Search for kindertransport foster families
‘We called them “Aunty and Uncle”… they provided us with a warm, loving and secure home.’
An IT pioneer and philanthropist has led a call to find British foster families who took in Jewish refugee children on the Quaker co-founded kindertransport.
Stephanie Shirley, a former kindertransport refugee, said she hopes that people ‘can help trace these foster families so that their acts of selfless kindness can be recorded and celebrated. For Britain, this was truly a heroic but so far neglected story’.
‘In 1939 I came aged five from Vienna with my older sister Renate without my parents, not knowing if I would ever see them again.’ In England, their future foster parents – Guy and Ruby Smith – took the sisters into their home near Sutton Coldfield. ‘We called them “Aunty and Uncle”… they provided us with a warm, loving and secure home.’
‘I am only alive because so long ago I was helped by generous strangers.’
Stephanie Shirley, a kindertransport refugee
who hopes to trace foster families.
The Quakers were instrumental in setting up the kindertransport, when 10,000 mainly Jewish children escaped Nazi persecution in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland. The system was developed, alongside other groups, by the Germany Emergency Committee which British Quakers set up in 1933.
This month sees the eighty-fifth anniversary of the last rescue trains from Prague to London, organised by Nicholas Winton. The work to search for families and record their testimonies is being led by a UK team working for a US holocaust museum. The organisers said that, though the foster parents are no longer alive, there is a good chance to trace living siblings – ‘those that became new sisters and brothers for the kindertransport children’. People with information can contact Mike Levy at kindertransport4@gmail.com.
‘I am only alive because so long ago I was helped by generous strangers,’ Stephanie Shirley told the Shropshire Star in 2015. ‘The Quakers organised the train and paid Aunty and Uncle some money every week.’
