Learning About The Kindertransport

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At a recent talk and concert I attended relating to Russian classical music, one speaker’s name escaped my initial memory of the event though I was notified by event organizer Olga Tabachnikova (Director of the University Of Central Lancashire based Vladimir Vysotsky Centre for Russian Studies) that the deeply moving presentation was given by Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines MBE. Lady Grenfell-Baines is the widow of a famous architect from my home city, Preston, (location of the UCLan University hosting the presentation), George Grenfell-Baines who designed a pavilion for the Festival Of Britain (1951) and planned the British town Peterlee, among many other achievements. Lady Grenfell-Baines has had a remarkable life herself. In her talk she honoured Holocaust survivors who shared their knowledge of Russian music to keep up their moral during their captivity in Nazi concentration camps. Lady Grenfell-Baines recognizes this as a subject close to her heart as she narrowly escaped the camps herself in her childhood due to the Kindertransport, which I only discovered anything about in looking up the life of this incredible lady. Outside of the occupied countries most of the civilian World knew nothing of the atrocities being perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews, gypsys, intellectuals, socialists, communists, homosexuals and many others. The terrible events of Kristallnacht 1938, when hundreds of Jewish home, hospital, business and synagogue windows were smashed in orchestrated attacks by Nazis in Berlin and throughout Germany, exposed the plight of the German Jewish people under Hitler. The attack was impossible to hide from the World media, and many Jews fleeing Germany in recognition that the situation could only get worse, shared their harrowing stories with Jewish community leaders in the UK. A fund and network was set up to spread awareness of the threats to the Jewish people and help evacuate those who wanted to escape but could not afford it. The Quakers and some Freethinkers supported a call by the Jewish leaders to help rescue Jewish children, who would in most cases need to be brought to Britain without their parents and housed with foster-families until Hitler’s regime changed its practices (war was feared but not then yet engaged in). Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain green-lighted the programme and hundreds of children were separated from their families to be brought to the UK. When the families left behind were often rounded up and sent to the concentration camps, many of the Kindertransport Children never saw their parents again. 10,000 children were brought to England. Other European countries also took part in the evacuation programme though some of these countries fell to Nazi occupation during the war, endangering the children again. Lady Grenfell-Baines, a child in Czechoslovakia, soon to be occupied in the 1939 annexation of the Sudetenland, was among the children rescued and brought to England, leading to her passionate work to help educate people on the horrors of the Holocaust. Kindertransport evacuations continued in Germany right up to the invasion of Poland on 1st September 1939, and in some countries at risk of occupation until the war closed the borders, making further rescues impossible. The last group of Kiindertransport refugee children sailed from the Netherlands on the 14th May 1940, the day before the country surrendered to Germany. The Kindertransport workers, many of them Jews themselves, worked at great personal risk, with even the ships they used being at risk of attack by the U-Boats lurking in the Baltic & North Seas. The tireless work of Lady Grenfell-Baines helps to remind us all of what must never be allowed to happen again. Arthur Chappell