Complicating narratives of the Kindertransport
Digital Exhibition
Born 12.2.23 in Vienna.
Heinz Danziger’s documents connect to themes of family separation, carers, agency, identity and religion.
Heinz (Henry) Danziger age 14
Heinz (Henry) Danziger was born 6.11.23 in Neustadt, a town in southeast Germany near the border with Poland. He was an only child of a Polish-born orthodox cantor (chasan) and his German wife. The Danziger family was deported from Germany on 28 October 1938, in the Polenaktion, and along with other Jewish families, marched across the border near Beuthen. Unlike those held in Zbąszyń, these deportees were allowed by Polish authorities to travel further into Poland and the Danzigers and made their way to relatives in Czestochowa, Poland. Heinz was accepted on a Kindertransport arranged by the Polish Jewish Refugee Fund (PJRF) and arrived in England on 30.8.39.
He was first sent to a farm, where he and about a dozen other refugee boys were supposed to be training for settlement in Palestine. However, the farm was closed down after a few months and Danziger was sent first to London where he stayed briefly with a foster family, the Sugarmans, and then to a hostel attached to a German-Jewish boys training school, the ORT-OSE, that had been evacuated from Berlin and re-established in Leeds. There, he trained as a market gardener (Document 2).
It is likely that the Fund balked at supporting Danziger for several years while he trained to become a cantor, preferring he go into the workforce and earn his own way instead. Although they stated that they had found him ‘not suited’ to the profession of cantor, Danziger fulfilled his identity as a singer. After serving in Italy in the British Army in the Second World War, where he heard opera for the first time, he returned to Britain (after fighting in the Israeli war of independence in 1948) determined to pursue a professional singing career. Just as he wrote to the Sugarmans eight years earlier, ‘I was however, a success.’ He became an opera basso, singing for over a decade at venues in England and across Europe. When he retired, he became a cantor in a London synagogue. He eventually emigrated to the USA, where he also served as a cantor, and had singing parts in two Hollywood films, “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” and “The Merchant of Venice” with Sir Lawrence Olivier. When he died in 2004, his sons found several folded and creased letters in his wallet. They were the last letters his parents had written to him before they were murdered in the Holocaust, and he had carried them with him for sixty-five years.
Henry singing at Glyndebourne in 1959
Image used with permission of Antony Armstrong Jones.
Heinz had been raised to become a cantor like his father, beginning his voice and Hebrew training at the age of four. The correspondence in this document collection reflects this desire, beginning with a long letter he wrote to his former foster parents describing a concert performance he made in Leeds and asking for their advice on pursuing his aspiration (Document 1). This letter also poignantly demonstrates how much even older Kinder missed the guidance and encouragement of their families, in this case, turning instead to a foster family as parental substitutes. Demonstrating agency, Danziger wrote to the Polish Jewish Refugee Fund asking to come to London to speak to them personally about fulfilling his wishes (Document 3) and again, poignantly, to be placed in a private home and not a hostel when he came to London (Document 6). The PJRF, an orthodox organisation, initially agreed to allow Danziger to pursue this religious calling (Documents 2, 4, 5, 7) seemingly convinced he had the talent to succeed, but then quite abruptly changed course and informed the Jewish Board of Guardians that he was not suitable, asking them to find him a manual labour job (Document 8). [Interestingly, this letter also indicates they had placed him back in Mrs Sugarman’s care]. Danziger apparently harboured no ill feeling towards the Fund, asking them for help in filling out forms for his new job and keeping them up to date about his life (Documents 9 and 10).
Henry (age 6) with his father in Neustadt
Image used with permission of Sebastian and Michael Danziger
The below documents are from the Schonfeld collection (MS 183) at the Special Collection, Hartley Library, University of Southampton. All of the below documents are used with permission of the University of Southampton Special Collections..
Please navigate the thumbnails below to view the full-size documents. Each document is accompanied by a description and archive reference.
