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Ten Thousand Children: True Stories Told by Children Who Escaped the Holocaust on the Kindertransport

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As the generation of World War II survivors is all-too quickly disappearing, today's children are running out of opportunities to connect with those who survived the war. Ten Thousand Children is a series of true anecdotes told by the children who escaped the Holocaust on the Kindertransport. The stories of the evacuated children come to life with emotion and clarity. Readers will be amazed at the courage of the children involved and the hardships they faced as they were separated from their families and sent to live in a foreign land. Each child tells his or her story in first person narrative, then the story is followed by an update which tells about the child's life after the war. Captioned photographs illustrate every story. The book is divided into seven chapters, each beginning with a news-like article giving background information to support the stories included in the chapter. The stories and articles are short enough to be read easily by children, and relevant vocabulary words are defined in reader-friendly terms in the margins. This book will help children understand the lessons which must not be forgotten from World War II. The cruel realities of war and intolerance leap from the pages of each story. Readers will be touched by those children from long ago. All those who read this book will walk away with a deeper understanding of the Kindertransport children and an appreciation for the freedoms we must cherish today.

Ten Thousand Children is a credible and compelling book which compiles first-hand accounts by children who escaped the Holocaust through a rescue mission known as the Kindertransport. Compiled by real-life survivors who also escaped via the Kindertransport, this book makes a great educational resource for social studies, language arts, and history teachers who would like to integrate the topic of the Holocaust into their curriculum.

The book begins with an overview of what life was like during the Nazi years, followed by the Night of the Broken Glass or Kristallnacht where Jewish-owned businesses in Germany were vandalized on a massive scale by the Nazis and their collaborators. But what makes this account even more compelling are the true accounts by various children who had lived through these tumultuous times. For example, in the chapter on Hitler and the Nazi years, there's an account of a Jewish girl named Sylvia who recounts her experiences during that time, of the fear of being Jewish and knowing that this placed her and her family in danger, of the ever-present need to be careful in case they were recognized and beaten up. Sylvia and her sister Ruth both managed to escape via the Kindertransport but their parents are murdered in a concentration camp.

There are many such accounts - similar stories of being uprooted and sent off to a strange land, of the yearning for their families, the ever niggling doubts as to how their parents and relatives were faring, all of which make for a heartbreaking read. Students in the upper elementary and up will find these stories, true accounts by children around their age, highly interesting and engaging. Recommended for use in the classroom, and for collections in libraries.

This was an illuminating and evocative book. Anyone interested in this topic should also read "Escape Via Siberia" and "The Uprooted" by Dorit Whiteman. Whiteman's books -- which expertly weave gripping personal accounts with historical context -- explore how survivors of the kindertransport and other Holocaust horrors coped with the legacy of their harrowing ordeals as adults. Whiteman is an expert in the field and some of her material was used in the movie, "Into the Arms of Strangers."

The testimonies written by the Jewish children of the Kindertransport are very scary - scary because the fear that Hitler systematically used on the German people that began as the erosion of their civil liberties and culminated in Jewish Germans and German Jehovah's Witnesses perishing in concentration camps is the same fear that U.S. president Bush is constantly pushing: "Give me full power to do whatever preemptive act is necessary to keep you safe from whatever I determine is a threat to you".

The testimonies in this collection are very upsetting - a dark sense of dread and the need to not just cry but to bawl one's heart into exhaustion haunt them. Anne Fox and Eva Abraham-Podietz have collected unique stories written by fellow escapees on the Kindertansport to Britain from Hitler's Nazi Germany. The stories are arranged under seven chapter headings: 1) Life Under Hitler, 2) Kristallnacht (Crystal Night), 3)Preparing to Leave, 4) The Journey, 5) Life in England, 6) The War Years, 7) After the War. The seven chapters are preceded by a section subtitled "To the Reader" and followed by an Epilogue. The stories are each followed by an update written by Fox and Abraham-Podietz informing the reader how each child fared in adulthood. Both authors were not yet teenagers when they joined 10,000 other children who escaped to Britain without their parents to end up living with foster parents.

In the foreward, we learn that the British are generally a cold people and not very charitable between themselves compared to other societies (I can testify to that), and many children (they call themselves "the kinder") felt unwanted in their new homes. Some were made to work as servants. When World War II was over, most of the children had no choice but to stay on in Britain because Hitler had wiped out millions of their parents in his concentration camps.

Under Chapter 1) Life under Hitler, Sylvia is the first of the "kinder" to share her account, which is mostly about the "Heil Hitler" salute that everyone did out of fear of being punished otherwise. " 'Mother would not have given the Hitler salute', I confided to Ruth"(p16), wrote Sylvia. In the update, we learn that her parents died in Hitler's concentration camps and her aunt in New York brought her to America where she became a secretary, got married, and became a mother.

Other stories include entries by Ruth, Dorit, Karla, Susie, Vera, Eva, Marta, Kurt, Peter, Marion, Ben & Stefan, Sara, Ernie, Ilse, Trudy, Ina, Klara, Anne, Celia, and Lilly. Their stories are profoundly touching in an unanticipated way - and that is a gross understatement. The photos of the children carrying their belongings such as an occasional violin and waving farewell to their parents - who we know did not survive is just too painful to contemplate. It hurts as much as watching those kids being bombed by Bush at the Baghdad wedding party in "Fahrenheit 9/11" by Michael Moore.

The chapter arrangement of the above stories serves to illustrate the gradual progression of Germany's slide down Hitler's slippery slope to a Nazi nightmare. When the first measure were taken against civil liberties in Germany, they seemed minor and perhaps even reasonable if you bought into the fear-mongering by Hitler. People's rights were taken little by little. Kosher slaughtering of meat was outlawed as were all publications of the Watchtower Bible & Tract Society. Eventually, people were incarcerated without charges just as Bush does today in the USA. Jews were forced to wear the yellow Star of David and Jehovoh's Witnesses wore Purple Triangles. Christians and Jews were Hitler's targets, Muslims are the targets of today's Bushies and neocons.

In the Epilogue we learn of the Kindertransport reunion in 1989 in London, England. Britain is a difficult place for a British Jew or Jewess to grow up - imagine how much more difficult it was for Jewish children who were also GERMAN! But despite the cold British weather and its effects on British behaviour, the British did rescue these children from a despotic madman whose evil is beyond imagination - when you think you know how bad Hitler was, you have reached an awareness equal to one one-thousandth of a percent of his evil. We can never know or understand that amount of evil.

Thomas Paine wrote "War is the gambling table of governments, citizens the dupes of the game". Just as the Civil War was not started by elites for anything but money, yet it was won by the common man fighting against slavery - so was the Second World War started over money but was won by the common man stopping Hitler. On behalf of my Step-Grandfather Hugh "Skeets" Beatty (RIP), may the Almighty forgive his shortcomings and reward his effort at Normandy, amen. [...]