80 Years On: Germany Compensates Kindertransport Survivors

PERSPECTIVES | Over the course of 18 months, 10,000 children fled persecution in Germany, Austria, Poland and then Czechoslovakia, and were brought to safety in Britain. Now, Germany has agreed to offer a small compensation to those still alive from the 'Kindertransport' — a symbol of recognition for their suffering. He was just one year-old when his mother handed him to a volunteer nurse on a train leaving Nazi Germany in 1939 — bound for England. Paul Alexander discusses with host Tracy Alexander. Story: The New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which negotiates compensation with the German government on behalf of Holocaust survivors, said Monday that Berlin would offer one-time payments of 2,500 Euros ($2,800) to living survivors of the Kindertransport. About 1,000 survivors are thought to be alive today, with about half still living in Britain, and the payment is seen as a 'symbolic recognition of their suffering,' Claims Conference negotiator Greg Schneider said. After the Kristallnacht pogroms on November 9, 1938, a group of Protestant, Jewish and Quaker leaders appealed to then British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to allow unaccompanied Jewish children into the country. A rescue effort mobilized swiftly, and the first Kindertransport arrived at Harwich on December 2, 1938, carrying 196 children from a Berlin Jewish orphanage which had been torched by the Nazis on Kristallnacht. Many of the children never saw their parents again. 'This money is acknowledgement that this was a traumatic, horrible thing that happened to them,' Schneider said. For more, see below ⬇ Website Articles: https://www.i24news.tv/en Live: https://video.i24news.tv/page/live?cl... (Subscription) Replay: https://video.i24news.tv/page/5a97bcc... (Subscription) Social Media Facebook:   / i24newsen   Twitter:   / i24news_en   Instagram:   / i24