My 7-year-old daughter plays with the little blue flashlight I’ve just given her, a token from the conference I’ve attended. She wants to know where I’ve been and what the “KTA” letters on the flashlight mean.
“Kindertransport,” I say. “‘Kinder’ means children in German, but the kinder are now 70 and 80 years old.”
“What were the names of the people?” she asks.
“Well, there were lots of people. Some named Kurt and Ilse and Bertha,” I tell her. “And Oma [my mother, her grandmother] was there, too.”
“What did Kurt and Ilse say?” she presses on.
I’m not exactly sure what I can tell her. Maybe something about the children with their suitcases on the train, and when they crossed the border into Holland, the Dutch women passed dolls and apples and chocolates through the open windows. The happy parts of the story, the part that evokes a big smile on the faces of those who retell it.
I’ve been to the first West Coast Kindertransport Association Conference, held in Burlingame. I’m a Kindertransport second generation — a KT2 — and until last month I didn’t even know there was a name for what I was. When asked about my heritage, I usually say I’m a first-generation American, that my mother escaped Nazi Germany, and that’s generally about as far as I get before the questions begin. My mother left Germany on the Kindertransport, the journey made famous by the Academy Award-winning movie “Into the Arms of Strangers.” This rescue mission saved nearly 10,000 children from the Nazis, by relocating them to foster homes in Great Britain. Most of their parents were not so lucky.
I checked the KT2 box on my registration form and it’s also on the badge the smiling grandmotherly woman wrote out for me. The first generation, understandably, was happy to see so many second-generation offspring there, sons and daughters, like me, who came to learn more, and for some, because it’s getting close to our turn to step forward to speak as descendants of survivors. As Lissa Schuman — who coordinates speakers for the San Francisco Holocaust Center and who spoke to the second-generation group at the conference — warns, there aren’t so very many survivors left.
My daughter is the same age that some of the kinder were when they left their homes. “I had just turned 7,” one woman said, as she recounted her story, and as I held my tears at bay, I couldn’t erase the image in my head of me packing a suitcase for my child and having to say an uncertain goodbye.
As trite as it sounds, here’s the simple truth — I wouldn’t be here writing this if it hadn’t been for the Kindertransport, which saved the lives of my mother and her sister and thousands of other Jewish children, whose offspring could be writing these very same words.
I went to the conference with few expectations. I had hoped to meet some of the kinder from the film. I felt I knew them, their stories, their families of origin and their foster families too. Bertha Leverton, who started the Kindertransport reunions almost two decades ago, was there, all the way from England. Although I didn’t recognize the others I was surprised at how familiar they seemed to me. Here were so many who shared my mother’s survival story. It was comforting to find this connection among strangers and discover a sense of strength in not feeling so alone in our bit of shared history that has either been a footnote or completely absent from the broad picture of Holocaust history.
Now my own daughter is asking me all about the conference. She’s always had an affinity for the older generation, so I’m not surprised at her interest in Oma’s friends at the meeting. “What else did Ilse and Kurt and Bertha say, Mommy?”
I think about their stories, details my daughter is still too young to hear, and then I remember something I can tell her. I wrap my arms completely around her tiny body. “They said to always tell you how much I love you.”
“Oh Mommy, you already do that,” she says, grinning.
And if I’m lucky, I’ll be doing that for a very long time.
Joanne Catz Hartman lives and writes in Oakland. She can be reached at [email protected].