kindertransport

Victoria link to UK honours

More than 20 girls were rescued from Nazi persecution and brought to Tynemouth (photo from Summerfield family via BBC)

On Jan. 26, 2023, a blue plaque at a house in Tynemouth, a coastal town in northeast England near Newcastle, was unveiled. The marker recognizes the efforts of David Summerfield, the grandfather of Victoria, BC’s Henry Summerfield, to help rescue Jewish children before the Second World War.

David Summerfield’s undertaking was part of the Kindertransport, which, from late 1938, after Kristallnacht, to the declaration of war in September 1939, brought Jewish children to the United Kingdom.

“My grandfather ran a jewelry store in Newcastle. He was very well known and well thought of inside and outside of the Jewish community,” Henry Summerfield told the Independent. “He got a committee together and they raised funds and got a house in Tynemouth. In those days, they would not have boys and girls in the same house. Thus, they decided girls were more vulnerable and they would take them in.”

The house at 55 Percy Park provided lodging for 24 Jewish girls, aged 3 to 15, from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. In total, nearly 10,000 children were brought into the United Kingdom during the nine months of the rescue operation.

“It was a terrible ordeal for the children because they were in a strange country and they were going to a city they had never heard of. They were not accompanied by any adults who could guide them,” said Summerfield. “A girl from Czechoslovakia was the worst off because did not speak either German or English.”

The local Jewish community in Newcastle needed people to care for the girls after they arrived, Summerfield said, and they managed to find two Jewish widows from Vienna who had fled to London: Paula Sieber, who had owned a cinema, and Alice Urbach, a well-known chef who also operated a cooking school.

Prior to the war, Urbach had written a popular cookbook, Cooking the Viennese Way, under a false name, because, as a Jew, she was not able to publish using her real name. In 2022, her granddaughter, historian Karina Urbach, published Alice’s Book: How the Nazis Stole My Grandmother’s Cookbook, which explored Alice Urbach’s story and the Nazi appropriation of her intellectual property.

“Because attempts to avert a war failed, the parents were never able to join their children,” said Summerfield. “Instead, Newcastle and the nearby area became a war zone subject to heavy bombing and out of bounds to enemy aliens, so the girls were moved across the country to a house at Windermere in England’s Lake District. There they remained under the care of the two matrons till the end of the war. They were educated in local schools.”

As reports started to come out about the death camps, the matrons tried to be strict about keeping the girls away from the cinemas, where newsreels were shown. One girl managed to sneak out, saw the news and returned to the house in hysterics. Most of the girls’ parents died during the Holocaust.

As the years passed, the girls finished their schooling and got training for various jobs. The whole enterprise was successful – the girls grew up, had careers and raised families. Some stayed in England, while others moved to Israel, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

The BBC recently learned of the endeavour and broadcast a report about a reunion of the refugees, now elderly, and their lives. The reunion was attended by David Summerfield’s granddaughter, Judith Summerfield, and great-granddaughter, Alison Moore. There were previous reunions, in 1988 and 1999.

A six-episode BBC podcast was released earlier in the year, The Girls: The Holocaust Safe House, detailing the stories of those who lived at 55 Percy Park. The current owners of the house, who purchased the property in 2017, hadn’t known the historical significance of the address as a Kindertransport hostel.

The newly unveiled plaque at 55 Percy Park reads: “In 1939, this house was home to more than 20 girls fleeing Nazi persecution. They came here via the Kindertransport rescue effort and were cared for by the Newcastle Jewish Refugee Committee, as well as the wider community of Tyneside. Most of those housed here lost their parents during the Holocaust. The committee funded their care for over seven years.”

Below that inscription is a quote from Talmud: “Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”

A posthumous honour for David Summerfield has been proposed. His jewelry store, started in 1914, is still in operation.

Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.

Meet award-winning artists

Seeking Refuge, written by Irene Watts and illustrated by Kathryn Shoemaker, has been shortlisted for the 2017 Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature. Published by Tradewind Books, the graphic novel is one of the three finalists in the children’s/young adult category.

