Evacuation of Children and Women

during World War 2

When did evacuations take place in Britain?
The British evacuation began on Friday 1 September 1939. It was called 'Operation Pied Piper'.
Between 1939 - 1945 there were three major evacuations in preparation of the German Luftwaffe
bombing Britain.

1. The first official evacuations began on September 1 1939, two days before the declaration of
war. By January 1940 almost 60% had returned to their homes.

2. A second evacuation effort was started after the Germans had taken over most of France. From
June 13 to June 18, 1940, around 100,000 children were evacuated (in many cases re-
evacuated).When the Blitz began on 7 September 1940, children who had returned home or
had not been evacuated were evacuated. By the end of 1941, city centres, especially London,
became safer.

3. From June 1944, the Germans attacked again by firing V1 rockets on Britain, followed later by
also V2 rockets. 1,000,000 women, children, elderly and disabled people were evacuate from
London.This new way of attacking Britain carried on until the end of the war in Europe in May
1945.

When did Evacuation end?

World War Two ended in September 1945, however evacuation did not officially end until March
1946 when it was felt that Britain was no longer under threat from invasion. Surprisingly, even 6 months
after the war had ended, there were still 5,200 evacuees living i n rural areas with their host families.

Many evacuees' had returned home long before March 1946.

In April 1945, the Government began to make travel arrangements to return the evacuees to their
homes when the war was over.

By 12th July 1945, more than 100 trains had brought 54,317 evacuees home to London.
THE KINDERTRANSPORT

The Kindertransport (Children’s Transport) was a unique humanitarian

rescue programme which ran between November 1938 and September
1939. Approximately 10,000 children, the majority of whom were
Jewish, were sent from their homes and families in Germany, Austria
and Czechoslovakia to Great Britain.
Immediately after the Nazis came to power in 1933 the persecution of Jews began. This reached a pre-
war peak with Kristallnacht (the ‘Night of the Broken Glass’) on 9/10 November 1938, when 267
synagogues were destroyed, 91 Jews were killed and 30,000 people were taken to concentration camps.

In response to this night of violence, British Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare agreed to speed up the
immigration process by issuing travel documents on the basis of group lists rather than individual
applications. Strict conditions were placed upon the entry of the children. Jewish and non-Jewish
organisations funded the operation and had to ensure that none of the refugees would become a
financial burden on the public. Every child had a guarantee of £50 to finance their eventual re-
emigration. It was assumed at the time that the danger was temporary, and the children would return to
their families when it was safe. Adult family members could not accompany the children.
The Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, later known as the Refugee Children’s
Movement (RCM), sent representatives to Germany and Austria to organise transporting the children.
On 25 November, after discussion in the House of Commons, British citizens heard an appeal for foster
homes on the BBC Home Service. Soon there were 500 offers, and RCM volunteers started visiting these
possible foster homes and reporting on conditions. They did not insist that prospective homes for Jewish
children should be Jewish homes.

1 - Kindertransport girls passing through customs © Wiener Library

The first Kindertransport from Berlin departed on 1 December 1938, and the first from Vienna on 10
December. In March 1939, after the German army entered Czechoslovakia, transports from Prague were
hastily organised. Trains of expelled German Jewish children in Poland were also arranged in February
and August 1939.

The last group of children from Germany departed on 1 September 1939, the day the German army
invaded Poland and provoked Great Britain, France, and other countries to declare war. The last
known Kindertransport from the Netherlands left on 14 May 1940, the day the Dutch army surrendered
to Germany.

After the war ended many of the children stayed in Britain or emigrated to the newly formed state of
Israel, America, Canada or Australia. Most of the children had been orphaned since leaving their homes,
losing their families in the ghettos or camps they had escaped.
The Heartbreaking WWII Rescue That Saved 10,000 Jewish Children
From the Nazis
Parents gave their children advice and checked them over one last time. Then, came the goodbyes —
sincere, but not too sad. “There was laughter and crying and one last hug,” recalled social worker
Norbert Wollheim. The Jewish children, clutching their possessions, then walked toward the train to
become child refugees in England. Their parents stayed behind.

The parting may have been understated, but its consequences were not. For most of the children who
left Germany in scenes similar to the one Wollheim recalled, it was the last time they ever saw their
parents. They were part of the Kindertransport, or children’s transport, a rescue effort that brought
Jewish children to England in the lead-up to the Holocaust.

2 - The Central British Fund for German Jewry, later known as Jewish Relief, discovered these documents in 1994. They show
photographs and details for three children who were brought to Britain from Austria to escape the Nazis.

“We couldn't even foresee, we couldn't surmise for a moment that for many or most, it would be the
last goodbye, that most of those children would never see their parents again, ” Wollheim recalled in an
oral history.

Between 1938 and 1940, about 10,000 Jewish children made their way to Great Britain on the
Kindertransport. But though the rescue is widely seen as one of the only successful attempts to save
European Jews from the Holocaust, the reality was much more complicated.

