Abstract
Jennifer Craig-Norton’s impressive monograph, The Kindertransport: Contesting Memory, sweeps away the longstanding and prevailing narrative of the Holocaust-era rescue project known as the Kindertransport. According to that humanitarian narrative, the ten thousand mostly Jewish refugee children permitted to enter the United Kingdom in the period 1938–1940 were cared for by kind British strangers, closely supported by the well-intentioned organizations that brought them over from Europe, and grew up to become successful adults who gave back to their new nation. This version of the story foregrounds the fact that these children’s lives had been saved when so many other children were murdered in the Holocaust, and is marshalled as Britain’s model response to a refugee crisis. Using newly discovered archival sources weighed carefully against memory sources, Craig-Norton demonstrates that the real story is in fact much more complex than the uplifting national myth suggests.
The book’s title—Contesting Memory—can be read in multiple ways. Certainly, the author seeks to contest the public memory of the Kindertransport by unpacking the dominant narrative. But she also interrogates personal memories of the Kindertransport by carefully analyzing testimonial accounts alongside the archival record—for instance by laying out the fascinating discrepancies between a former Kind’s memories and her wartime correspondence with a relief organization. This method brings to light the coexistence of multiple narratives, helping us to better understand this history and its legacy. The author’s approach was shaped by her discovery of a new cache of archival sources: the files of the Polish Jewish Refugee Fund, a small Anglo-Jewish agency that organized the Kindertransport rescue of 154 children victimized by the expulsion of 20,000 Jews of Polish heritage from Germany in fall 1938 (the Polenaktion). Previous accounts of the Kindertransport consisted of official histories or scholarship written without access to the files of the primary rescue organization (the Refugee Children’s Movement). Craig-Norton sidesteps that limitation by digging into the other Kindertransport casefiles she unearthed. Her focus on the Polenaktion children is significant in that it highlights an important marker in the chronology of the Holocaust: this expulsion of Jews to Poland was the first time that Nazi Germany used mass deportation as a technique in their accelerating persecution of Jews, and it meant that those rescued children were “double refugees” (6) when they arrived in the UK.
Craig-Norton organizes her account around the perspectives of those she considers to be the four key players in the Kindertransport story: the private British relief agencies that organized the rescue movement, the individuals who cared for the children in Britain, the refugee children themselves, and the parents who for the most part remained behind in Europe as it descended into war. The book’s four chapters correspond to each set of players, and each chapter follows a similar structure: first Craig-Norton lays out how the dominant narrative has problematically characterized or ignored that player, then follows her analysis of archival and memory sources that convincingly overturns the redemptive narrative, restoring the voices of these largely forgotten actors along the way.
Chapter One, The Organizations, examines the “multitude of semiautonomous relief committees [that] operated both cooperatively and competitively with one another as they faced the challenges of emigrating and settling thousands of children” (35). Often mischaracterized as a government program, in fact the Kindertransport was financed and carried out by private groups who served as “de facto parents” (55) for the children after their arrival in the UK. Craig-Norton shows that the perceptions, values, and priorities of those in charge shaped the trajectories of the Kinder in every way, with frequent reports of dissatisfaction on both sides. Saving lives, not souls, was the imperative of this non-sectarian movement, and the result was the alienation from Judaism of many of the Kinder, with limited and belated organizational efforts to correct it. A short discussion of other mid-century child refugee projects, like the hundreds of Jewish refugee children from Germany who were brought to the United States in the 1930s, or the War Orphans Project that brought over a thousand surviving Jewish youth to Canada after World War II, would have been an interesting addition to this chapter. Did the organizations involved in these similar programs encounter the same challenges and demonstrate the same short-sightedness in regard to the needs of young refugees?
In the dominant Kindertransport narrative, the movement’s success is attributed to “the kindness of strangers”—the heroes of the story are the generous Brits who welcomed the children into loving homes and allowed them to bloom into productive adults. Chapter Two shifts to the motivations and behaviors of those who took in the refugee children and saw to their daily needs as parental substitutes. The carers included foster parents, relatives of the children already living in the UK, families into which children evacuated from cities were billeted, hostel managers, teachers, and others. Craig-Norton’s analysis of the carer-child relationships raises a series of problematic issues related to the quality of their care, including Anglicization, exploitation, sibling separation, and abandonment. Here the fiction of the dominant narrative is striking. By the end of the chapter we learn that there were few loving, lasting placements; the norm was disappointment and further trauma, even—surprisingly—when children were placed among their own relatives.
