Kindertransport Memorials- Stories Cast In Bronze

by John Greeves

“It diminishes none of this if I say that the sun was never as bright, the light as penetrating or the vision so memorable, the sadness so terrible, as in those days, in those streets and houses, with those people who have all vanished forever.” Kinder transport child.

Kindertransport is the name given to the rescue mission that began nine months prior to the outbreak of World War II in which nearly 10,000 children were rescued from Nazi persecution. The children came from Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Vienna, Prague and Danzig. They travelled mainly by train and boat and a few by plane. Parents packed practical and sentimental objects into a small suitcase for their child. Items included clothes, dolls, photographs, letters, but valuables such as jewellery and money were not permitted.

Children aged as young as five and up to the age of seventeen, travelled alone without parents and found refuge in foster homes, hostels and some with relatives. Older children were often absorbed into the country’s agricultural labour force and girls sometimes found themselves in domestic service. Treatment of the children in Great Britain varied, some entered very loving homes, while others received little sensitivity in terms of their social, cultural and emotional needs.

Since the late nineties and the turn of the century, a series of parallel and even competing memorials have appeared across Europe from two sculptors Flor Kent and Frank Meisler to commemorate the estimated 1.6 million children who were murdered in the Holocaust and those who were saved. Many of the statues mark the departure points for these Kindertransports from cities such as Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, Prague and Danzig (now called Gdansk).

Frank Meisler was himself a kinder child. His statues are interesting because they document the various staging posts of his own journey from Danzig in late August 1939 to England and to the safety of his grandmother’s home in London. Frank, aged 14, travelled from Danzig by train via Berlin, the Netherlands and then by ferry from the Hook of Holland to Harwich before reaching his final destination at London’s Liverpool Street Station. Three days after Frank left Danzig, his parents were arrested and deported to the Warsaw Ghetto before they were sent to Auschwitz.

Meisler’s first memorial is called ‘The Departure (2009),’ and was erected in front of the main Railway Station of Gdansk. It depicts the departure point for Jewish children to Britain. The route would have taken Frank through Berlin towards the Dutch border. Standing outside Friedrichstrasse Railway Station in Berlin is the second bronze entitled ‘Trains to Life, Trains to Death’ (2008). This commemorates the 1 6 million children murdered in the Holocaust.

In his book, ‘On the Vistula Facing East’, an autobiography published by Andre Deutsch, Frank Meisler records how an aunt waited on the Berlin platform to give all the children fruit before the train passed through the Dutch countryside. What for many had been an exciting and cheerful experience became a new reality. Frank wrote:

“

I had the uneasy sense, for the first time, that more might be involved in our departure than a temporary separation.” A night-ferry carried the children from the Hook of Holland to Harwich ready for the final leg of the journey.’

Channel Crossing to Life’ (2011) shows children awaiting embarkation from Holland to England to escape Nazi incarceration. The final leg of Frank’s journey terminated in a London station.

‘The Arrival’ memorial (2006) is situated just outside Liverpool Street Station in Hope Square was where many of the Kinder (children) from all over Europe met their foster parents and other officials and embarked on a new life. ‘The Arrival’ memorial shows three girls and two boys of various ages with their suitcases. The youngest child sits on one holding her toy. Around the edge of the plinth are small blocks inscribed with the cities from where the children came.

The memorial was installed in September 2006, and replaced Flor Kent's bronze Für Das Kind (For the Child), which was unveiled in 2003. This new statue was commissioned by World Jewish Relief and the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) and would later lead to a bitter controversy between Flor Kent and the WJR. In 2015, the last of Frank Meisler’s Kindertransport series was created. Entitled ‘The Final Parting’ it is located in Dag Hammarskjöld Platz – Dammtor Bahnhof Hamburg, Germany.

Flor Kent is the other prominent sculptor who has also contributed to the Kindertransport memorials. Born in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, in 1961, she moved to London, where she gained a BA in Arts, and later a MA in Arts for Site-Specific Sculpture in Wimbledon School of Art. Her public art project "Für Das Kind" represented the conclusion of her MA studies. The original piece was located in Liverpool Street Station in 2003 and showed a girl standing next to a giant glass suitcase which contained an array of objects that the children brought with them including clothes, aprons, spectacles, toys and photographs all packed by their parents’ loving hands. The triple laminated glass case was specially made and filled with argon gas which neutralised any effects of UV light while keeping the objects in ideal conditions.

