Josie Le Blond – The Guardian
Germany will give a one-off payment to mostly Jewish survivors who were evacuated as children from Nazi Germany, a US-based lobbying group has said, in a move that coincides with the 80th anniversary of the Kindertransport trains to Britain.
About 10,000 unaccompanied children left Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland on special trains in the run up to the second world war to be rehoused in Britain with foster families, or in schools, hostels and farms.
The vast majority would never see their families again, many of whom were later murdered in Nazi extermination camps. Now Germany has agreed to give an estimated 1,000 elderly survivors, half of whom still reside in Britain, €2,500 (£2,249) each in compensation for their suffering.
“Our team has never given up hope that the moment would come when we could make this historic announcement,” said Julius Berman, president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, a New York-based group pushing for increased compensation for victims of the Nazis.
The breakthrough on Monday marks the 80th anniversary of the Kindertransport rescue mission, with the first train arriving in Harwich, England on 2 December, 1938 with 196 children on board.
The life-saving rescue mission was prompted by a Nazi-orchestrated, anti-Jewish pogrom in November of that year. The incident, known as Kristallnacht or the Night of the Broken Glass, has been considered a watershed moment in the Nazi’s escalating persecution of European Jews that culminated in the Holocaust.
In the aftermath of the violence, Jewish parents across the continent began looking for escape routes to get their children to safety. British authorities, in response, agreed to allow unspecified numbers of children under the age of 17 to enter the country from Germany and German-annexed areas.
So desperate were Jewish parents to save their children’s lives that many surrendered infants and babies into the care of older children, resulting in countless heart-breaking farewells on railway platforms – experiences the Claims Conference has said scarred survivors for life.
“After having to endure a life forever severed from their parents and families, no one can ever profess to make [the survivors] whole,” said Claims Conference’s special negotiator, Stuart Eizenstat. “They are receiving a small measure of justice.”
The rescue trains from Germany were suspended after the second world war broke out in 1939. Kindertransports ran from the Netherlands for several months but stopped when that nation fell under Nazi occupation in 1940.
Germany has reportedly paid more than $80bn in compensation since the end of the war to around 60,000 survivors of Nazi persecution in 83 countries.
Some Kindertransport survivors were given a small amount of compensation in the 1950s, but the Claims Conference has said this would not affect their eligibility for this newly agreed payment.
Payments would be coordinated by the Claims Conference, which has been setting up a dedicated Kindertransport fund to begin processing applications in January 2019.