Zyta Eliahu - February 3, 2008
Importance of Teaching about the Holocaust
Do you think, do you think it's important to uh, teach about this experience?
About the Kindertransport?
The Kindertransport and then, then, then the greater...
Oh, you mean like about the Holocaust?
Yeah.
I think it's very important.
Because the Kindertransport are given short shrift very often because...
Yes, because you know, we didn't really--the first fifty years we had no contact. Do you know how we started? Have you heard the story of um, there was one lady--she really got this going. She was--one day she was looking at her granddaughter's photograph who was sixteen in England--she lives in England--and she remembered that exactly when she was sixteen she was sent to England and she became a domestic worker. And I'm sure she--and she thought, "Well, wouldn't it be nice if all of us Kinder could have a reunion?" So she advertised in all the papers in England, in Israel, in Australia and America and she had the first reunion in '89 exactly fifty years after the last Kindertransport arrived.
What was her name?
Her name? It's right at the tip of my tongue. Bertha Leverton. Have you heard of her?
I have.
I think she also visits the States sometimes to give lectures. She, she--this was really a one woman--she started off--on the way she managed to get a lot of people involved who were able to help her professionally but she was the one who started this. And we established a bulletin every month and people kept sending in their stories and I was reading and reading them and one day I decided, "Well, maybe I should send in my story too," and I did. And when we had the sixtieth reunion in '99 there was a whole book comprised. All the details were given--the background to Nazism and the background to the English let...agreeing to let the children come in--as many as possible and 10,000 were saved and there's a lot of interesting stories. Every single story is interesting in that book and uh, she's still busy with this in London. She's still involved with this.
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