The Kindertransport: Contesting Memory by Jennifer Craig-Norton (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Kindertransport: Contesting Memory by Jennifer Craig-Norton Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz Jennifer Craig-Norton. The Kindertransport: Contesting Memory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. 364 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000288 In the beginning there were children. Then came persecution and danger. After that came the rescuers who helped get the children to safety, but wouldn't rescue the parents. Then there were the carers who looked after the children. Some were better, some were worse, and some were downright awful. Many children had one carer. Others went from one to another. Some children had no carers and ended up in hostels. Many children adapted. More than a few didn't. Time passed, the children grew up, and the persecution ended. Some of the parents survived and tried to join their children. Sometimes they managed to bridge the gap of years. Much of the time they couldn't. Most of the parents didn't survive. Their children were on their own. Many of the children began as Jews. Some ended up as Christians. Quite a number felt little connection to any type of religious practice. More time passed. Some tried to forget their past. Others knew that they never could forget. A third group just didn't remember much from before and didn't have what to forget. Everyone got older. [End Page 444] Most of the parents were dead. Many of the carers were no longer alive. The children were themselves parents and grandparents. Some of them were no longer alive. The ones who were began to take stock of their lives and past. Then came memory. And then came those who contested memory. That, in brief, is the story of The Kindertransport: Contesting Memory, an excellent, thought-provoking study that Jennifer Craig-Norton has dedicated "to the Kinder, their parents and families," or as she succinctly puts it: "This is your story." Until now there have been several studies of the Kindertransport movement, the story of how the British government allowed some 10,000 refugee children from the Reich—Jews and non-Aryan Christians—to enter the country from December 1938 to September 1939, ostensibly as transmigrants, who in practice rarely transmigrated anywhere. My book Never Look Back: The Jewish Refugee Children in Great Britain 1938–1945 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2012), based on my MA thesis from 1981, was the first in-depth study of the Kindertransports, with the added bonus of the fruits of thirty years of additional research in between my first and second look at the phenomenon. Even before my MA thesis, there was Karen Gershon's anthology, or rather "collective autobiography" as she called it, We Came as Children (London: Victor Gollancz, 1966), and between my thesis and book several articles were published about various aspects of the child-rescue scheme in Britain. Therefore, when I took Craig-Norton's volume in hand, I wondered where she would be able to make her unique mark on a topic that had thoroughly been discussed. And I was delighted to see that she indeed found a niche that was strikingly absent in the previous studies, including my own. From the outset, the movement that brought the bulk of the children to Britain, the "Movement for the Care of Children from Germany," which metamorphosed into the "Refugee Children's Movement," claimed that the refugee children's case files no longer existed. One explanation had to do with a flood; another with a fire; a third with the files having been deliberately destroyed as many of the former Kinder, who had reached positions in British society, wished to have no record of their past available for the perusal of all and sundry; and yet another explanation claimed they were destroyed during the war in case of invasion. Craig-Norton had also grappled with this lacuna until she found a very special group of files, those of the Polish-Jewish Refugee Fund, which was responsible for children from Poland, namely the German Jewish deportees of 1938 (the "Zbonszyn Deportation"), who had been brought to Great Britain. There she hit pay dirt—not only the children's files, but also information about their carers, in their...