“Travel Toward a Happy Future!”

“On Parting”

As painful as it was to let the children leave, it was often the only hope that at least they would have a secure future. Max Heymann from Berlin wrote a poem for his 14-year-old daughter Eva on the occasion of her departure on 20 May 1939. It ended with lines of encouragement: “If the new world seems curious, be strong and try to puzzle through. The old world disappointed us. Your life will be new!” Eva Heyman would start a new life in England, but she would never see her father again. He died in the Theresienstadt ghetto in 1944.

The lucky ones followed

Alfred Dienemann of Berlin also fearfully awaited the separation from his 14 and 9-year-old children, Ursula and Wolfgang. In mid-December—he had just been released from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp—he wrote to his siblings in Palestine:

“We hope that we can send both children to schools in England in the coming weeks. Later they are supposed to go to the USA, to schools or elsewhere. The endless negotiations are still up in the air. Then we have ‘seen children off.’ I can’t bring myself to tell you the meaning that lies behind these words. At the same time, the struggle is for ourselves.”

A few months after their children were saved, Dienemann and his wife were able to follow them to England.

For siblings Stefan und Carola Prager from Berlin, who were 14 and 11 years old when they left Germany, the separation from their parents was permanent. On 26 October 1941, just before their deportation, their parents sent a final letter to Sweden. After their father, Wolfgang Prager, announced that they “would soon go on a big journey,” he added:

“Never forget your parents, who always only wanted everything good for you. Stay true to each other and support each other in times of crisis.”

Their mother Ruth wrote below:

“I hardly know what I should say to you because my heart is so full, and words are so small and say so little. I have always only hoped for a reunion with you, but likely we are now standing before a twist of fate.”

A new life

Annemarie Fleck from Danzig went to England with a Kindertransport at age 13. She lived with a foster family and wrote to her parents on 28 October 1939:

“I’m so happy that you’re healthy. Everything here is just as usual, you can’t tell there’s a war. Everyone has enough and I eat a ghastly amount. I help out a lot more at home, and except for cooking I can do almost everything. My foster-mama says she doesn’t know how she’ll get along without me.”

For Annemarie a new life began in England. In her weekly letters to her parents, who were often traveling for months at a time following their emigration to Shanghai in 1941, she wrote extensively of her daily life, experiences with friends, her first love, and school. In Shanghai, her parents were distraught. It seemed to them that their daughter had become estranged to them, to which Annemarie answered in English on 20 July 1940:

“I’m sorry […], that you seem to know me so little as to have any doubt about my feelings.”

And she assured them that she only wrote about these “little, stupid events” to stay optimistic and to enjoy life, which she also hoped her parents would do, since “Who knows what may happen in the Future?”

Today, only a few of the now elderly “Kinder” are still alive. That makes it all the more important that we preserve their stories in the archive, so that they are not forgotten.