Mike Levy reveals the story of the 10,000 Jewish children rescued from the clutches of the Nazis
Starting in 1938 after the November pogroms, known as Kristallnacht, and going right up to the invasion of Poland in September 1939, a concerted and organised effort was made to get children of persecuted families, mostly Jewish, out of Germany. Their rescue from Nazicontrolled areas likely saved them from even worse actions to come from Hitler's regime. But who were the men and women who helped to shepherd these children out of Germany, and who took them in? That's what Mike Levy explores in his book, Get the Children Out!: Unsung Heroes of the Kindertransport. We caught up with him to learn more about this story.
How did the Kindertransport rescue effort to beginin 1938 and how involved was the British government in setting it up?
First of all, the government didn’t fund the Kindertransport in any shape or form. It was completely aloof from the fundraising part of the rescue and made it very clear from the word go that no taxpayer’s money would be used to support these children. For the Kindertransport, we’re talking about around 10,000 children, 90 per cent of whom were Jewish. These children came between the beginning of December 1938 and the end of August to the very, very beginning of September 1939. And in those eight months about 10,000 children came over unaccompanied. They were not allowed to bring their family or their parents with them. Initially, they were up to the age of 17, but then that was lowered a little bit into the spring of 1939 down to 16. What the government did was provide visa-free travel, a visa waiver scheme, you might call it, to allow the children to come without formal documents to enter the country. They had documents, but they were much easier to obtain without going through the lengthy and laborious process of receiving a visa. But the caveats were very much that the scheme had to be run by volunteers, it had to be financed by them, homes and hostels and all the means of welfare had to be provided by voluntary efforts and not by the government.
What were the backgrounds of the people involved in this mission? Did they have any history in activism or political movements?
There was a wide spectrum. At one end there were people who had been politically aware and involved in anti-fascist, anti-Nazi rallies and peace campaigns. There were certainly some parliamentarians who I mention in the book, who had been lobbying the
