My Train to Freedom Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Ivan A. Backer

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  ISBN: 978-1-63450-604-5

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63450-975-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  “Activism is my rent for living on the planet.”

  —Alice Walker

  For Nicholas Winton

  without whom I would not be alive

  For Paula

  without whom this memoir would not have been written

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Preface

  Chapter One: The Kindertransport Kid, 1939

  Chapter Two: Childhood Memories from before the Nazis, 1929–1939

  Chapter Three: The Rest of My Family Escapes, One by One, 1939

  Chapter Four: My Three English Families, 1939

  Chapter Five: From School to School to School, 1939–1944

  Chapter Six: Perilous Voyage to America, 1944

  Chapter Seven: New York, 1944–1946

  Chapter Eight: Why Was I Spared? 1946–1952

  Chapter Nine: Being a Businessman and an Activist, 1952–1963

  Chapter Ten: Being a Parish Priest and an Activist, 1964–1969

  Chapter Eleven: Being an Educator and an Activist, 1969–1979

  Chapter Twelve: Being a President and an Activist, 1979–1999

  Chapter Thirteen: Being Retired and Still an Activist, 1999–Now

  Chapter Fourteen: Am I a Jew? Am I a Christian?

  Chapter Fifteen: People, Places, and Things: An Update

  Afterword

  Trains

  Appendix 1: From Flossenbürg to Freedom

  Appendix 2: Auschwitz and Death March Survivor Liselott Bächer Fraenkl

  Appendix 3: Letter from Nicholas Winton’s Mother, Barbara, to My Mother, 1940

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  SIR NICHOLAS WINTON saved my life in 1939, but I didn’t know it until much later.

  Winton was a young London stockbroker in 1938 when a friend invited him to Prague to see the aftermath of the German takeover of Czech borderlands. Winton realized that Hitler’s ambitions would soon engulf Czechoslovakia and that many people, including children, were likely to perish. He responded to the Nazi threat by organizing a massive relief effort utilizing trains and boats to save young lives. Winton’s Kindertransports successfully whisked 669 children away from impending danger. I was one of the children he rescued.

  More than sixty years elapsed before I became aware of my savior. Today, Winton is known as “Britain’s Schindler.” An award-winning 2011 documentary about his life, Nicky’s Family, has been distributed internationally. In 2014, 60 Minutes aired a report about Winton’s life that featured several clips from the documentary.

  Although I did not know many of the details about my escape until recently, I always knew it was my immense good fortune that I was saved. I was no more deserving than others. At all times I carry with me the reminder that I am very lucky to have been spared from Holocaust brutality.

  This memoir recounts how my survival influenced the course of my life.

  PREFACE

  I HAVE BEEN called upon frequently these past few years to share my story as a Kindertransport escapee from the Holocaust. Suggestions were made that I should record my recollections in a memoir. I put the idea on the back burner until fairly recently when I noticed that my generation is now often referred to as “elders”—a step in aging beyond “senior citizens,” which I had become used to hearing. I realized that preserving what those of us who were a part of that history have to say has become an urgent priority.

  The blue folder I always take with me when I tell my story to an audience is something of a security blanket. It sits on my side table ready for me to grab on my way out the door. I check that it contains the typed notes I won’t consult but always bring along. I will start my talk with a description of my happy boyhood in Prague, then turn to what I remember about my escape in 1939 as a ten-year-old boy aboard a Kindertransport train. Included in the folder is a copy of my poem titled “Trains,” which I have been reading aloud at the end of my several talks this past year. Underneath the master copy are several extras in case someone asks for a copy of the poem, which occasionally happens. The DVD of Nicky’s Family, a documentary about the great humanitarian Nicholas Winton, who organized Kindertransport trains from Prague, has already been delivered to the group sponsoring my presentation and will be screened for the audience prior to my introduction. As I walk through my foyer to leave by the front door, I pass the large framed poster presented to me in 2012 by the West Hartford Jewish Community Center, where I gave one of my earliest talks to one of the largest and most appreciative audiences. Moving through my condo into that space each day, I often glance at the oversized photograph in the frame—a round-faced gentleman with white hair and a slight twinkle in his eye. The picture is of Nicholas Winton: rescuer of 669 doomed Czech children, including me, who would otherwise have been caught in Holocaust terror. As an escapee I am eternally grateful to this man who saved my life.

  In the last few years, I have begun to write vignettes about my boyhood before and after I arrived by train, then boat, in England from Prague as a refugee. I looked back at decisions I made as a young man seeking to establish a life in a new country, America. The fate I had been spared as a child is always with me, and I ponder my worthiness; why was I saved? My thoughts and reflections as an older adult started to knit together and, in combination with my early notes and vignettes, formed a cohesive story—my story. Over the years, I’ve been in contact with just a few others who had also been on those Kindertransports from Prague, but neither they nor others who’d made the journey had, as far as I could find, published any personal accounts of living in America. I undertook the task of writing this book to document my memories and also to add another voice in admiration of the courageous moral stance taken by Nicholas Winton, who, working with only a few other volunteers, including his mother, Barbara, managed in the short window of time he had to transport so many of us children from Czechoslovakia to safety.

