The Tragedy of Reluctant Compassion: Jewish Child Refugees and Britain’s Kindertransport Program Before the Second World War

Abstract

Great Britain’s Kindertransport program is widely regarded as one of the most important humanitarian efforts to save European Jews before the Second World War. This rescue mission, which was initiated shortly after the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938 and continued until the outbreak of war in September 1939, transported thousands of mostly Jewish children from Nazi territories to Britain. Upon their arrival, the children were placed in family homes and hostels throughout Britain, where they spent the war in relative comfort and safety. Compared to the actions of other European countries and the United States, British actions on behalf of child refugees were extremely generous.¹ By July 1939, European countries such as France and Sweden had taken in no more than several hundred Jewish children from Germany, while the U.S. had rejected facilitating the entry of German child refugees entirely.² In Britain, by contrast, the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, the British umbrella organization that coordinated the Kindertransport effort, would rescue nearly ten thousand children in the nine months of its operation before September 1939.³ Since there is little doubt that the Kindertransport saved the lives of children who would have perished in the Holocaust, the program has been rightly applauded as a singularly remarkable act of British kindness and generosity.