Eight decades later, longtime Londoners retrace their childhood escapes on Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld’s kindertransports

Photos: Family archives

Following the horrors of Kristallnacht in November of 1938, Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld, a 26-year-old charismatic and forward-thinking British rabbi and educational pioneer, travelled to Vienna and organized the first Kindertransport of close to 300 Orthodox Jewish youngsters.

At the time, Rabbi Schonfeld was doing the bidding of his mentor from his days in the Nitra yeshivah, Rav Michoel Ber Weissmandl, who begged him to bring out as many children as possible and put them in the schools Rabbi Schonfeld was running in London.

The young rabbi used his clout as presiding rabbi of the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations and executive director of the newly formed Chief Rabbi’s Religious Emergency Council under the auspices of his future father-in-law, Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz (he would marry Judith Helen Hertz in 1940), in order to convince the British government to waive all visa requirements and not put a cap on the number of refugee children entering the country, as long as there were trains to transport them.

Following Rabbi Schonfeld’s initiative, Kindertransports seemed to take on a life of their own. With tireless organization, bravery and unending dedication, over two dozen groups and private activists worked in parallel, and in the nine months prior to the outbreak of World War II, the UK took in nearly 10,000 children from Nazi-controlled territory — Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and parts of Poland. The children, who were placed in British foster homes, hostels, schools, and farms, were often the only members of their families who survived the Holocaust.

For Rabbi Schonfeld though, that initial rescue work was just the beginning. For the next ten years, this remarkable Holocaust hero went on to rescue thousands of Jews, breaking every rule in the book as he practically singlehandedly brought several thousand youngsters, as well as rabbis, teachers, shochtim, and other religious functionaries to England, doing his best to provide his charges with kosher homes, Jewish education, and jobs. He had no problem bending the rules all the way if it meant saving a Jewish life – and so, for example, any Jewish man became a tzitzis knotter or kashrus supervisor or shul shamash in order to get a visa and a temporary “paid” job (sometimes paid by the Religious Emergency Council).

During the war, time and again he urged the British government to bomb Auschwitz; and at the war’s end, he repeatedly traveled back to the devastation to bring child and adult survivors to England — wearing a military-style uniform he created himself to give the impression that he was an army officer. For the next few years, he recovered hidden children and spirited many others away from Communist Eastern Europe.

Rabbi Dr. Schonfeld passed away in Adar 1984 (on his 72nd birthday), and in honor of his 40th yahrtzeit this week, four long-ago Jewish refugees who’ve been living in the UK for eight  decades — just children at the time, who owe their survival to his and other Kindertransport initiatives — share their stories