  Nicholas Winton’s story overarches my own. He accomplished the Kindertransport rescue operation selflessly and with a humbleness that is not found today, a time when the slightest accomplishment is considered newsworthy. The last of Winton’s Kindertransport trains did not leave Prague as scheduled in September 1939 because the occupying Nazis closed the Czech borders; the children on that train presumably perished, as did most Jews in Czechoslovakia. After Winton married, he didn’t tell his wife about saving Czech children during the war. She accidentally discovered a scrapbook in their attic in 1987—almost fifty years after the event—that documented his wartime work with children, families, adoptive homes in England, and governments.
She shared her finding with a television producer who publicized the details on a TV program.

  The most dramatic moment in the program came after Winton was identified from the stage and recognized for his life-saving Kindertransports that brought Czech children to safety in 1939. On cue, everyone who had ridden as a child on one of Winton’s trains to freedom stood up. Taken by surprise, Nicholas Winton turned around to the silent crowd behind him. Like most in the studio that night, his eyes welled up with tears, and he took out a handkerchief to prevent them from rolling down his cheeks. Unfortunately, I was not present because the organizers of the event did not know how to get in touch with me. I heard that most in attendance lived in England.

  I did not know who saved me or the full Kindertransport story until fifteen years later. When I learned of Nicholas Winton and his role in saving my life, I was dumbfounded. I started to read accounts and tried to recall as much as possible about those critical years in which war was beginning.

  The Kindertransports from Czechoslovakia were not the first to be organized. Already in the mid-1930s trains and ships were leaving Germany with Jewish children from orphanages and some whose parents were interred in concentration camps. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, there were Kindertransports that took children from Austria and Germany.

  The numbers of rescued children swelled. All told, approximately ten thousand children were taken to safety in Great Britain. Only Britain was willing to accept these refugee children—every other country closed its borders to them. The people of the British Isles showed their generosity in taking in so many. Several agencies in England, including Jewish, Quaker, and Christian ones, organized trains, but the plight of Czech and Slovak children was ignored until the German occupation of the Czech Sudetenland, where twenty-nine-year-old Nicholas Winton saw the refugee camps and recognized the situation as dire. No agency was attending to children in Czechoslovakia.

  Winton acted on the need to fill this vacuum. He shuttled between his London home and Prague, identifying and recruiting English families willing to sponsor a child, pairing them with eligible children in Prague, arranging for the children’s departure, and organizing Kindertransports. Eight Kindertransports were successful. Most of the children said good-bye to their parents before boarding the trains, never to see them again. In this sense my story is different because my immediate family of four escaped. I tell about them and others in this memoir. After Nicholas Winton’s story was revealed, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II to become Sir Nicholas. The government of the Czech Republic also honored Winton on his several visits to Prague. His “family” has greatly multiplied from the original 669, and he acknowledged all of us as his “children.”

  I also pay tribute here to my parents and all parents of Kindertransport children for having had the courage and foresight to part with their children—to bestow on them the gift of life, even sometimes at the price of their own lives. Looking at my children and grandchildren when they were at the young ages of those on the Kindertransports, I wonder if I would have been able to do the same. I, too, must have seemed to my parents to be young, dependent, and vulnerable. Yet it is remarkable how many of us children considered the journey an adventure and how trusting we were of our own safety. I acquired the sense that “things will work out in the end,” and it has stayed with me throughout my life.

  In this memoir I recount ways I have shaped my life in response to these events of my past. For those of us rescued by Nicholas Winton, the task is how to repay our debt for the gift of our lives. Up until his death, Winton revealed his sensitivity to the plight of those in need. Perhaps the legacy of Nicholas Winton will commit us to care more for others.

  Finally, I do not refer to myself as a survivor because I did not suffer like others who were unable to leave during the long, murderous Nazi reign. I had no narrow escapes from the Gestapo, no long suffocating rides in trucks and cattle cars, no internment in concentration camps, no brutal forced labor, long inhumane marches, or physical suffering. Unfortunately, this was not the case for many family members and friends. But I lived safely exiled in free countries under circumstances that were initially unfamiliar, but comfortable enough. I escaped.

  An intent in writing my story is to investigate the focus—the central question that hangs over my postwar life: How did the fact that I avoided the Holocaust horrors influence the choosing of my life’s work and the major decisions I made along the way?