While this year’s Vine winners will be announced Oct. 3 at a luncheon in Toronto, Vancouverites can meet Watts and Shoemaker later this month at Word Vancouver, and again at the Vancouver Writers Festival in October. The multiple-award-winners, who are both founding members of the Children’s Writers and Illustrators of British Columbia Society, have worked together on several publications, including Good-bye Marianne, a graphic novel based on Watts’ play and subsequent novel of the same name, which also included Shoemaker illustrations.

In Good-bye Marianne, readers meet Marianne Kohn. Set in Berlin in 1938, a week after Kristallnacht, the 11-year-old struggles to understand and cope with the increasing restrictions placed on Jews in Nazi Germany, and the fierce antisemitism she and her family encounter, with a couple of exceptions. The story begins with Marianne not being allowed into her school – all of the Jewish students have been prohibited from attending. As well, her father has disappeared. The situation, as we know from history, worsens, and her mother makes the heartrending decision to send Marianne with “a group of 200 children who are leaving for homes in England,” one of the first groups to be rescued in the Kindertransport.

Seeking Refuge sees Marianne safely to London, arriving Dec. 2, 1938. While protected from physical harm in her new country, Marianne does not escape antisemitism and poor treatment.

In an interview with CBC, Watts commented on Shoemaker’s choice of medium for Seeking Refuge, noting how the grey of the pencil was so well-suited to the story.

“Seeking Refuge is a darker, sadder story, taking place in a time of blackouts, black-and-white films, coal-foggy London, especially the winter months, a gloomy time and place,” said Shoemaker in an interview with the Jewish Independent. “In Good-bye Marianne, Marianne is happier than in Seeking Refuge because she is with family, her home, her country, her language. So, yes, the backgrounds are light, often white. She is anxious about her being sent away but she is not yet sad about it. She is not yet a displaced refugee.”

The possibility of using Seeking Refuge as a way in which to teach younger readers about the current refugee crisis has not gone unnoticed by reviewers and interviewers.

“Stories, in whatever genre, help us to discover more about our place in the world and who we are,” Watts told the Independent. “Immersing ourselves in the lives of fictional characters and their stories, we gain insight of how others live.” While acknowledging that readers will “take whatever message they are ready to understand from the books they read,” she added, “Marianne’s story, though set in the past, is still a familiar one. There are many refugees in the world. Seeking Refuge concerns one child, and how she responds to losing home, friends, family, birthplace, language, culture. In reading about Marianne, a reader may wonder how he would cope in this situation; maybe respond with more kindness and understanding to anyone struggling to make a new life.”

Marianne’s story is similar to – but not the same as – that of Watts, who was educated in England and Wales after her escape from Berlin via the second rescue train in December 1938. Skipping ahead 30 years, she and her husband moved to Canada in 1968, she said, “to give our children a better future.” They immigrated to Alberta.

A playwright and director for Theatre in Education and a drama teacher and consultant in England, Watts taught drama in Hobbema (now Maskwacis), where they lived for a short time before moving to Edmonton. In Edmonton, she was director of Citadel on Wheels and Wings, a children’s touring company that traveled all over Alberta. “We even took our shows to schools in the Northwest Territories,” she said, noting that, among the company’s alumni are Jackson Davies and the late Susan Wright.

“After a few years,” said Watts, “my late husband accepted a position in Vancouver and our four children and I followed. This was in 1976. My base was in White Rock, B.C., and I moved to Vancouver in 2000.”

That Watts likes to write in different genres is clear from the way in which Seeking Refuge came into being.

“Good-bye Marianne began life as a play, which premièred at the Norman Rothstein Theatre in 1994,” Watts explained. “It was produced by Carousel Theatre, and toured widely. It has had many productions, both in Canada and the U.S.A., and will be touring with Theatre New Brunswick for three months in the spring of 2018. I had been a playwright long before I became a novelist. I decided to write the novel because there was still much to say beyond the confines of the play. Kathy Lowinger, then publisher of Tundra Books, rescued the manuscript from the slush pile, and published it in 1998.

