The Kindertransport: Saving 10,000 Children Before the War

In the weeks after Kristallnacht — the coordinated pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938, in which nearly a hundred Jews were killed, tens of thousands arrested, and more than 7,000 Jewish businesses destroyed across Germany and Austria — the British government faced a decision. Jewish organizations were pleading for refugee visas. The doors to most countries remained firmly shut. After urgent negotiations, the British cabinet agreed to something unprecedented: it would admit an unspecified number of Jewish children under the age of seventeen from Nazi-occupied territories, on temporary travel documents, without their parents.

The first transport left Berlin on December 1, 1938, carrying 196 children from a Jewish orphanage that had been destroyed during Kristallnacht. They arrived at Harwich the following morning. Over the next nine months — until September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland and the borders closed — nearly 10,000 children made the same journey. They came by train and ferry from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig. Most would never see their parents again.

The Crisis That Forced a Response

By late 1938, it had become impossible for most Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe to emigrate through normal channels. Emigration required money, exit visas, destination visas, and evidence of financial support in the receiving country — each requirement functioned as a barrier, and together they formed a near-impenetrable wall. The United States maintained strict immigration quotas. Palestine was subject to British limits that Jewish organizations were fighting to expand. Latin American countries accepted some refugees but not nearly enough. The world was watching a community of millions be systematically stripped of rights, property, and livelihood, and the doors were closing.

Kristallnacht accelerated the urgency. Within days, Jewish leaders in Britain — including Lionel de Rothschild, Viscount Samuel, and the Chief Rabbi — met with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Home Secretary Samuel Hoare to press for emergency measures. The proposal they brought forward was deliberate in its modesty: children only, no parents, no permanent right of residence. Each child would need a guarantee of £50 — roughly £3,000 today — from a British sponsor, to ensure they would not become a public charge. The government agreed. The Refugee Children Movement, as the organizing body came to be known, began work immediately.

The Journey

For the children, the departure was experienced in ways that ranged from bewildering to terrifying. Parents who had spent weeks or months securing a place on a transport now had hours, sometimes minutes, to say goodbye. They packed small suitcases with clothes, a photograph, a toy. They sewed names and addresses into coat linings. They told their children they would follow soon — a reassurance that most believed and that most would not live to fulfill.

The trains passed through Germany and the Netherlands, where Dutch volunteers often boarded to accompany the children to the Hook of Holland. Older children sometimes shepherded younger ones who were too small to understand what was happening. At the German border crossings, SS guards would board to inspect documents, search luggage, and sometimes confiscate the few valuables children had been allowed to bring. Then the ferry, then the English coast, then the children's reception centers at Harwich or Southampton.

In Britain, the children were distributed to a range of placements: private families who had volunteered or been recruited, hostels run by Jewish refugee organizations, agricultural training camps for teenagers, and in some cases group homes operated by Quakers and other religious organizations. The quality of these placements varied enormously. Some children were welcomed into warm families and given stability. Others experienced neglect, loneliness, or worse. Many were placed far from other Kindertransport children, with no one who spoke their language and no community that understood what they had left behind.

The Parents Who Stayed Behind

The decision to send a child on the Kindertransport was among the most agonizing any parent could make. It required accepting that you could not save yourself, that you could not keep your family together, and that the only way to give your child a chance was to put them on a train alone and watch them disappear. Many parents had spent months trying to emigrate as a family before concluding that the Kindertransport was the only option that remained.

The vast majority of parents who sent children on the transports did not survive the war. Some were deported to the camps in 1941 and 1942, before the full scale of the killing was known. Others held on longer, sustained by letters from their children in Britain, by the hope that emigration would still become possible, by the daily work of survival in an increasingly dangerous city. By the time the war ended, the children who had arrived in Britain — now teenagers or young adults — began the slow, often futile search for news of their families. Most found none, or found the worst.

Nicholas Winton and the Czech Children

Among those who organized the Kindertransport, one figure deserves particular attention. Nicholas Winton was a 29-year-old British stockbroker who traveled to Prague in December 1938 after a friend told him of the desperate situation of Jewish families in the German-occupied Sudetenland. What he found — thousands of families crowded into refugee centers, desperate for any way out — led him to set up an informal rescue operation in his hotel room.

Working largely on his own initiative, Winton organized eight trains from Prague to Britain between March and August 1939. He fundraised for sponsors, forged documents when necessary, negotiated with British bureaucrats, and kept meticulous records of every child he placed. By the time the borders closed on September 1, a ninth train carrying 250 children was stopped at Prague's Wilson Station and never departed. Those children were later killed in the Holocaust.

Winton kept his records for decades without telling anyone what he had done. His story came to light in 1988, when his wife found a scrapbook in their attic and a journalist traced the surviving children — by then middle-aged adults with families of their own. Winton was invited to a BBC television program where the host introduced him to a studio audience of the people he had saved. He had not known they would be there. He was 79 years old. He died in 2015 at the age of 106, having lived long enough to see the children he rescued become grandparents.

What the Kindertransport Was — and Was Not

The Kindertransport saved nearly 10,000 lives. That is not a small number. Every one of those children grew up, built a life, and became the parent or grandparent of people alive today. The operation required the generosity of thousands of British families and volunteers, the tireless work of Jewish refugee organizations, and the willingness of a government to act — however partially — in the face of a humanitarian emergency.

And yet the Kindertransport also represents what was not done. Britain did not open its doors to the parents. It did not significantly expand its immigration quotas for adult Jewish refugees. The policy that permitted the children's rescue was deliberately designed to exclude their families — a compromise between compassion and the political pressures of a country that feared an influx of foreign refugees. The 10,000 children who arrived were a fraction of the children who needed to be saved. And the parents who watched the trains leave were left behind in a Europe that was about to become a killing ground.

The Kindertransport Kinder — as the survivors came to call themselves — have spent decades grappling with the particular weight of their experience: the guilt of survival, the grief of loss, the strangeness of a childhood interrupted. Many have devoted their later years to education, speaking in schools and at memorials about what they witnessed and what was taken from them. Their testimony has shaped how the world understands not only the Holocaust, but the meaning of rescue itself — its possibility, its limits, and the human cost of both.