American Swedish Institute Kindertransport Exhibition
A wall of blank tags fills the side of the Osher Gallery at the American Swedish Institute, each one representing the tag worn by a child who was transported out of Nazi-occupied territory before World War II. It’s half of the American Swedish Institute’s two-part exhibition on the most successful organized effort to rescue Jewish children before the Holocaust: "Kindertransport".
Between 1938 and the end of 1939, the kindertransport (“children’s transport”) trains brought about 10,000 children to Great Britain, Sweden, and other countries. Jewish parents had to make the heart-wrenching decision to send their children to a foreign country, with the knowledge they may never see them again, in order for them to survive. Some parents could not afford to keep their children, others felt it was their only chance to give them a better life as the situation in Europe grew increasingly dire before the Holocaust.
Some children ended up in loving homes and were accepted into their new families, others ended up as servants and laborers. “There’s no one story about the kindertransport, each child has a unique and different story,” says Michael Simonson, an archivist at the Leo Baeck Institute at the Center for Jewish History. By the end of the war, some children struggled to reunite back with their birth families, if they had even survived.
Things changed rapidly after the Kristallnacht pogrom, or the Night of Broken Glass, which was the turning point for many countries to begin accepting the refugees. “The world, for the most part, was very anti-immigrant and anti-semitic, and no one wanted the Jewish refugees in their countries,” Simonson says. Some American politicians wanted to make a kindertransport, but the Wagner-Rogers "Child Refugee" bill to accept Jewish children stateside died in congress.
The stories of the “kinder” are told through objects that the children brought with them on their passage, letters with their parents, and new audio testimonies from survivors. One suitcase that was brought on the journey is a time capsule of artifacts from the period. More than 1 million Jewish children were ultimately killed in the Holocaust.
The exhibition is co-presented by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas and the Greenberg Family Fund for Holocaust Awareness at Beth El Synagogue.
Special to the Minnesota debut of the exhibition is “The Story is Here,” a collection of stories from families in Minnesota who were personally impacted by the kindertransport, on display in ASI's Turnblad Mansion. One of the survivors was Siegfried Lindenbaum, who escaped Poland at 9 years old with his 7-year-old brother, arriving in England just three days before the Nazi invasion of his home country. The boat never arrived for their sister Ruth, who was later killed in Auschwitz. Lindenbaum ended up in Minneapolis.
“I'm not supposed to be here. My family is not supposed to be here. My children are not supposed to exist,” said Beth Gendler, the daughter of Lindenbaum, who died in 1993 and didn't talk much about this period of his life when he was alive. "On my better days that's a real source of strength and power. On the harder days, it's wow, we are an unwanted and cast out people, and some of that still happens today as we see rising anti-semitism around the globe."
The exhibition runs through October 31, 2021.
