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Aus der Digitalen Ausgabe der New York TIMES vom 19. März 2025 über den Kindertransport, mit dem auch die Wormser Jüdin Suse Herz 1939 als 8-jähriges Mädchen nach England gelangte; die Stolpersteine für Suse Herz und ihre Familie liegen seit 2024 in der Kämmererstraße in Worms, vor dem Haus Nr. 10.

As Children, They Fled the Nazis Alone. Newly
Found Papers Tell Their Story.
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.
Hanna Zack Miley, center, on her first day in England after being evacuated from Nazi Germany via the
Kindertransport, in July 1939.Credit…via Hanna Zack Miley

By Claire Moses
Reporting from London
Published March 19, 2025 Updated March 20, 2025, 11:10 a.m. ET
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.
For Ms. Miley and many descendants of people who were part of the Kindertransport, the emergence of
the lists has helped shed light on a murky period in their family history and offered a sense of
connection to others who were affected. For researchers, the findings provide a key puzzle piece,
offering new information about the families and rescue organizations involved in the mission.
“I was always told, from when I started my work, ‘These lists don’t exist, they were destroyed,’” said
Dr. Williams, who was doing research for her third book about the Kindertransport when she discovered
the documents. “And they’re not.”
The lists she found were used by Dutch border guards to determine which children from other European
countries should be let through to Britain and which should be sent elsewhere.
A majority of the children on the Kindertransport, which was funded largely by Jewish communities in
Germany and Britain, arrived by boat, traveling from Hook of Holland to Harwich, England. From there,
they boarded trains to Liverpool Street Station in East London. Refugee organizations helped to match
them with foster families.
Refugee children who were part of the Kindertransport arriving in England in 1938.Credit…Fred
Morley/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images
The Kindertransport has long been taught as a feel-good story, researchers said, but the mission itself
was a complicated affair. The British government, for example, only allowed children to come into the
country without their parents, deeply traumatizing many of them. The children had to be healthy, and
they had to be from Nazi Germany (which included Austria and parts of the Czech Republic) rather than
from other parts of Eastern Europe.
Dr. Williams also found documents that helped reinforce the story of how the Kindertransport ended.
While many have suggested that it was the start of World War II in September 1939 that ended the
mission, the British refugee organizations operating the Kindertransport actually had decided that no
more than 10,000 children could come to the country because of the difficulty of housing them.
“The story is much more complex than the way we want to portray it,” said Laura Hobson Faure, a
professor at Panthéon-Sorbonne University-Paris 1 who wrote a book about Jewish children who fled to
France during the Holocaust.
“It’s not a feel-good story,” Dr. Hobson Faure said. “It’s a story, though, that did save lives.”
While thousands of children were rescued from the Nazis, many of them were traumatized by the
experience and never saw their family members again. At the same time, several children of
Kindertransport survivors said that their parents always felt a deep loyalty to Britain for the role it
played in their survival.
Ms. Miley had long known that thousands of other German children had also been on the
Kindertransport, but she said that seeing her name in black and white on an official list gave her a sense
of belonging. “Suddenly, it wasn’t me alone,” she said.
Through Dr. Williams’s research, Ms. Miley has connected with the descendants of other children on the
Kindertransport. Among them is Richard Aronowitz, 55. His mother — Doris Aronowitz, who died in
1992 — was on the same train as Ms. Miley in July 1939.
British government documentation for Doris Aronowitz, who was evacuated from Nazi Germany as a
child. Credit…via Richard Aronowitz
For Mr. Aronowitz and other descendants of the Kindertransport children, the lists of names, dates and
numbers have led to complicated emotions. “It gave me much more of a profound context,” Mr.
Aronowitz said in an interview last month. But, he added, “I don’t think there’s ever any closure.”
Some learned information about their parents or grandparents for the first time through the lists. For
others, the documentation serves as a harrowing piece of evidence of the atrocities their parents
survived, and an explanation of why so many of them grew up without grandparents or extended family.
“It’s that last, final parting document,” Dr. Williams said. “It really sealed people’s fates.”
For researchers, the discovery of the lists may provide new insight into how the Kindertransport was
organized and how desperate parents came to their decisions.
“The Kindertransport has never been investigated so much from the continental point of view,” said
Andrea Hammel, a professor at Aberystwyth University in Wales and the author of a book about the
Kindertransport.
For Bobby Lax, whose father came to Britain on the Kindertransport, the documentation helped fill gaps
in his family’s story. He found out that his father first went from Berlin to the Netherlands before being
sent to Britain, leaving his brother and parents behind in Amsterdam, never to see them again, Mr. Lax
said.
“While I had discovered most of my dad’s story, it’s absolutely overwhelming to see these original
lists,” Mr. Lax, a filmmaker living in Tel Aviv, said. “There’s something incredibly empowering about
that. It’s the final piece of the puzzle to me.”
More than eight decades on, the lists have brought Ms. Miley a renewed sense of grief. “One of the big
losses when you’re taken away from your family so suddenly,” she said, “is that you don’t know the
personality of your parents.”
On the other hand, she said, she feels gratitude. The discovery has helped give her “a deeper
thankfulness for the gift of life,” Ms. Miley said. “My name and details on that list were the means of
my escape.”
Claire Moses is a Times reporter in London, focused on coverage of breaking and trending news. More
about Claire Moses

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