The Kindertransport: Contesting Memory is by Jennifer Craig- Norton. This book relies on extensive research by the author into the files of the various organizations that ran the Kindertransports. This research led her to The University of Southhampton in Great Britain where she located a “trove of remarkably preserved and previously unknown archival materials”. (Craig, p 15). This trove of materials were files of the Polenaktion Kindertransport of 1938. This led her to looking into this particular transport.
This transport consisted of children who had been thrown out of Germany with their parents and sent back to Poland where their ancestors has come from. These Jews were considered neither German nor Polish and lived in limbo for a time. The parents wanted to get their children to safety and took advantage of the Polish Jewish Refuge Fund’s offer to take their children to England where they would be safer. With these extraordinary records as well as other records, Jennifer began to look at this particular transport.
However, she wanted to look at more than the saving of the children, she wanted to look into what happened to the children, how they were treated, their religious teachings, as well as the separation of siblings. She wanted to look at the parents and why they chose to send their children away. She also wanted to look at the caretakers and find the reasons they chose to undertake such a vital role in this undertaking. Why did some last and others not?
Jennifer Craig-Norton also talked to the children who had been on this transport and their siblings or children. She wanted their view of what happened. Some of the children had been interviewed just after the war; but she believed they were so involved with being grateful for being saved that they didn’t always tell the entire story. Her travels to visit these elderly people took her all across the globe.
She also looks at the children and how this event changed their lives. The act of separation from their parents and for some, the inability to really see what was happening left an indelible mark on these children. Why did their parents send them off and keep their younger siblings at home? What had they done to lose their parents’ love? Why didn’t they write later? Even when they were old enough to know why, they still had the same questions. She brought out a fascinating point of how the separation was so important in the way the children acted years later as adults.
What began as a project for the Museum Fellow Program at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum extended over years and resulted in this book. After watching her research from a distance, I knew I wanted to read this book as soon as it came out. The book met all my expectations and more. It is easy to read and understand; but at the same time, it was difficult. To wrap your mind around what the individuals were doing and what they went through is very emotional and difficult. I found myself having to take breaks from reading this in order to think about what I had just read.
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