The Kindertransport’s True Legacy https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/history-ideas/2022/03/the-kindertransports-true-legacy/

March 24, 2022 | Jonathan Freedland
About the author:

In discussions regarding Britain’s obligations to Ukrainian refugees, notes Jonathan Freedland, many commentators have invoked the Kindertransport, in which specially chartered trains brought thousands of Jews below the age of seventeen to England in the months prior to World War II. Freeland argues that appealing to the Kindertransport as a “noble tradition of looking after refugees,” as the conservative pundit Simon Heffer put it, is both self-serving and inaccurate:

It is quite true that between March 1938 and the outbreak of war in September 1939, some 9,000 Jews below the age of seventeen came to Britain on the specially chartered trains that would become known as the Kindertransport. But here’s the question asked by too few of those who like to invoke that episode as proof of British generosity: why exactly was it children who were admitted, given that it was Jews of all ages who faced the threat of lethal Nazi persecution in Europe?

The answer is not flattering. Special provision was made for those children because Britain refused to let in their parents—or indeed any adults. Consult The Final Solution, the magisterial history of the Holocaust by the late David Cesarani—and how we miss his calm, reasoned scholarship—and you soon learn that then-Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare waved aside demands that Britain extend a hand to Jews fleeing Nazism, telling the House of Commons that there was an “underlying current of suspicion and anxiety, rightly or wrongly, about alien immigration on any big scale. It is a fact that below the surface there is the making of a definite anti-Jewish movement.”

In other words, His Majesty’s government could not help Jews escape anti-Semitism in Germany because that might cause anti-Semitism in Britain. Jewish refugees would become the objects of hatred, not least from those who imagined refugees coming here and stealing their jobs. Best, then, to keep the Jews out.

Read more on Jewish Chronicle: https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/all/pretending-the-kindertransport-was-a-part-of-a-noble-tradition-is-ignorant-of-history-2vi3phYQmghjpshWnshPtH