1 - British Memory of the Kindertransport

Summary

Introduction

Scholars claim that British memory of the Kindertransport is celebratory. For example, Tony Kushner argues that the Kindertransport has “become a safe story … with a redemptive ending.” This positive view of the Kindertransport, Kushner notes, set in from the very beginning because the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany—which later became the Refugee Children's Movement (RCM)—who cared for the Kinder at the time, started in “defensive mode” as it was “anxious” to protect its contemporary and long-term reputation. The RCM, Kushner states, tried to “justify its actions” in terms of being quick to downplay any negatives in its annual reports because it did not want to fully “acknowledge the inherent problem with the scheme.” According to Kushner, that a Kind's diary was used to provide a “comforting narrative” also suggests that the RCM would go to great lengths to evoke a narrative that focused on the restoration of the Kinder's childhoods thanks to British efforts. Moreover, through Kushner's work we can deduce that the RCM's sidestepping of more complicated matters ensured that a selfcongratulatory institutional memory of the Kindertransport developed. This memory would later transform into Britain's national memory, with the Kindertransport coming to symbolize Britain's humanitarian tradition of saving refugees. This has led Kushner as well as Andrea Hammel, Caroline Sharples, and Jennifer Craig-Norton to suggest that British memory of the Kindertransport consists of the following features: rescue, welcome, successful integration, gratitude, heroism, and salvation.

Secondary literature on the Kindertransport also reflects upon how the Kinder's stories were “lost in different post-war narratives of the Nazi era,” resulting in several decades passing before the Kindertransport was rediscovered by the British public. The later re-emergence of the Kindertransport narrative in the 1990s, Sharples notes, coincided with a broader national and international interest in the Holocaust and the Second World War. Today, the Kindertransport has become, according to Antony Grenville, one lieu de mémoire around which British political, social, and cultural memory of the Second World War has crystallized. The British, says Grenville, see the Kindertransport “as part of the story of their ‘finest hour’ in the war against National Socialism.”