It is extraordinarily difficult to generalise about Kindertransportees’ experiences, given the range of their ages and backgrounds, the wide variations in foster care, hostel, farm or boarding school life, and given their varied experiences with religion, education, evacuation, internment, employment, military service and re-emigration. However, with the exception of orphans, all Kindertransportees had one thing in common: every single child was for some period of time separated from his or her parents and other family members.

 

Family separation is the unifying factor in Kindertansportees’ lives, and it affected them all in some way. For some, the separation was fairly brief and the effects temporary. For others, the separation lasted for years with consequences that reverberated throughout lifetimes, for both Kinder and their families. For most, separation was forever, and the loss of their parents and other family members the most potent and lasting legacy of the Kindertransport.

 

The imperatives of gratitude imposed upon Kinder (and other refugees) hindered their ability to express their own grief and trauma both at the time and later when telling their life stories. As one Kind wrote in her autobiography, “We were saved, how dare we criticize anything?”[1] Few have been willing to question the decision of the British government to allow them to be saved but not their parents. Many, comparing their own war years spent in relative safety to the sufferings of their families, felt unable to acknowledge or voice the loneliness, distress and misery they experienced as refugee children, and the trauma of losing their families in the Holocaust. This unspoken anguish sometimes manifested itself as depression, other life-long psychological distress and even suicide.

 

The parents, too, were deeply affected by family separation. Those fortunate enough to also find refuge in Britain still had to contend with living apart from their children for months or years and dependent upon refugee organisations, were often deprived of a decisive role in managing their children’s welfare and education. Parents who survived in other parts of the world spent long years apart from their children during their most formative years, often having little or no contact during that time. And for those parents who ultimately perished, parting with their children and coping with the dawning realisation that they might never see them again was the cruellest fate.

 

It is difficult to reconcile the narratives of rescue and salvation with the traumas of family separation, but as the overarching commonality uniting all Kinder experience, it is vital to examine its effects and lasting legacies.

 

[1] Milena Roth, Lifesaving Letters: A Child’s Flight from the Holocaust, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 131.