The themes of identity and agency run through the third chapter, The Children, as the author seeks to restore the voices of the children as children to the narrative. Contemporary correspondence provides insight into the ways that the displaced youth attempted to advocate for themselves, for their siblings in the UK, and for their parents left behind in Europe, and the challenges they faced due to their dependency on organizations and carers. The significance of identity cannot be overstated when considering the fates of unaccompanied children uprooted into an unfamiliar setting; questions like who am I? and where do I belong? were compounded for the Polenaktion children, treated alternately as Germans, Poles, Jews, refugees, aliens, or Brits in the making. Again, the fiction contrasts starkly with reality. Most of the rescued children did not live happily ever after in Britain: they were marked by their separation from their family, unevenly supervised by organizations, and left in the hands of carers who sometimes had other interests and motivations than providing loving homes. Their rescue had lifelong consequences as they struggled to find a place as adults.
In the final and most moving chapter, The Parents, Craig-Norton restores a place to those who were of necessity left out of the dominant triumphalist narrative. The flip side of Britain’s acceptance of ten thousand children, we must not forget, was its rejection of their parents—“a government-mandated act of family separation” (11), as one critic recently put it. In making the wrenching decision to separate (temporarily, so they hoped) from some or all of their children, parents can be considered as the first rescuers, and their expectations for their children went beyond mere survival. Their fears, desires, concerns, desperation, and agency comes through in their correspondence to the organizations as they first used all of their powers of persuasion to find a place for their child on a transport, and later as they tried to maintain communication from the war- stricken continent. This is a methodologically deep and significant chapter that uses International Tracing Service records and others to discover the fates, where possible, of parents and siblings who remained on the continent. Of the 32 Polenaktion children pictured in the book’s cover image, we learn that “nearly all lost every remaining member of their families” (296). Throughout the book Craig-Norton includes photographs to great effect, and in this chapter the images are particularly poignant, including precious copies rescued from archives that she was able to copy and return to the families. Legacy is a strong theme in this book, from the uplifting legacy of the Kindertransport in British national memory to its traumatic and lasting legacy for individual Kinder and their families.
Throughout the book, a fifth player frequently comes into view: Jennifer Craig-Norton, as a detective-like researcher and sympathetic custodian of Kindertransport history. An archival historian by training, Craig-Norton’s commitment to, in her words, “my Kinder” (xi) is apparent throughout the book. Despite having no familial link to this history, it became personal for her as she immersed herself in the records, had intimate and repeated conversations with individual survivors, and took trips all over the world to track down former Kinder or their relatives to share her findings. It is clear how deeply important they are to her, and her reflections form part of the story. She ends the book by reflecting on the mutual benefit of the project: “few [historians] have been rewarded as I have in being able to offer something of value back to the subjects of my research. In return, they have given me much more than the life stories that have informed this study” (324).
Kindertransport: Contesting Memory is a model of how to critically analyze the intersections between archival sources and memory sources. Craig-Norton’s sensitive and respectful juxtaposition of the two shows us what we gain by bringing these sources together. As an archival historian, she had not intended to use memory sources, but felt compelled to add this layer after confronting discrepancies between the primary source record and the testimony of a particular Kind. She guides us through the ways in which Kinder memory sources, the “remembered and recalled life” (28), reveal to us how the subjects have created meaning out of their traumatic pasts. Craig-Norton’s explanation of the value and challenges of memory sources is an accessible introduction for advanced students and any reader interested in pairing testimony with archival research.
This book is very much a Kindertransport history, which is a strength as well as its primary weakness. The bibliography and footnotes occasionally include works by other scholars working in overlapping contexts related to children and the Holocaust (including Tara Zahra, Laura Brade, and Beth Cohen) but the author does not engage deeply with their work here, citing them only on specific Kindertransport points. She does not raise broader questions about why it is important for us to know about the Kindertransport —in what ways does it add to Holocaust studies, the history of childhood, or the study of the British memory of World War II? There are obvious entry points for broader discussions, such as the controversial issue of the conversion of children by their rescuers and the desperate efforts of Jewish organizations to track down surviving children after the war. The book is so clearly written and Craig-Norton’s points so well expounded that the concluding sections of each chapter and the conclusion itself were unnecessary to reiterate her convincing points. That space may have been better spent helping the reader see the broader implications of this work for the multiple fields that it straddles.
Regardless of the reader’s desire to hear even more from the author, this “complex, critical history of the Kindertransport” (28) is a much-needed study that will help to revise the redemptive British narrative. This rethinking could begin in the British education system: the Kindertransport does not seem to be part of the national history curriculum, and a survey of thousands of secondary students several years ago by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education reported that they were not familiar with this topic. There is an opportunity for the best scholarship, led by Craig-Norton’s work, to inform education at the public and curricular levels in the UK. As the memory of World War II is central to British national identity, this important task will likely prove to be a challenging one.