Saturday 30 November 2013

flรผchtling


There was a very poignant and unexpected collection of memories narrated over the radio in commemoration of the upcoming seventy-fifth anniversary of the rescue mission Kindertransport, organsied by British Jewish and Quaker leadership in the days following die Kristallnacht (the Night of the Broken Glass) until the outbreak of World War II.

Some ten thousand children in Nazi Germany and in occupied lands were placed with foster families in England, Scotland and Wales. The first trains departed Germany to arrive in Harwich on 1. December 1938. The war orphaned many of these saved children but bonds were strong with their adoptive families. Though the story of this exodus is retold from time to time through the lens of historical drama and has been the subject of theatre and movies and fate of these refugees is not unknown or forgotten, involving many famous personalities, it does seem that the dread decision to split families apart, parents hoping to find sanctuary that many times was not a temporary arrangement, and the acts of kindness maybe have been so well attended. The remembrance is especially pointed with the current climate on immigration and welling refugee crises. Just a few from a multitude of stories, the radio montage was mostly recounted through the experiences of Sir David Attenborough, whose family, a headmaster at a boys' school in Leicester responded to the urgent call for volunteers to take in displaced children.
One day, not long after the project started, Attenborough's mother brought home two young girls that became they boys' foster-sisters. An avid fossil- and rock-hound from an early age, it was piece of amber (Bernstein) from the beaches of the Baltic (Ostsee) filled with preserved prehistoric insects. This frozen terrarium, microcosm, was a source of fascination and inspired the nature documentary The Amber Time Machine decades later and included one of the first rigourous scientific attempts to extract ancient DNA. There was also the powerful story of Kurt Beckhardt, the son WWI Luftwaffe ace aviator, Felix Beckhardt, from Wiesbaden whose achievements were later discounted by the Nazis and supplanted by more palatable heroes because of his Jewish heritage. As his father's record and activities became more of a nuisance, the young Beckhardt was sent to England while his parents were held at Buchenwald. His parents eventually escaped and fled to Portugal—the family reunited years later but very much shaped by these separate odysseys.