Description
Author: Jason Hensley. 401 pages, paper back. Published by the author in 2016.
In 1938 and 1939, the Kindertransport occurred––a movement to bring thousands of Jewish children out of Nazi occupied territories to safety in Great Britain. These children came without their parents, almost always without a knowledge of English, and also little experience with English culture. They came to a new family, a new country, and a new life. Approximately 250 of these children were sponsored by Christadelphians, a small Christian group. They came and lived in the homes of Christadelphian families, or in hostels that the Christadelphians had started. So often the Holocaust is considered in terms of statistics––how many perished and how many were affected. Yet it is often the individual stories that provide the most powerful human connection and the opportunity to learn. Rather than focus on the statistics, this series examines the experiences of these people, who came to England as children, and lived with Christadelphians. Ten of the former Jewish refugees, and their families, were contacted and collaborated in this effort to bring about this first volume. This is their story.
The book is illustrated by many black and white photographs and contains copious information on the sources used and a bibliography.
An introduction and extract from the book is published on page 41 of The Bible Magazine July 2016.
An electronic version of this book can be purchased on Kindle from Amazon. Hard copies are also available from Amazon.
Interviews with two of the subjects of the book can be seen on You tube:
Book Review
Would you rather keep your children with you, knowing it meant putting their lives in danger, or send them away to safety, knowing you may never see them again? This was the terrible choice that many Jewish parents in Nazi Germany faced. It must have been painfully clear to them what was looming in the years ahead, that they were willing to send their children to another country, to stay with people they had never met, to give them a chance of survival that they often could not hope for themselves. One of the survivors, Suse Rosenstock, says: “I’ve looked at each of my children as they’ve reached the age of eight. I have three … I looked at each one of them and wondered if I could have that strength to do what [my mother] did”. Another, Ingrid Wuga, remembers boarding the train to begin her journey to England, and seeing one father lifting his little girl out through the train window, deciding at the last minute that he could not part with her.
Brother Jason Hensley, the author of Part of the Family, is the principal of the Christadelphian Heritage School in Simi Valley, California. As part of his research into teaching senior students about the Holocaust, he recognised that one of the simplest and most powerful ways to study a historical event is to examine the stories of individuals. This is partly what led him to write this book, researching and collating the stories of ten Jewish children who were sent from Nazi Germany to live with Christadelphian foster families in Britain.
In the first part of the book, Hensley provides a short background of Christadelphians and their involvement with the Jews. Unlike some other religious groups (notably Catholics), who regarded them as Christ-killers and often openly supported Nazi policies, Christadelphians have always seen salvation as “of the Jews”. No other religious group as a whole set out to support and sponsor them the way the Christadelphians have – not for humanitarian reasons or to try and convert them, but simply out of respect and love for God’s chosen people. The Christadelphians expected the restoration of Israel long before the Zionist movement began, and the whole community raised money to support Jewish groups that attempted to settle in Palestine from the mid-1800s until the 1930s. In the years following, they watched with concern the growing persecution of Jews in Germany, and soon began raising funds and resources to support Jewish refugees fleeing from Europe instead. When the ‘Kindertransport’ began, many of them saw it as another opportunity to help.
The Kindertransport was an organised rescue effort that was set up by the British government to transport Jewish children out of Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland in the months leading up to the Second World War. It was established shortly after Kristallnacht (‘Night of Broken Glass’), a huge organised pogrom that spread across Nazi Germany in 1938, revealing to the world Hitler’s evil intentions towards the Jewish people. Through the Kindertransport program, around 10,000 Jewish children were transported out of Nazi-occupied countries and taken into foster homes, farms and hostels across Britain. Of these, around 250 were taken into Christadelphian homes. This book tells the stories of ten of those children.
Each story is different, but they all contain a similar narrative thread. Each time, the author gives some historical background and context, then recounts each person’s experiences, supported with letters, photos, maps and snippets of their recollections in their own words. There is a common theme of happy childhood disrupted by growing anti-Semitism, coming to a head with the terror of Kristallnacht, which many of the children experienced firsthand. They all recall the pain and confusion of leaving their home and family for an uncertain future in a new country. Many of them could not speak a single word of English. Several went on to experience suspicion and animosity in wartime Britain due to their German heritage, even though, as Jews, they were the furthest possible thing from Nazi sympathisers. Despite this, they all warmly speak of the kind welcome they experienced from their Christadelphian foster families in England. These families often tried to help them contact their own family members or to bring them to England, although very few attempts succeeded. In most cases, the transported child was the only member of their entire family that survived the Holocaust.
This book highlights the generosity of the Christadelphians who took in a child during the difficult war years and their willingness to truly live by the principles they believed. Many of them volunteered, even though it placed considerable financial strain on their own family. One couple did so, even though their own son had recently died and they were still struggling with their grief. In one of the stories, a teenage girl who had come to stay with a family, Ursula Meyer, found herself in a terrifying situation where she was suspected of being a German spy and threatened with a pistol. Her foster father, Norman Sawyer, stood in front of her and said “you shoot me first”.
All of the transported children kept in touch with their sponsor families after the war and all of them remain deeply grateful. None of them were pressured into following the family’s religious beliefs, although several chose to be baptised of their own accord after coming to an understanding of their faith. They all speak with respect and love of their foster families, and of Christadelphians generally, as wonderful people with strong moral values and kind hearts. All of them, no matter their circumstances or backgrounds, were made to feel ‘part of the family’.
This wonderful, moving book brings life to history by telling the stories of a few individuals whose lives were touched by the terrible events of the Holocaust.
