Published: 23 April 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
CHILDREN SEEKING SANCTUARY in Britain before the Holocaust were refused the lifeline of the Kindertransport if they were thought to have disabilities or looked too Jewish, say researchers.
Historian Louise London, who has written about Britain’s immigration policies at the time, said that it was “the Jewishness of Jewish refugees” that was seen as “particularly problematic”.
Speaking at a conference on Monday organised by the Association of Jewish Refugees to mark the 80th anniversary of the Kindertransport, Dr London said it was thought that Jewish children separated from their parents “would be less visibly Jewish” and, once dispersed into British families, “over time they would be, as was often said, ‘Anglicised,’ hastening their assimilation.”
She added that the “problem of what to do with the Jews took precedence over efforts to save them”.
One document featuring details of a 15-year-old refugee from Vienna, Kitty Milch, stated she was “an intelligent looking and not particularly Jewish young woman”.
Professor Paul Weindling of Oxford Brookes University, who has studied letters sent by the Kindertransport office in London and organisations applying to accept refugee children, said it was also common for people to request “non-Orthodox” children so that, it was thought, they could be more easily integrated.
FULL STORY Fit, bright, not too Jewish - Kindertransport policy for which children to save from the Nazis revealed (Jewish Chronicle)
Photo: The children who were left behind: (Clockwise from top left) Eva Renee Seinfeld, Selma Streigold, Hans Lang and Robert Rosenmann
