The Kindertransport Journey: Memory Into History Exhibit

In the nine months between the pogrom of November 9, 1938 (Kristallnacht “the Night of Broken Glass”) and the start of World War II, a bold rescue operation now known as the Kindertransport brought nearly ten thousand children, most, but not all, Jewish, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland to safety in Great Britain. Much smaller numbers of children were sent to France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Palestine, the United States, and Australia. Most of the parents who sent them to safety perished in the Holocaust. Many of the children settled in Britain; others re-emigrated to Israel, the Americas, and elsewhere, scattering over the world. Some live today in New York and Long Island and will be speaking at the opening.

Kindertransport Survivor Robert Sugar has created a series of exhibition panels that trace these children’s epic journeys from 1938 into the 21st century. Robert fled Vienna at age six and spent the war years on the Millisle Refugee Settlement Farm in Northern Ireland. This exhibit shares the arc of Kindertransport history and details of the lives of individual Kinders and their families. It is an effort to retrieve the almost-lost story of an almost-lost generation.