Russian Army during World War I. Mr. Turski’s mother, Estera (Worobiejczyk) Turbowicz, was a clerk. Mosze attended Jewish primary and secondary schools in Lodz, but once the Germans invaded in 1939, Jews were confined to the Lodz ghetto. He helped support his family by tutoring in Hebrew, Latin and Polish and working in a smokehouse, where he butchered horse meat. He also joined the Communist resistance. Two weeks after his parents and younger brother were deported, in August 1944, he was shipped out on one of the last transports from Lodz. He figured his chances of surviving were better at Auschwitz-Birkenau than in the ghetto, which the Nazis were obliterating. His mother was sent to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in northern Germany; she survived the war and died in 1988. Mosze’s experience, too, was one of harrowing survival: deployed from the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp to do roadwork; forced to join a death march to the Buchenwald concentration camp ahead of the Soviet advance; and sent to a camp at Theresienstadt, in occupied Czechoslovakia, where he caught typhus and shriveled to 70 pounds before the camp was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945.

After the war, he returned to Poland as a committed socialist. Given the antisemitism in the country, a Communist official suggested that he adopt a non-Jewish name; he chose Marian Turski. He earned a degree in history from the University of Wroclaw. After joining the Polish Workers’ Party, Mr. Turski became a committed Communist official: He enforced censorship, imposed crop quotas on farmers and presided over a fraudulent referendum that consolidated Polish territory recovered from the German occupation — all, he would later say, in the interests of promoting Polish nationalism and socialism. In 1965, while studying and lecturing in the United States on an eight-month State Department scholarship, he participated in a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Years later, when President Barack Obama, at a ceremony in Warsaw, asked Mr. Turski what had motivated him to march, he replied, “Simply out of solidarity with all those who fought for their civil rights and against racial divisions.” In the late 1960s, he soured on Soviet Communism because of the government’s official policy of antisemitism and Moscow’s opposition to political liberalization in Czechoslovakia. That “accelerated my transition from being a Pole with Jewish origins to an awareness of being a Pole and a Jew simultaneously,” he said. While he suppressed his wartime memories for years, Mr. Turski returned to Auschwitz in the 1970s, a trip he would make more than once. In 2020, he urged Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, to ban Holocaust deniers from his social media platform. Mr. Zuckerberg eventually did so that year. Mr. Turski’s wife, Halina (Paszkowska) Turski, a fellow Holocaust survivor, had escaped the Warsaw ghetto, served as a messenger for the resistance and later worked as a sound engineer for filmmakers. She died in 2017. He is survived by their daughter, Joanna Turski, a flutist; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

“Soft-spoken, an intellectual giant, he remained in Poland so that his voice resonated as closely as possibly to the abyss,” Professor Rosensaft, of Cornell, said. “He could tell people, ‘I have seen this,’” he added. “It is now going to be our task — the following generations — to make sure the authentic memory of the survivors becomes ingrained in our consciousness. We cannot replicate the voice of the survivors, but we can make sure that the questions they asked, the warnings they raised, remain ingrained in our consciousness.”

NYT published on February 25, updated on February 27, writen by Sam Roberts.

A fellow survivor, she was a literary and political adviser who helped her husband gain recognition as a singular moral authority on the Holocaust.

Marion Wiesel, who translated many books written by her husband, Elie Wiesel, including the final edition of his magnum opus, “Night,” and who encouraged him to pursue a wide-ranging public career, helping him become the most renowned interpreter of the Holocaust, died on Sunday at her home in Greenwich, Conn. She was 94.