Sarah Burney, Enfield South Australia
This review was first published in the Lampstand magazine for November - December 2016
Review by Geoff Henstock
Many books about the holocaust have been published, and justly so. It is an important event in history which needs to be studied and understood. The atrociousness of the holocaust almost defies belief; the vast number of people slain and extent of suffering overwhelms students. So terrible are the facts and figures related to the holocaust they can impede a proper appreciation of this period in modern history.
One of the standard historical texts about the holocaust is Sir Martin Gilbert’s mammoth work The Holocaust the Jewish Tragedy. Readers of that work sometimes observe that it could have been somewhat shorter had the author not included the names of so many individuals who appear to be incidental to the matter under discussion. Such criticism, however, misses the point Sir Martin was trying to make. Aware that the statistics can be mind-numbing he deliberately wrote the work as a record of people – individuals with names, personalities, hopes and aspirations just like his readers. The inclusion of so many names serves to personalise the story and helps readers to relate to what happened.
Adolph Hitler and the Nazi regime in Germany developed what they called “The Final Solution” to deal with what they called “the Jewish question”, the solution being the systematic extermination of European Jewry. Although “The Final Solution” often is linked with the Wannsee Conference (named after the Berlin suburb where it was held in 1942) the plan was really the culmination of policies the Nazi administration had been implementing since it seized power in Germany in 1933.
Persecution of Jews by the Nazis became increasingly severe throughout the 1930’s. Perceptive Jews recognised where the policies of the Nazis were heading and many Jewish refugees began looking for havens outside Germany. In July 1938 a conference held at Evian in France and attended by representatives of 24 nations discussed how the world should respond to the plight of these refugees, but little of substance was agreed. It certainly had no impact on the leaders of Germany.
A major milestone in the intensification of anti-Semitic aggression in Germany was Kristallnacht in November 1938 when the murderous intent of the Nazi regime became too obvious to ignore. While governments around the world were reluctant to act there were individuals who stepped into the breach. In the United Kingdom some of these individuals lobbied the government, and by the end of November 1938 arrangements had been approved under which nearly 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children from Europe would find refuge in Britain. Many of these children arrived by train in what is called the Kindertransport (German for "children's transport").
While there is a number of excellent texts on the Kindertransport, some of which mention the Christadelphians, there has until now not been a book dedicated to reviewing the involvement of Christadelphians in providing homes for refugee children who arrived via the Kindertransport. Jason Hensley has begun to fill that gap with the publication in May 2016 of Part of the Family (volume 1). The book’s subtitle Christadelphians, the Kindertransport, and rescue from the holocaust is an accurate description of its contents.
The author is the principal of a Christadelphian school in California. He has written a number of books, including a very helpful volume on the persecution of the Jews under title Centuries of Persecution (reviewed in the Testimony, February 2016). In some respects, this new work might be seen as complementing the earlier book but it had really its genesis in a conference for educators at the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Washington that bro Jason attended in July 2015. That he has produced a substantial volume of nearly 400 pages in less than a year is testimony to bro Jason’s enthusiasm for the subject and his industry (and, we may presume, a very understanding wife!)
The author quite reasonably assumes that the reader will be broadly familiar with the facts of the holocaust, so these are not dealt with separately. The book’s first section reviews the relationship between Christadelphians and the Jews. It outlines the Biblical basis for their interest in the natural seed of Abraham and also the history of the community’s support from its earliest days to the 1940’s for Jews fleeing pogroms in Europe, especially those who sought refuge in the Holy Land.
Having established the basis for their interest in the plight of the Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution, bro Hensley in Part 2 moves on to provide biographical sketches of ten children taken into the homes of British Christadelphians. Facts and figures are important in the study of history, but it is the stories of the individuals involved that puts flesh on the skeleton the facts establish. As bro Jason says on page 50:
Sometimes individual stories get lost in the facts and the figures. Therefore, this book, along with the subsequent books published in this same series, is an attempt to tell those stories.
The story of each child refugee was prepared in consultation with the individual concerned (if still alive) and their family. The subjects very generously provided access to photographs and documents relevant to their experience. At the start of each chapter a map is provided indicating the key places mentioned in each story. In each case the author introduces the story of the person with comments about relevant events which were unfolding at the time of their birth and which transpired during their life leading up to the time when their parents made the anguished decision to despatch their child to a foreign land for safety. In most of the cases documented, the parents of these children perished at the hands of the Nazis without ever seeing their children again.
Some of the brothers and sisters who hosted the children are well known; others will be known to relatively few outside their immediate ecclesial circle. All made a significant sacrifice to provide a haven for a child who almost certainly would have perished had they not been selected for the Kindertransport. The children comment on their exposure to ecclesial life; it is pleasing to note the overwhelmingly positive tone of these comments. In a few cases the children came to embrace the Truth and were baptised.
In a few cases there are links to the Testimony. One of the couples who hosted a child was bro Philip and sis Lillian Adams of Sheffield. Bro Adams was an editor of the Testimony and contributed many articles over the years. Sis Adams also contributed articles to the magazine. At least one of the refugee children who was later baptised (sis Elfriede Ransome) contributed to the magazine in later life; bro Jason notes that her experiences as a refugee can be detected in the language used in an article that was published in 2003.
The book concludes with a useful glossary of terms relating to the holocaust. There is also an extensive bibliography and an index. The stories told are moving and captivating. We should be very thankful to these individuals and their families for sharing their stories and to bro Jason for documenting this fascinating subject. Many will look forward eagerly to volume 2.
Geoff Henstock
This review was first published in The Testimony October 2016
The second volume of this book has been published and is available on this website.