The Ginsberg family was struggling. Their daily living conditions were deteriorating, and every day there were more arrests. Moses learned that a few German Jewish children were leaving for England as part of a rescue program created by the British government called the Kindertransport.
Moses and Chane agonized over sending Susi, a thirteen-year-old, alone to England to get her out of harm’s way. In April 1939, they applied for Susi to be part of the Kindertransport and she was accepted. On May 11, Susi landed at Harwich, England and was cared for by the Inter-Aid Committee for Children. Though her family still struggled to leave Germany, Susi was safe.
From Kristallnacht (November 9/10, 1938) until September 1939, 9,354 refugee children arrived in England through the Inter-Aid Committee for Children, of which 70% were Jewish. The first Kindertransport arrived on December 2, 1938, in Harwich, England with 200 Jewish orphans from Berlin. Their orphanage had been destroyed in Kristallnacht. The last German Kindertransport left just as WWII was beginning on September 1, 1939. The last Kindertransport from Europe left Holland in May 1940.
Though Kindertransports lasted for a brief two years, 10,000 Jewish children were saved by being brought to England. Left in Nazi-occupied Europe, the majority of their parents died in the Holocaust.
Photo: Group portrait of Jewish refugee girls, who had come to England on a Kindertransport. The girls are standing in front of Cockley Cley in Swaffham, Norfolk, having been evacuated there on September 2, 1939, from the B’nai Brith hostel in Hackney (London). September 14, 1939, Cockley Cley, England.
Photo credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Ruth Wassermann Segal.