The Wiesels met in the late 1960s and married in 1969. By then, Mr. Wiesel had achieved wide acclaim. “Night” — a memoir about his teenage experience at Auschwitz and a tortured spiritual reckoning about the meaning of the Holocaust — came out in 1960, originally translated from the French by Stella Rodway. Mr. Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize and his numerous encounters with world leaders still lay decades away. Friends, relatives and writers all attributed the moral stature he achieved partly to the quiet influence of Marion. “In the alignment of stars that helped make Wiesel the international icon he became, his marriage to Marion was among the most significant,” Joseph Berger wrote in “Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence” (2023), a biography. By nature, Mr. Wiesel was a reader of literature, a chess player and an observer of Jewish rituals. Into his early 40s, he led the intense but unworldly life of a passionate intellectual. For days he might not sleep. He often forgot to eat meals. He abstained from alcohol. He took trips abroad without notice and could not be reached. Mrs. Wiesel, too, was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. Following their marriage, she changed the rhythm of Mr. Wiesel’s days and expanded his sense of possibility — without altering his moral temper. Her most obvious impact on his career was through translation. He was an eloquent, powerful speaker of English, but he cherished his command of French, which dated from his days as a young refugee. Mrs. Wiesel shared her husband’s cosmopolitan knowledge of European culture and fluency in several languages. She quickly began translating his writing from French to English, ultimately working on more than a dozen of his books. None was more important than her 2006 translation of “Night.” In his biography, Mr. Berger, a former reporter for The New York Times, wrote that of the 10 million copies that the memoir had sold, three million came after her translation. It was heavily promoted by Oprah Winfrey, and in the following years it became a widely assigned book in high schools — a concise literary work of moral instruction, like “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Animal Farm.” Mrs. Wiesel also advised and coached her husband as he made public appearances — including frequent TV interviews with Ted Koppel on ABC — and became a voice in world politics. Using money from Mr. Wiesel’s 1986 Nobel Prize, the couple founded the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Mrs. Wiesel took the lead in managing the Beit Tzipora Centers in Israel, which provide schooling and other support to Jewish children of Ethiopian origin who have faced challenges integrating into Israeli society. The initiative reaches hundreds of children every year. Mr. Wiesel’s other public activities included serving as the founding chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Perhaps no single moment of his political career is so vividly recalled as his plea to Ronald Reagan, issued in the White House alongside the president and in front of TV cameras, not to visit the Bitburg military cemetery, where members of the SS are buried in what was then West Germany.“That place, Mr. President, is not your place,” Mr. Wiesel said. “Your place is with victims of the SS.” Those remarks had an editor: Mrs. Wiesel. “There would not have been a Bitburg speech without Marion’s conviction,” the couple’s editor, Ileene Smith wrote in an email. She called Mrs. Wiesel her husband’s “most trusted adviser.” “As his translator from the French,” she added, “Marion pored over every sentence of Elie’s work with astonishing insight into his interior world, his literary mind.” Mary Renate (also sometimes spelled Renata) Erster was born in Vienna on Jan. 27, 1931. Her father, Emil, owned a furniture store. He and Mary watched from a street corner as Nazi troops took over Vienna.

A long flight ensued. Her mother, Jetta (Hubel) Erster, carefully guarded jewelry and silver candlesticks that she would barter over years of repeated escapes. During a brief period in Belgium, Mary attended school. She announced to her classmates that she had shed her first name — which was inspired by her mother’s love of Americana — and that from then on she would be called Marion. “It was an emotional turning point — my first step toward freedom,” she wrote in an unpublished reminiscence. The family spent time at Gurs, a French concentration camp, then fled to Marseille, where they narrowly avoided detection thanks to the protection of neighbors. Jetta had a relative with Swiss citizenship, and the family managed to smuggle themselves into Switzerland in 1942. The family arrived in the United States in 1949. Marion attended the University of Miami but mainly lived in New York City, where she worked at a bra factory and as a saleswoman at a department store. She wound up having a creative career of her own. She edited “To Give Them Light” (1993), a collection of Roman Vishniac’s photographs of Eastern European Jewry before World War II. She also wrote and narrated “Children of the Night” (1999), a documentary about children killed during the Holocaust. She married F. Peter Rose in the late 1950s and had a daughter, Jennifer. While her marriage was falling apart, she met Mr. Wiesel. They discussed French literature on their first date. He fell in love.

In addition to their son, Mrs. Wiesel is survived by her daughter and two grandchildren. Mr. Wiesel died in 2016. The Wiesels’ relationship was not solely an experience of Holocaust remembrance. Mrs. Wiesel also had the ability to convince her philosophically inclined husband that he would, for example, enjoy going to a Broadway cast party at Sardi’s restaurant. Back when Mr. Wiesel was single, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the revered Lubavitcher rabbi, wrote him a personal plea to marry and have children, suggesting that the propagation of the Wiesel line would be a repudiation of the Nazis. Mr. Wiesel was unconvinced: He did not want to bring more Jews into the world. “I changed his mind,” Mrs. Wiesel told Mr. Berger. “I told him he would be happy.”

NYT Published Feb. 2, 2025, updated Feb. 23, 2025 by Alex Traub.