LONDON — With age taking its toll, survivors of the transport that saved thousands of children from the Nazis converged on London last month for what is likely to be the last international gathering of the Kindertransport.
“There will never be another gathering like this — this is it,” said Bertha Leverton, the Munich-born founder of the organization Reunion of Kindertransport. “We are dying out, and I don’t want this to just peter out. I want to go out on a high.”
The London-based ROK may have sponsored its last reunion. But the Kindertransport Association, a North American organization with some 600 members, will continue to hold gatherings, including a reunion planned for next year.
“The KTA is alive and well,” stressed Ralph Samuel, a 67-year-old Point Richmond resident who co-chairs the KTA’s Northern California chapter. “In fact we have a higher membership this year than any year previously.”
Samuel, who was among 30 Bay Area residents attending the London gathering, said North American Kinder feel “anxious and disappointed” to see the ROK coming to an end. Many North American Kinder belong to the organization and have attended its reunions.
In addition, “there is disappointment that the second generation [in Britain] will have nowhere to go to find out what happened to their parents.”
Between 1938 and 1940, some 10,000 children from Germany, Austria and Poland were plucked from the imminent threat of the Nazi inferno and brought to safety in Britain.
“We came to England alone,” said Alfred Cotton of Oakland, a 73-year-old retired contractor who also attended the London reunion. “Approximately 80 percent of the Kinder lost their parents, including myself.”
In addition to 300 survivors from the United States, the 1,300 reunion attendees included residents of Britain, Canada and Israel. They also came from Australia and New Zealand.
One delegate, originally from Berlin, even traveled to the event from Nepal, where he lives alone, self-sufficient with his own generator, in the mountains outside Katmandu.
The three-day gathering included conferences, seminars and workshops. There were formal dinners and country hikes. One highlight was the unveiling of a plaque in the British Parliament that expresses the gratitude of the Kinder to the British government for saving them.
“The whole thing was very moving,” said Cotton, co-chair of the KTA along with Samuel. “It was sad, because it was probably the last time we will all be together.”
Being with other Kinder, he said “gives you very good feelings. You have an instant rapport.”
Samuel attended the reunion with his foster brother Peter Epstein of Liverpool, whose parents took Samuel in after he arrived from Dresden at the start of the war. “I felt for the first time that he was appropriately thanked for what his family did in saving my life,” Samuel said.
For ROK founder Leverton, the lasting memory will be a book for the Kinder that will be as exclusive as the group itself.
Available only to Kinder families, the book will contain archival material, stories and articles by them, as well as their names, addresses and telephone numbers.
Leverton, now 75, founded the ROK 10 years ago to keep the former Kinder in touch with each other through a regular newsletter.
Fifty years after the war began, Leverton said she realized most Kindertransport survivors had never spoken about their experiences. Their children might have known they were from Germany, Poland or Austria, she said, but they knew little of the ordeal their parents had endured.
She decided to remedy that by organizing the first Kindertransport reunion. The 1989 event not only captured the imagination of the 700 Kinder in attendance, but also the attention of the international media.
The idea of an association was picked up by American Kinder, who established the Kindertransport Association in New York. It now has chapters throughout the country, including the Northern California chapter founded in 1991.
Leverton arrived in Britain in January 1939 when she was 15, leaving behind her parents and a sister. “I prayed every night that they would be able to come.”
Her prayers were answered. Fate and circumstance allowed her parents to flee Germany in 1940 and slowly make their way to Britain.
The overwhelming majority of other children’s prayers were not answered. Most continued to receive mail from their parents for a few months after they arrived in Britain. Then the letters from home stopped, and they were left to guess why.
“I lost my childhood,” Leverton says. “We all lost our childhoods. We all knew what was going on.” Curiously, she recalls, “most of them did not break down during the war.
“They broke down afterward — when they saw the pictures of the concentration camps, when they knew for certain that their parents would never be coming for them, when they learned in what gruesome circumstances they had become orphans.”
Like many of the Kinder, Leverton was assigned to a non-Jewish family. But while she emerged with her Judaism intact, many others — younger than her and influenced by their adoptive families — did not.
“Quite a few became Christians,” she said. “They came as little children and needed something to believe in. You take children 5, 6, 7, and it gives them roots. This is what happens.
“Those that came to the reunion showed an interest in Judaism. They know they are still Jews and they want their children to know.
“There is still something in the soul.”
Leverton blames the British Jewish community for the placements into non-Jewish homes. Many, she said, were simply unwilling to take in the refugee children.
“Anglo Jewry didn’t open their arms to us,” she recalled. “We didn’t look like refugees. Many of us arrived in our finest clothes and some people resented that. They wanted refugees to look like refugees.”
The problem was compounded by the insensitivity of the refugee committees — composed of Jews — who “did not pay much attention to whether Jewish children went to Jewish homes.”
But she hastens to add there were exceptions. One wealthy couple bought a home in London that could accommodate 13 of the Kinder. And 51 boys were billeted together in a mining village in the north of England. “Of the 51,” she said proudly, “only one was lost to Yiddishkeit.”
Today, the Kinder form a large and intensely close international family, largely as a result of Leverton’s newsletter.
“The refugees mainly mix with each other and marry each other,” she said. “I suppose the major characteristic of the Kinder is unity. It all happened a long time ago, but you can never forget something like that.”