Just under 10,000 Jewish children fled to Britain from Europe from December 1938 to September 1939. Not much was known about their journeys, until recently.
Published March 19, 2025Updated March 20, 2025
When Hanna Zack Miley boarded a German train in July 1939, she did not know that the journey would permanently change her life.
She was 7 at the time, about to travel to Britain without her parents. She remembers saying goodbye to them on the platform of the train station in Cologne, Germany. “They told me it was a nice trip, and I believed it,” Ms. Miley, an only child, said. “I think they were trying to make it easy for me. I was the apple of their eye.”
As her short legs took her up the steep steps of the train, she wanted to take one more look at her parents. “I turned around, and I saw that they were crying,” Ms. Miley said. “It must have been awful for them.”
In that moment she realized that this was not, in fact, a nice trip.
She never saw her parents again.
Ms. Miley, 93, now living in Phoenix, Ariz., is one of almost 10,000 Jewish children who were part of the Kindertransport, a rescue mission that helped minors flee Nazi Germany to Britain, via the Netherlands, between December 1938 and September 1939.
Over time, many details have been lost about this part of Holocaust history. But in the fall of 2024, Amy Williams, a researcher, unearthed a trove of information about the mission: lists of names and other identifying information about most of the children and chaperones who made the journey to Britain, tucked away in the vast archives at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial.
A version of this article appears in print on March 24, 2025, Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: As Children, They Fled the Nazis Alone. Newly Found Papers Tell Their Story.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/world/europe/kindertransport-holocaust-britain-rescue.html
