Jews Saved in Kindertransport Recall the Day Childhood Ended

The occasion was a screening for students of an Oscar-winning documentary about the rescue of 10,000 Jewish children by the British just before World War II. On screen, Ursula Rosenfeld, now a woman in her 70s, was describing the moment she realized her happy childhood was over.

Rosenfeld was one of the children whisked out of Nazi Germany in 1938 and 1939 and taken to England. She is among the survivors featured in “Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport,” which will air Monday on HBO.

Later, Rosenfeld would know genuine horrors. Her father was beaten to death when he protested the treatment of fellow prisoners at Buchenwald concentration camp. His ashes were sent home to his widow in a box.

When Ursula left on the train for England, the last image she had of her mother was her face contorted with the pain of losing a child.

But Ursula’s first clue that her world was falling apart was at her birthday party when she was about 10. None of the friends she had invited came to the party because she was a Jew.

“That was the first terrible blow to me,” Rosenfeld recalled more than 60 years later. “I know it sounds trivial, but it was the first sort of comprehension . . . that you’re ostracized, that there’s something different about you.”

Being safe in England was little solace to the child who desperately missed her mother and feared constantly for her mother’s safety. “I cried for years,” said Rosenfeld, who learned after the war that her mother had been killed.

Seeing Rosenfeld talk about that terrible birthday party was the most moving moment for Marine Hovanesian, 15, a sophomore at the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies in Reseda. Marine was one of a dozen students who attended the screening Wednesday as part of National Tolerance Week.

Classmate Melanie Esteva was shocked when a German mother was shown on screen urging her child to give a Nazi salute. “It showed how ignorant they were,” said 15-year-old Melanie, who was wearing her brand new cheerleader’s jacket.

Angeleno Joe Hess was one of the children of the kindertransport, and he spoke to the local students after the screening, sponsored by HBO and Time Warner Cable.

“I stand before you a lucky person,” said Hess, 69, a retired meteorologist who worked in the United States space program and now lives in Garden Grove. Hess was 5 when he got on a train in his native Fulda, Germany, and set out with his older sister for a new life in England. Hess and his sister were taken in by English Jews, a London taxi driver and his wife with three children of their own who bore the entire cost of caring for two sad, little German-speaking refugees.

Hess remembers getting slapped regularly by his English teachers, who didn’t much like having a German in class, especially one named Hess, like notorious Nazi Rudolph Hess.

“But I’ll always be grateful to the British,” said Hess, whose first English word was “inkwell” and who developed a taste for kippers. “No other country--none, zero--took Jewish refugees in.”

Eva Perlman, 69, of Encino, also spoke. Born in Germany, she escaped with her parents to France, where courageous Gentiles hid the fact Perlman’s family was Jewish. Her mother had the good sense to leave Germany when, as a medical student, she heard a colleague say he would rather see patients die than have them be treated by a Jewish doctor.

Hess asked the students to imagine what it would be like to say goodbye to their parents. “And this was forever,” he said, as many of the children realized when letters stopped coming from home.

The number of children taken to England was limited to 10,000, Hess said, even though “we could have taken 10,000 out of just two or three towns” in Germany and Eastern Europe.

Hess told the students that barbarism existed before the Holocaust and continues to exist: “Humans are the cruelest animals in the world, and you can see that happening today in Afghanistan,” he said.

Hess assumed his parents had both been killed by the Nazis. But several years after the war, he learned his father had survived a string of concentration camps and a Soviet forced labor camp in Siberia. His father was beside Hess under the wedding canopy, along with Hess’s adopted British father and the father of Hess’s bride, Margie.

Can he tell if students understand his message, Hess was asked? Not always, he said. “But when you look at their eyes, they’re not blank. It’s just hard for them to believe this could happen.”

It happened. An estimated 1.5 million Jewish children were killed by the Nazis and those who collaborated with them.