  This book is a look back at my life but does not try to capture the voice of who I was when the events occurred. It begins in 1939 with Nazi troops marching into Prague, the city of my birth, and my mother’s success in obtaining passage for me at age ten to leave on a Kindertransport train for England, where I was placed with several different English families. I detail the adjustments required there of the “Czech boy” and eventually in America where my family and I obtained citizenship. My narrative progresses chronologically and follows my schooling and careers as I wrestle throughout my life to define and act upon the meaning of my survival.

  Chapter One: The Kindertransport Kid, 1939

  IT WAS MAY 11, 1939. The dank, dimly lit train platform was crowded that evening at the Masaryk Station in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Masaryk, the chosen name for the busy railroad hub, was in honor of our republic’s first president and showed a source of pride nurtured in happier times; the invading Nazis had not yet renamed the streets and places around the city. The station was swarming with German soldiers looking very stern and frightening to me. But what is etched most in my memory is the sixty of us children standing about with numbered tags—my number was 1174—hanging from our necks surrounded by parents, grandparents, and other relatives who had come to see us off on the fourth scheduled Kindertransport from Prague to England. Adults were crying, and hugging and kissing us, fearing they would never see their children again. Some children, particularly the older ones, were trying to wiggle out of the embraces that held them too tightly. Both young and old found it difficult to say good-bye.

  The descending dusk further darkened a gloomy sky and mirrored the mood of somber family groups who stood peering down the tracks for the train. With one small suitcase apiece, we young ones were directed to board the Kindertransport that was to take us to safety. Each compartment door opened directly onto the platform, which made it easy for some anguished parents to take their children off the train and then change their minds and suddenly thrust the children back on. Choking back sobs, loved ones fluttered handkerchiefs, dampened with tears, at the train as it pulled away promptly at five o’clock and faded from view.

  My mother and aunt were there to see me off, but our farewells lacked the visible emotion of so many around us. My mother was stoic, as she had accepted weeks ago that sending me to England was assuring my survival. I myself was looking forward with excitement to the trip as I had been told my father would be waiting for me at my final destination in London, which was a great comfort since most children had to leave both parents behind. My departure, however, was not as smooth as it appeared to me at the station; I learned later that my leaving was quite difficult for my mother. Not only was she parting with her ten-year-old son, perhaps never to see him again, but she had to endure the rebukes of her sister-in-law, my aunt Malva, who upbraided her vehemently—“You’re out of your mind sending the boy off. Do you realize what you are doing? It’s terrible!” This incident illustrates the two different points of view among Jews in Prague about the threat posed by Hitler after Czechoslovakia was occupied. Some were certain we must leave the country as soon as possible by whatever means possible, but others thought it would blow over, cautioned calm, said things won’t be so bad, believed life as it was for us at the time would endure. Though Mother, too, must have felt some conflict and had certainly worried, she was resolute and would not be deterred. She had become convinced that she was saving me from almost certain death—the tragic fate that befell Malva’s two children, both much older than I was.

&nb
sp; Our train went north, heading for the German border some seventy-five miles away. I was off on an adventure, unaware of the Holocaust to come. At the border the train stopped for passport checks, but nothing untoward occurred that I remember. Once the Nazi officials saw that our passports had the official Gestapo exit stamp, we were allowed to proceed. I sat next to one of the three adults accompanying our Kindertransport, a lady named Eugenia Tausiková. She was a social worker whom my mother knew, and I was in her care. We occupied a third-class compartment that seated about eight members of our group.

  Later that evening we ate the sandwiches brought from home and whatever other goodies were packed with them as the train rolled through Germany. I remember thinking to myself, I am now in the heart of my mortal enemy’s territory, ruled by the hated Nazis, and I felt some trepidation, but not sustained fear. Above all I felt lonely and could not fall asleep, even while nestled safely on the shoulder of Miss Tausiková. The incessant clickety-clack of train wheels pounded in my head.

  I began to think of Father waiting for me at the end of my journey. It had been two months since I last saw him. Father seldom showed outward affection toward me, but he responded warmly and encouraged me whenever I shared my dreams about visiting America, where I imagined I owned a factory managed by my employee, a Mr. Kapusta (cabbage in Czech). I forget what my company manufactured, but there were always problems that Mr. Kapusta invariably solved for me. I looked forward to seeing Father to tell him more of my boyhood fantasies and observing once again the pleasure on his face as he listened to me with complete attention.

  Then my thoughts turned to my mother, whom I had left just a few hours before. I kept asking myself when I would see her again. She had promised me she would come to England, too. Mother was not the cuddly type either, but I loved her deeply. She called the shots in our family even though I disliked some of the outcomes, like having to practice the piano, which I considered torture. But I followed through with things I didn’t want to do because she insisted. It was she who made the arrangements for my wonderful trips to Dobruška to see my grandparents even when she could not go with me. So many memories of my parents came flooding back on the train.