80 Years On: Germany Compensates Kindertransport Survivors
PERSPECTIVES | Over the course of 18 months, 10,000 children fled persecution in Germany, Austria, Poland and then Czechoslovakia, and were brought to safety in Britain. Now, Germany has ag…
80 Years On: Germany Compensates Kindertransport Survivors
PERSPECTIVES | Over the course of 18 months, 10,000 children fled persecution in Germany, Austria, Poland and then Czechoslovakia, and were brought to safety in Britain. Now, Germany has agreed to offer a small compensation to those still alive from the 'Kindertransport' — a symbol of recognition for their suffering. He was just one year-old when his mother handed him to a volunteer nurse on a train leaving Nazi Germany in 1939 — bound for England. Paul Alexander discusses with host Tracy Alexander.
Story:
The New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which negotiates compensation with the German government on behalf of Holocaust survivors, said Monday that Berlin would offer one-time payments of 2,500 Euros ($2,800) to living survivors of the Kindertransport.
About 1,000 survivors are thought to be alive today, with about half still living in Britain, and the payment is seen as a 'symbolic recognition of their suffering,' Claims Conference negotiator Greg Schneider said.
After the Kristallnacht pogroms on November 9, 1938, a group of Protestant, Jewish and Quaker leaders appealed to then British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to allow unaccompanied Jewish children into the country.
A rescue effort mobilized swiftly, and the first Kindertransport arrived at Harwich on December 2, 1938, carrying 196 children from a Berlin Jewish orphanage which had been torched by the Nazis on Kristallnacht.
Many of the children never saw their parents again.
'This money is acknowledgement that this was a traumatic, horrible thing that happened to them,' Schneider said.
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