June 28, 2018--KinderTransport

How fitting it is that on what would have been my mother's 110th birthday I would be writing about children being sent to safe havens by parents who know it is unlikely they will ever again see them. The ultimate act of sacrificial parental love. My mother's and many mothers' specialty! 

I am thinking about young children being sent north to safety in the United States from Central American where their lives are in peril. Fleeing gang-infested Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

And I am also thinking about other children sent to refuge by their parents. Those from Germany and other Eastern European countries overrun by the Nazis where just being Jewish put their lives at risk.

In regard to the latter, I am thinking about my ex-wife Lisa's aunt Mimi Schleissner, who was born in 1927 in Sudetenland, and who, in 1939, at age12 was sent from Czechoslovakia to sanctuary in England via the KinderTranport ("Children's Transport"), an organization that came into being soon after Kristallnacht, to rescue children. In less than a year, 10,000 had been saved by the English who served as foster families.

The KinderTransport

After the Nazis occupied her town, Mimi and her family fled to the country and then on to Kolin where she was hidden by a Christian family and then subsequently transferred to safety in England, through the KinderTransport, to live initially with an uncle in London and then, during the Blitz, to Cheltenham in the Midlands, on the edge of the Cotswolds. 

And how, when there, she met and fell in love with a Newark-born American GI, Eddie Ormond, who played the violin in an army musical group. He was 24, she 17. Her parents didn't approve but still they married, came to America, had three girls, and settled in Cleveland where he was a member of the Cleveland Orchestra.

On the Left--Eddie Ormond

Unlike so many, most of Mimi's immediate family survived, having escaped to Palestine through Italy.

We are seeing a version of the same thing right now, today, along our border with Mexico where there has been and is a steam of unaccompanied young people, some just 10 and 11, sent north by their parents, on their own, to live, if they are fortunate, in the shadows, without the support of organized groups such as the KinderTransport's sponsor, the Jewish Agency. 

They are not murderers and rapists. And their's are not heartless parents. Heartlessness resides elsewhere.

Mimi Schleissner On the Right