The pocket dictionary that was a vital tool after Kindertransport
WITH ITS frayed leather cover and well-thumbed pages, it is an ordinary pocket-sized Collins German-to-English dictionary.
But for one of the last Jewish children to flee Vienna after the Nazis took power, this was a vital tool for her new life in Britain. The book, on show in a new exhibition on the Kindertransport, belonged to Susanne Perl.
Born Susanne Spritzer, she carried it with a ticket issued by the Central European Travel Agency stamped “child” onto the train that brought her safely out of Austria, before she eventually found a temporary new home in Edinburgh.
Hers was one of the last Kindertransport rescue operations before the Second World War broke out. She was one of 3,200 Jewish children whose lives were saved by the Kindertransport rescue effort.
She always remembered her Kindertransport number: 7356. She eventually settled in the United States, marrying a fellow Austrian ex-pat Otto Perl, with whom she had three children, and died last year aged 98.
Her story and those of other children who found safe harbour in Britain after 1938 are documented in a new exhibition at Vienna’s Jewish museum, Without A Home: Kindertransports From Vienna, which opened on Wednesday, the anniversary of Kristallnacht.
What’s known in Austria as the November Pogrom began on the night of 9 November 1938. All but one of Vienna’s
26 synagogues were burnt to the ground as firemen looked on and did nothing. Jewish cemeteries, Jewishowned businesses, and Jewish homes were also targeted for destruction and “Aryanisation”.
Police rounded up 6,000 Jews, deporting them by the trainload to Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. At least 27 Jews were murdered, many more were beaten up and injured, and others took their own lives.
Kristallnacht was the prelude to the Holocaust and the spur for the Kindertransport programme.
The exhibition looks at the Kindertransport
not only through the eyes of the children themselves but also of anguished parents and members of Vienna’s Jewish community body, the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (IKG), all of whom did what they could to get Jewish children out of harm’s way.
After the Anschluss of March 1938, the IKG quickly received 10,000 applications from parents who wanted their children to emigrate, which at the time was almost impossible.
On 10 December 1938, the first Kindertransport train containing 700 children left Vienna for the Hook of Holland prior to onward passage by ferry to
Harwich. Of the 3,200 Jewish children who escaped Vienna between December 1938 and August 1939, 2,400 found a home in Britain with foster families or in institutions.
Carrying few personal mementos and faced with a language barrier, some children felt dislocated and alone. Their parents back in Vienna often lost contact, unsure of where their children had ended up.
Yet the exhibition is also testament to the Kindertransport children’s perseverance and the opportunities for a new, safer life afforded to them.
Hans Menasse left
Vienna aged eight and eventually settled in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, where he had no contact with other Austrian children and soon forgot his native language.
His footballing ability won him a place with Luton Town as a youth player. After the war, he returned to Austria, playing for First Vienna and earning two call-ups to the national team.
Also this week, a new memorial to commemorate Austrian Jews who died in the Holocaust was unveiled.
The names of more than 64,000 Jewish men, women and children who were murdered by the Nazis are inscribed on the monument, which was unveiled on Tuesday.
The Wall of Names was originally conceived more than 20 years ago by Holocaust survivor and campaigner Kurt Yakov Tutter. The project received the support of the Austrian government in 2018.
Construction on the memorial in a park across from the Austrian National Bank began in the summer of 2020 and took 15 months to complete at a total cost of £4.52 million. The finished
memorial consists of 160 stone slabs — the tallest of them 7’9’’ in height —set up in an oval form around a central green space, the victims’ names etched in black upon the sandstone-coloured granite.
Vienna’s first Holocaust memorial dedicated to Jewish victims opened in 2000. Nameless Library, designed by the British artist Rachel Whiteread, is a rectangular library of books turned outwards with no point of access. It sits on Judenplatz across from the Jewish museum.
The Wall of Names differs from other Viennese Holocaust memorials, however, in that it remembers the Shoah not as a symbolic or collective tragedy but rather a tragedy of individuals and families. It measures the Holocaust according to its human dimensions, each victim recorded in stone for all eternity.
Austria’s Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg said The Wall of Names “gives the victims back their individuality, and with it, a piece of their human dignity”.