Germany has agreed to compensate survivors who fled the Nazis as children in the Kindertransport. From November 1938 (after Kristallnacht) to September 1939 (when Germany declared war on Poland), about 10,000 children, 7,500 of them Jewish, from Germany, Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, were sent to Great Britain. Many never saw their parents, who were killed in the Holocaust, again. The $2,800 paid to each of the estimated 1,000 survivors, most of whom remained in England or emigrated to the U.S., Canada, Australia, or Israel,, is symbolic compensation for the physical, psychological, and spiritual harm done to them. Most never recovered from the trauma. To learn more about the life-long effects of the Kindertransport on the children whose lives were torn apart, read my short story, “Golo’s Transport,” published in The Madison Review, Fall 2017) (see SHORT STORIES).