“I received countless letters from children, wanting to know what happens next, and so completed both the novel and the play Remember Me, on which Seeking Refuge is based. The trilogy, which ends with Finding Sophie, was later published in an omnibus edition, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Kindertransport, as Escape from Berlin.”

For readers anticipating a possible third graphic novel, Watts told the Independent she has “no plans to write about Marianne and Sophie again.”

Shoemaker and Watts collaborated on Watts’ first book for Tradewind, A Telling Time, “which places the story of Queen Esther and the story of Purim in three time frames: modern-day Canada, Nazi-occupied Vienna and the biblical era of Persia. So,” said Watts, “when Kathie told me she had read my play Good-bye Marianne and suggested that it would make an interesting graphic novel, I needed no persuasion, and together we embarked on our next project – a new genre for me. Since then, we have done several other books together, for both Tundra and Tradewind Books.”

A Telling Time, which Shoemaker described as “a picture book for older children about the parallel stories of Queen Esther and how she saves her people and a 1939 secret Purim party,” was recognized by the International Youth Library in Munich, Germany, with a 2006 White Raven special mention.

“For that book,” said Shoemaker, who teaches children’s literature at the University of British Columbia, “I did a huge amount of research. As well, Irene shared many resources with me.

“While I was illustrating A Telling Time,” she said, “I was working on my MA in children’s literature at UBC. Instead of doing an academic thesis, I wrote a graphic novel. During the process of finishing it up, Irene asked me what it was like to write a graphic novel and I told her that, for her, it would be a snap, as it is very much like writing a play or screenplay, as you write primarily dialogue, and, similarly to writing a play scene by scene, a graphic novel is written panel by panel. In response to my answer, Irene told me that Good-bye Marianne had been a play before it was a novel.”

Shoemaker said she drew up several pages of Good-bye Marianne for Watts to send to Tundra as a proposal for a graphic novel. “It was about to have its 10th anniversary, so it was good timing,” said Shoemaker. “Tundra had never done a graphic novel before but they agreed to it.”

Graphic novels were still a relatively new phenomenon at that time. “Other than Chester Brown’s Louis Riel and books for adults, there were almost none,” said Shoemaker. “It was a bit of challenge working with an editor who did not understand the form and also who didn’t seem to understand how closely Irene and I work.

“You will often hear that editors like to keep writers and illustrators apart. I hate that. Irene and I work closely on everything that we do.”

Their creative process begins with Watts writing a rough draft. “She doesn’t number the panels but she describes all the key actions she wants to see occur along with the dialogue,” explained Shoemaker. “From that version, I go back into the manuscript to visualize the sequence of panels. When I do that, I create panel numbers and add in additional panels that may be close-ups, wordless images and additional panels to handle complex conversations. After I’ve done that, I begin a visual dummy, drawing out the entire book panel by panel. When that is complete, I sit down with Irene and go through it panel by panel. As we go through it, we decide what stays, what goes and what more we might need. The best thing about our working together is that we highly respect each other’s ideas and we both listen, consider and change things without any kind of ownership because we consider the work ours. It is our book, not mine, not hers, but ours.”

Watts and Shoemaker will be at Word Vancouver on Sept. 24, 12:45 p.m., at the main branch of Vancouver Public Library in the South Plaza (the Quay) and the Writers Fest on Oct. 18, 1 p.m., at Revue Stage on Granville Island. For more information on both of these festivals and for tickets to the latter ($17), visit wordvancouver.ca and writersfest.bc.ca, respectively.

Nicholas Winton’s kindertransport

The Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society will mark Vancouver Raoul Wallenberg Day on Jan. 19 with the screening of the documentary Nicky’s Family, about Holocaust hero Nicholas Winton.

Now 104 years old, Winton lives in England (where he was born). The story of his heroism during the Holocaust starts in 1938, when he was a stockbroker. Receiving a letter from a friend in Prague about the plight of Jews in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, he traveled there to assess the situation for himself. Shocked at what he witnessed, he established an organization to aid children from Jewish families, setting up office in his hotel room in Prague, from which he eventually expanded.

poster-Nicky's Family — Nicky’s Family will be screened in Vancouver on Jan. 19.

