In the first part of this blog, we focused on the use of the term Kindertransport to mean rescue more broadly from 1934-1942. When the British Kindertransport came to a halt in September 1939 there was a final transport from the Netherlands to British shores in May 1940. I have recently found a list of children who were fully guaranteed and paid for, yet they never arrived in Britain. These children’s fathers were often in Kitchener Camp. Well into October 1939 the British were still trying to organize for children to escape and be reunited with their parents. Today these seem like envisaged Kindertransports as they did not take place but at the time the refugee organizations hoped that they would become a reality. While the British transports did eventually come to an end during the war other transports continued. The American Kindertransports have been overshadowed by the fact the 1939 Wagner-Rogers Bill did not pass Congress. Yet the American transports via Japan and Russia and Spain, Portugal, and Casablanca did continue as part of the America-Aktion scheme. Recently, the term “The 1,000 Children” has come into use to describe the unaccompanied children who journeyed to America. We now have the lists of Kinder for America which were put together by the Austrian Jewish community. More children are listed than actually left. The irony is not lost here because 1,000 is also the number of children who Britain had reserved places for as the war began. These later transports to America also identify other Kindertransport routes which are not necessarily known to a British audience.

My colleague and co-author Prof. Bill Niven has found Gestapo files relevant to the Kindertransport. All the Kinder who left needed permission from the Gestapo. The Nazis continued to encroach upon the Kinder’s worlds through their laws which expelled their parents from their professions, deprived their families of their livelihoods, and robbed their parents and grandparents of their lives as some committed suicide after Kristallnacht. The children’s futures and freedoms were severely impacted as they were no longer permitted to go to school, the park, and the cinema, and they were stripped of their nationalities. Eventually, the Kinder would come face-to-face with the Gestapo as they boarded the trains with the children until the Dutch border. Tragically, the aftermath of the Wannsee Conference which took place on 20th January 1942 would also bring the Nazis face-to-face with the Kinder. Adolf Eichmann was heavily involved in the Kindertransports which exiled the Kinder from their homelands. He would go on to be instrumental in the deportation of children on Kindertransports to death.

Around the time of the Vél d’Hiv roundup in July 1942 Eichmann, Frank Nowak, and Theodor Dannecker discussed the “Kinderabschub” – to literally shove Jewish children out of France towards occupied Poland. During this discussion Eichmann decided that the “Kindertransports should roll” as soon as possible. I first came upon the use of term Kindertransport meaning deportation in late Prof. David Cesarani’s book on Eichmann. Bill and I then viewed the files which Cesarani refers to. We also found further evidence that the term was indeed used to mean the removal of children to the east. Similar to the original rescue, there were adults present. The Kindertransport to Britain also rescued some of the adult chaperones who had permits to stay – these were often domestic visas. There are documents which show the Nazis discussed whether the children who were being deported should travel on their own. Some of the children are in fact deported on transports just for children but many transports of children included elderly Jewish people. The Kinder’s parents were often separated from their children – they were not always deported together.

There are so many examples of Jewish children being deported on Kindertransports to death, but this is something which has been largely overlooked within the British context of the Kindertransport. However, this is certainly known in Germany and the Netherlands for example. We have forgotten about the fluctuation of the term. We have also neglected to remember the transports which never made it to Britain. For example, there is a list of 71 children in Danzig who were unable to board a Kindertransport to British shores. Could these children have been part of the 1000 children we had hoped to rescue as the war started to rage?

There is a document from August 1942 about Kindertransports from Drancy to Auschwitz. It clearly states that there were Nazi meetings in July 1942 about deporting children on Kindertransports. There were deportation Kindertransports from Vught in the Netherlands to Sobibor – over 1000 children were deported from this camp. There are also Kinderlists from Westerbork to Auschwitz. On 21 August 1943, 1,200 children were taken to Theresienstadt and, a few weeks later, deported to Auschwitz. On 5th January 1945 there was also a Kindertransport from Buchenwald to Bergen-Belsen. 21 Jewish boys from Poland and Hungary were on the list. The youngest was 2-year-old. Yidele Henechowicz was born in the Piotrków ghetto, and he and his father had been deported from a forced labor camp for Jews to Buchenwald. His mother had been murdered by the SS in Treblinka. His father was not allowed to travel with his son to Bergen-Belsen. Miraculously, Yidele was liberated and survived.

In the postwar period the term “Kindertransport” does not disappear as it is then used to refer to groups of German children being rehabilitated from the bombings to countries such as Switzerland. It was the historian Vera K. Fast who first argued that Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfeld extended the term to describe the evacuation of children who had survived the Holocaust in hiding or even in concentration camps. In suggesting that this fourth wave of child refugees was in many respects connected to the earlier transports, Fast traces the continuous uprooting of Jewish émigré children right into the postwar period. We actually have lists of Jewish children who were in the Allied Zones after the war waiting to be sent on postwar Kindertransports to their new homelands.

The term was also used another time before the 1980/1990s, which is when the Kinder first publicly used it to mean rescue – and that was during the Eichmann trial in 1961. Here, it was directly used to describe the deportation of children to the east. I have previously written about the deep ambivalence of the term but going back into the archive has reinforced my sense of two basic, very different meanings. The refugee organisations understood the Kindertransport to be a rescue scheme, but they were also fully aware of Kindertransport lists they’d drawn up which never left. They would eventually learn about the fates of the children. The Nazis knew that the original Kindertransports were for purposes of exile. They are the ones who changed the meaning and symbolism of the term to mean something absolutely terrifying – the eradication of the innocent, of the next generations.

Why is this double meaning not known more widely? For a long time, the British narrative of the Kindertransport has dominated Kindertransport research. No children who reached British shores on British Kindertransports were deported to the camps. The children who had places and who never arrived in Britain have been overlooked. In Britain, we do not really remember the children we did not save. Yet some children we evacuated from the camps after the war had places on the Kindertransport, but were not able to flee. In many cases the survivors did not know that they had places because they were too young to know what was being planned for them by the adults around them, and the documents which prove this have only recently been found.

The memorial sites at former camps across continental Europe though do remember the Kindertransports to death. They are the ones who have ensured that these Kindertransports have not been forgotten. For example, in Vught there is a Kindertransport memorial to the children who were deported from the camp. Oorlogsbronnen, Yad Vashem, Buchenwald, and many other memorial sites have used their social media to present the stories of children who were deported on Kindertransports. The most famous Kindertransport memorial network by Frank Meisler has a memorial in Berlin entitled “Trains to Life – Trains to Death”. It is striking though as my co-author Bill Niven noted in our first book on the transnational memory of the Kindertransport German memory had for a long time overlooked the fates of the children who had escaped. It seems the British have not faced the story of the children they could have rescued but Germany has started to reflect upon what happened to the children when they were forced to flee.

On 24th February 2026 we commemorated the fourth anniversary of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The term Ukrainetransport was formed from the term Kindertransport. In fact, it was a second-generation Kind who coined the term. This modern day Kindertransport also had adult chaperones but this time mothers were able to be rescued with their children. The extension of the term into the 21st century is significant as the Kinder and their families think associatively. The term Kindertransport has been restored to its original use – to rescue children.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)