The bronze figure of the girl cast by Flor Kent, was modelled by the seven-year old granddaughter of Eli Eberstarkova one of the original evacuees. The girl is dressed in contemporary clothes as would be other later models for her bronzes that Flor Kent made. Flor Kent tells me why she chose this approach for her figures and what she wanted to achieve:

“I didn’t dress them in 1930’s costumes. They represent the leaving, but they are alive today, and part of society...I didn’t want them to be over dramatic. I didn’t tell them how to look, I wanted them to be very natural.”

The original memorial was made in association with the Museum of London and the Imperial War Museum and supported by the Jewish Community and was a homage to the children saved from Nazi Germany that had made the faithful journey and who arrived safely at Liverpool Street Station.

Bad news was to follow when her work, Fur Das Kind (Liverpool street Station 2003) was to be dismantled and replaced with a the new work by Frank Meisler (The Arrival). The Museum of London had withdrawn its custodial support for Kent’s statue, claiming they could no longer cover the cost of curating the work in a period of recession. As a result, Flor Kent’s memorial was taken apart and put into storage by the World Jewish Relief (WJR). Controversy arose, as Flor Kent claimed to have the “intellectual, moral and property rights” to the work. Such was the acrimony between the two groups that a binding resolution was eventually sought through the Beth Din (a Hebrew House of Judgement) who ruled in favour of the WJR.

Not all was lost, the girl statue finally found a new home in the Holocaust Centre Beth Shalom Nottingham and later the WJR agreed to renounce any claim to Kent’s work. The transfer of the bronze girl to the ownership of the Holocaust centre involved no cost to the centre.

In 2008, another Fur Das Kinder memorial by Flor Kent was unveiled Westbahnhof Station, Vienna. It shows a boy sitting on a huge suitcase and was commissioned by Milli Segal. The boy, Sam Morris is the greatgrandson of Sara Schreiber. Sara Schreiber was saved by Rabbi Solomon Schönfeld, a very brave man who rescued more than four thousand children from the clutches of the Nazis.

The following year in 2009 another Flor Kent statue was unveiled of Nicholas Winton (sometimes referred to as the British Schindler) which shows Winton holding a small child and has a little girl walking beside him. It’s on platform 1a of Hlavni Nadrazi Station (Prague Central Station).

The young child is modelled on an iconic photographic of a child called Hansi Beck. His father survived the Holocaust only to find his young son had died tragically later in the war.

The final bronze in this series of Flor Kent’s work is entitled Fur Das Kinder Displaced (2011) and is found in the concourse of Liverpool Street Station. It is similar to the Vienna statue and shows a boy sitting on a suitcase but with a girl standing. This second opportunity, that came out of the blue, to display her work inside the station came as a complete surprise to Kent and provided some consolation for the loss of her original monument in 2003.

Other notable memorials by other people are to be found at Harwich and Maidenhead, Vienna Kindertransport Museum.

Most of the Kinder survived the war and some were even reunited with parents who had been in hiding or had endured the Nazi concentration camps. Reunions were not always happy as these children had changed, and were now faced by parents who themselves had endured horrific transformative experiences. For the majority, the stark reality was one in which home and family was now lost. Nevertheless, the story of the Kindertransport is one of hope that can exist even in the darkest times, even when the sun is never at its brightest.

Links:

If it's Not Impossible: The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton by Barbara Winton, Publisher: Troubador Publishing 2014

Statues Hither &Thither- René & Peter van der Krogt - https://statues.vanderkrogt.net/ https://frank-meisler.com/

The Journey, Holocaust Centre, Laxton, Nottinghamshire, http://holocaustcentre.net/thejourney/

The AJR Journal, the KT Newsletter, the Kindertransport survey (Making New Lives in Britain), available online via the AJR website: www.ajr.org.uk/kindertransport

Bertha Leverton (ed.), I Came Alone: The Stories of the Kindertransports (Brighton, 1996)

John Greeves originally hails from Lincolnshire. He believes in the power of poetry and writing to change people’s lives and the need for language to move and connect people to the modern world. Since retiring from Cardiff University, John Greeves works as a freelance journalist who's interested in an eclectic range of topics.