The director of Nicky’s Family, Matej Minac, said in an interview on Czech Radio in 2003: “When he came here to Prague, and wanted to rescue all these children, and he had a plan how to do it, everybody was telling him – you know, it’s absurd. You can never manage it. The British won’t let the children in. The Gestapo won’t let the children out. You don’t have the money, so how do you want to do it? It’s crazy. And Winton said that anything that is reasonable can be achieved.”

After Kristallnacht, in November 1938, the British Parliament approved the entry of refugees younger than 17 into the country, if they had a place to stay and a warranty was paid. Knowing this, Winton left his friends in Prague to manage the gathering of the children there and returned to London, where he started a campaign to find foster homes and the necessary guarantees for as many children as he could.

Winton also organized for the Jewish children to be transported on trains and then on to ferries to England, where the foster families met them. The operation later became known as the Czech Kindertransport. It lasted until the official start of the Second World War on Sept. 1, 1939, by which time 669 of “his children” had arrived in England. He kept records of the names and addresses of the children, their parents and their foster families. Most of the Jewish parents in Prague perished during the Holocaust.

Winton never told anyone of this enterprise. Fifty years after the fact, his wife found a suitcase in the attic with all his wartime documentation. She contacted the BBC, and they sent letters to the addresses of the foster families. Several dozen people responded. Most of them didn’t know the identity of their rescuer. His “children” and their children and grandchildren now number more than 6,000.

A 1988 TV program about the reunion of Winton and dozens of the children he had saved started a snowball of recognition; among the honors, Winton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

In the late 1990s, Minac was searching for a theme for his next film. The Czech director read Pearls of Childhood by Vera Gissin, in which she mentions Winton and his rescue operation.

“I was astonished,” said Minac in the aforementioned radio interview. “That’s exactly what I needed for my story. I wrote a film treatment and I asked one lady, Alice Klimova, whether she could translate it into English. She said: ‘Matej, I think you have a few mistakes in your treatment, especially the scene in the train station, when the children are leaving for Britain.’ I said: ‘How do you know?’ And she said: ‘I know because I was one of those children, of Winton’s children…. I was only four-and-a-half years old. I don’t remember it so well. Why don’t you call Nicky, Nicky Winton?’ And I said: ‘How do you mean Nicky Winton? He’s still alive?’ She said: ‘Yes. He’d be very happy to talk to you, he’s a nice person, and I’m sure he would help.’ Two months later, I visited Nicky. We spent a beautiful afternoon together, and I knew that I can’t do only one film … but I will have to do also a documentary….”

In the end, Minac made three movies about Winton: one feature, All My Loved Ones (1999), the documentary The Power of Good: Nicholas Winton (2002), which won an Emmy Award, and Nicky’s Family (2011), which includes reenactments and never-before-seen archival footage, as well as interviews with Winton and a number of those he rescued.

The Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society, which is hosting the Nicky’s Family screening and reception here, incorporated in April 2013, Deborah Ross-Grayman, one of the society’s founding members, told the Independent. “This was the natural outgrowth of the Raoul Wallenberg Day event, which began in 1986 with the placement of a plaque in Queen Elizabeth Park. It was revived on the 20th anniversary in 2006, as a cooperative event sponsored by the honorary Swedish consul, Anders Neumuller, and the Vancouver Second Generation Group…. We formed the society in order to be able to formally present an award for civil courage, and so acknowledge and support such heroic acts today.”

She added that approximately 50 diplomats from different countries risked their lives and careers to save the lives of Jews during the Second World War. “We have shown films highlighting the acts of Wallenberg, Sweden, and Chiune Sugihara, Japan, [whose visa saved Ross-Grayman’s mother’s life] as well as people from Chile, Portugal and Spain. Wallenberg saved approximately 100,000 people and Sugihara saved approximately 6,000. Their names stand as a symbol for all such courageous and heroic acts.”

Nicky’s Family will screen at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver’s Rothstein Theatre on Jan. 19 at 1:30 p.m.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].