READ MORE: Holocaust Photos Reveal Horrors of Nazi Concentration Camps

The idea for the Kindertransport came after Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish pogrom in which tens of
thousands of synagogues, homes, and businesses were destroyed in November 1938. Life had been
getting harder for Jews under Nazism, but Kristallnacht represented a turning point. After the violence,
Jewish parents began desperately searching for ways to get themselves—and their children—to safer
countries.

That wasn’t easy. The United States, Great Britain and other countries had strict immigration quotas and
repeatedly refused to change their policies to help Jews under threat from the Nazi regime. At the
1938 Evian Conference, 32 nations had met to discuss what to do about the increasing number of Jewish
refugees. But Great Britain, France and the United States had all left without committing to change their
policies.

3 - Tired and alone, 8-year-old Josepha Salmon, arriving from Germany destined for the Dovercourt Bay camp near Harwich in
December 1938.

Kristallnacht, however, brought more attention to the plight of Jews within Germany and its territories.
When public opinion in Great Britain turned, the British government finally shifted its policy toward
refugees. If English refugee aid organizations would agree to pay for the care of refugee children, Britain
agreed, it would relax its immigration quotas and allow Jewish children age 17 and younger to
immigrate.

There were catches: The children couldn’t be accompanied by parents or any adults, and would have to
leave the host country once the refugee crisis had ended. At the time it was inconceivable that within a
few years most of Europe’s Jewish population would be murdered.

It took a major mobilization effort to get the children to Great Britain. Guarantors—people who agreed
to pay for the children’s upkeep—had to be found for children who wanted to immigrate. (The
government refused to use state dollars to support the children.) Usually, foster families were friends or
family members in Britain, but they were also solicited in newspaper advertisements. “Please help me
bring out of Berlin two children (boy and girl), ten years, best family, urgent case, ” read a characteristic
ad.
 4 - The first batch of German-Jewish children, the 'Kindertransport', complete with identity tags, arriving in England.

On December 2, 1938, the first Kindertransport arrived—200 children from a Jewish orphanage in Berlin
that had been destroyed on Kristallnacht. On the way over the German-Dutch border, the train carrying
the children was boarded by SS members who went through the children’s luggage. “As the SS men
pawed through carefully packed clothes and toys,” writes historian Thomas J. Craughwell, “the children
wept and shrieked in terror.” The children then sailed to Harwich, England on a ferry.

Orphans, homeless children, and the children of people in concentration camps were given priority on
the transports, which lasted until as late as 1940. Many children were sent by their parents, too. Vetting
of foster families was lenient when it happened at all. Some children headed to homes where they were
abused or expected to act as servants.

Over time, the transports stoked increasing anti-Semitism in Great Britain. As fears of a German invasion
grew, parliament passed legislation allowing the internment of “enemy aliens,” refugees thought to be
pro-Nazi. “That many of the ‘enemy aliens’ were Jewish refugees and therefore hardly likely to be
sympathetic to the Nazis, was a complication that no one bothered to try and unravel, ” writes the BBC.
Suspected enemies, among them teenage members of the Kindertransport, were incarcerated on the
Isle of Man or sent to Canada and Australia. About 1,000, or one tenth, of the Kindertransport children
were classified as enemy aliens.
 5 - Three refugee children at the Dovercourt Bay ca mp near Harwich in December 1938.

The fates of the Kindertransport children varied dramatically. Some fought for Britain against the Nazis.
Others reunited with family members after the war. But for most, the day they boarded the transport
trains before World War II was the last time they ever saw their parents. For those who did reunite with
their families, the transition was often difficult, and brought up complicated issues of familial
assimilation, trauma, and even language.

Today, the Kindertransport looms large in Britain’s memories of World War II. But historian Caroline
Sharples warns that it can be used as a way to glorify a country’s generous action without
acknowledging the nuances of the actual situation—the adults who were turned away to die in the
Holocaust, the traumatic experiences of children whose time in Britain was characterized by abuse and
antisemitism, the mistreatment of so-called “enemy aliens.”

“For all of the popular fascination with the Kindertransport,” Sharples writes, “there remain a number of
issues that need to be addressed more fully….the history of this scheme needs to be placed much more
firmly within the broader, long-term context of British immigration policy.”
 6 - The 48th child transport with 10,000 Viennese children goes to Switzerland.

The story of the Kindertransport continues to evolve as survivor stories and historical revelations about
the world’s reaction to the Holocaust are woven together. In December 2018, the Claims Conference,
which negotiates with the German government for financial compensation for victims of the Holocaust,
announced that Germany would make a one-time payment of about $2,800 to each surviving child of
the Kindertransport.

“After having to endure a life forever severed from their parents and families, no one can ever profess
to make [the survivors] whole,” a negotiator of the settlement, Stuart Eizenstat, told the Guardian.
“They are receiving a small measure of justice.”

For survivors of the Kindertransport, their lives were forever altered by their flight from a hostile nation
before the Holocaust.

Guiding Questions:
1. Why is it important to study the past?

2. How can hatred and prejudice be overcome?