These are two photographs from the Centropa collections. The first photograph is of Ruth Halova aged twelve in her classroom in Cesky Krumalov, then Czechoslovakia. She can be seen in the centre of the photograph seated at her desk in the second row. She is wearing a checked dress and has short hair. The bare classroom has a wooden floor and two windows. Ruth is seated in a row of girls; there are boys on the left-hand side of the photograph.
The photograph was taken in 1938, a short while before the German annexation of Czechoslovakia, when Ruth was forced to leave the school with her classmates chanting: “Juden raus” (Jews out). She recalled saying to the only other Jewish girl in the class: “The worst thing about it is that now we'll stay dumb forever, as we can't count on any more education.” Ruth left their city after the German annexation and finally settled in Prague. When the situation for Czech Jews worsened, Ruth’s mother heard that Jewish children were being helped to escape to England. Subsequently, Ruth and her sister left for England on the Kindertransport. Ruth was thirteen by this time and found herself helping the younger children on the transport. On July 1 she arrived in London, where the children waited for their foster families wearing name tags around their necks. Ruth was taken by a young man, who she later learned was Nicholas Winton, on a train to Birmingham to live with a non-Jewish foster family called the Joneses. They were a warm family, and Ruth soon learned English and made friends with her friendly classmates. When she was fourteen, Ruth moved on to secondary school thanks to an anonymous donation from a Quaker. Ruth lived through the war in relatively good conditions, and in May 1945 she was reunited with her mother, who had spent the war year in Theresienstadt, in Czechoslovakia. It was then that she learned that most of her family had been killed in the Holocaust.
The second photograph is of a visit in the 1990s to Cesky Krumlov by Nicholas Winton, who Ruth called “my savior.” Ruth is leading Nicholas Winton and both are smiling. A European city can be seen in the background. Speaking of “Nicky,” as she called him, she said to her Centropa interviewer:
"All I can add…is my deepest gratitude for the blessing that…I’m able to count myself amongst the “children” of the bravest and most capable, kindest and wisest – and at the same time most modest person of our time."
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Nicholas Winton – Nicholas Winton (1909–2015) was born to a Christian family of German Jewish origin. Winton organised the Czech Kindertransport – the rescue of 669 children, mostly Jewish, from Czechoslovakia in 1938. He arranged their safe passage to England and found foster families for them. Winton, a quiet and modest man, never mentioned these actions, and it was only in 1988, when his wife found a scrapbook in their attic with details about the children he had saved, that his story went public. He received recognition for his work and received awards including an MBE from the Queen.
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.
Jewish Community of Cesky Krumlov – Cesky Krumlov is a town located in the South Bohemian region of the Czech Republic. Its small existing Jewish community began flourishing at the turn of the twentieth century, and a synagogue was built. Following the Munich Agreement of September 1938, the Sudetenland, where Cesky Krumlov was located, was annexed to Nazi Germany, and anti-Jewish laws were immediately applied. From the end of 1941, Czech Jews were sent to the Terezin ghetto (Theresienstadt), from where they were deported to concentration and extermination camps in Poland.
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.
