Kindertransport, or What Does it Mean to Become a Refugee?

September 15, 2022

In this project, which I created using online material provided by Centropa (particularly the stories of Otto & Kitty Suschny and of Kurt Brodmann), students learn about the Kindertransport. Between Reichspogromnacht (9-10 November 1938) and the Nazi-German invasion of Poland (1 September 1939), about 10,000 children and teenagers from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia were brought to safety in Great Britain. Sometimes they arrived with one or more siblings, but most of them were on their own, and their parents stayed behind.

With my students, I talk about the problems, challenges and dilemmas faced by the children (What to take with you, learning a new language, being lonely, making new friends, etc.) and their parents (Should I send my child, how can I make sure my son/daughter preserves his identity, what should I send with them, etc.). We also discuss how Jewish and non-Jewish individuals and organizations helped those children. Slowly but surely, my students - most of whom are Jewish, and who usually find it fairly easy to identify with Jewish children who had to flee from their homes 85 years ago - realize that we are talking about problems, challenges and dilemmas faced by refugees today as well.

We then discuss what refugees today have in common with Jewish and other refugees in the last 100 years or so, and what we can help them with. I use the poem 'We Refugees', by Benjamin Zephaniah, which talks about how we and our forefathers have all come (and fled) from somewhere, and also an article of mine (Jerusalem Report, December 2010) which talks about the link between the prosperity, scientific and economic success of a country on the one hand, and its hospitality to refugees and other migrants on the other.

As a final - free and creative - assignment, students are asked to put themselves in the shoes of a refugee - Jewish, non-Jewish, then or now, whatever they choose - and express what they have felt and/or learnt throughout the unit, in any creative form they choose. Some of the final results appear below.

Students have used music and mime or written short plays for this assignment. One student wrote a set of haikus, two students on the autistic spectrum wrote a letter (please notice the empathy they show towards their friend, something that is far from obvious for students on the autistic spectrum), and other students created a series of pictures, using Photoshop, that portray - respectively - loneliness, longing and memories.

In 2025, we did the project with the Edith Stein Gymnasium in Darmstadt, Germany. Some of the videos that the students created together can be found here.