This is an article that was published in The Palestine Post on December 7 1938. The article reported that Whittingehame House in Scotland, the residence of the late Earl Balfour, had been offered by Balfour’s nephew as a hostel for Jewish refugee children. According to the article, 200 children were to be housed in the building. The article referred to the symbolic link between Balfour and the Jewish people and quoted Rabbi Salis Daiches of Edinburgh on Balfour’s role in issuing the declaration “which held forth to the Jewish people of the world the hope of a National Home in Palestine.” This statement connects the Balfour Declaration’s assistance to the Jewish people in 1917 to the assistance now being provided by Balfour’s family to the children who had left areas ruled by the Nazis. The following paragraph reports on the departure of 3,000 children from Vienna for Holland and England.
These newspaper reports refer to the rescue operations known as the Kindertransport which were carried out between December 1938 and September 1939. This article is evidence of the beginning of the Kindertransport, which ultimately saved 12,000 children from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia and provided them with a new life in England. Once in England, the young children lived with families or in hostels, large residences, schools, or farms.
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Kinderstransport – Kindertransport, the German word for “children’s transport,” is the name given to the rescue operation of 12,000 Jewish children from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia between December 1938 and the outbreak of World War II on September 1, 1939. Following the Kristallnacht pogrom, pressure was put on the British government to provide a safe haven for Jewish children. Jews and non-Jews, such as Wilfrid Israel, Bertha Bracey, and Nicholas Winton, were the driving forces behind the Kindertransport operation. The Jewish community in Britain provided funds to assist with the absorption of the children. The children were accompanied by their parents to local railway stations and, in many cases, never saw their parents again. Once in England, the children were placed in foster homes, hostels, schools, and farms. In many cases the children were welcomed and cared for, however they inevitably suffered extreme trauma due to parting from their parents, adjusting to a foreign country, and worrying constantly for their parents in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Holocaust – The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide and persecution of European Jewry by the German Nazi regime and its collaborators in Europe and North Africa during World War II. The Holocaust was implemented in stages from Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party’s first rise to power. From 1933 anti-Jewish laws were passed in Germany which excluded the Jews from German society. The Nazis also began to create a network of concentration camps where Jews and other “undesirable elements” of society were imprisoned in inhumane conditions. With the Nazi occupation of Europe during World War II, which started in 1939, the formal persecution of Jews was implemented in all the occupied countries. Jews were sent to ghettos, made to work in forced labour, and lived in appalling conditions. In 1942 the Nazis held the Wannsee Conference where they decided on the Final Solution which detailed the extermination all the Jews of Europe. Initially, more than one million Jews were exterminated by death squads named Einsatzgruppen, who were assisted by local collaborators. As of 1942 Jews were deported from the ghettos to death camps in Poland, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, where millions were murdered in gas chambers on arrival. Jews who were not immediately murdered were sent to force labour, and many died as a result of the harsh conditions, starvation, and disease. Jewish resistance was extremely difficult, but attempts to fight the Nazis were made by Jewish partisans and fighters in uprisings such as, most famously, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Sobibor Uprising. In 1944, as it became clear that the Nazis were losing the war, Nazi camp commanders began to close the camps and forced the survivors to march towards Germany. Already sick and weak from the years of violence, more than 250,000 Jews died on these death marches. The Holocaust came to an end with the defeat of the Nazis in May 1945. Six million Jews, two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, were murdered with millions more experiencing tremendous suffering, violence, and loss. In addition to the Jews, millions of Roma (gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people, and Soviet and Polish prisoners of war were also murdered during the Holocaust.
Arthur Balfour – Arthur Balfour (1848–1930) was born in Whittingehame House in Scotland. After studying at Eton, Cambridge, and Trinity College, he pursued a political career, becoming a Conservative party politician. He served in many different roles ranging from an MP to prime minister from 1902 to1905 and later foreign minister in Lloyd George’s cabinet. Balfour believed in the strong and important connection between Christianity and Judaism. He made efforts to help the Zionist movement receive charters to settle in Sinai and later in Uganda. After a meeting with Chaim Weizmann, Balfour became a strong supporter of the Zionist movement. In 1917 Balfour issued the declaration that bears his name supporting a “national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” On April 1, 1925 Balfour was the guest of honour at the inaugural ceremony of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Balfour died in 1930 and is honoured throughout Israel in the names of villages, streets, and forests.
