Orange High School had the privilege of meeting a Kindertransport member by the name of Henry Landsberger Thursday, February 20. He is a part of the Chapel Hill-Durham Holocaust Speakers Bureau. Landsberger was born in Germany and lived there with his mother and father until he was 12 years old. When Hitler came into power, he began the removal of all Jews with the help of his followers, who were part of the National Socialist German Workers Party, otherwise known as Nazis.
The Kindertransport system was for the safety of the young children in Germany whose parents were of Jewish faith. Children were sent away on a train and they went to the United Kingdom to find families that could provide for them. Without this system, millions more children would have died in the tragedy known as the Holocaust. Landsberger was on one of these trains and left Germany when we was 12, he was sent away by his own parents who cared deeply about his safety.
Landsberger was sent to England to an empty summer camp building in the middle of winter. The living conditions weren’t well equipped to handle all the needs of a person in the cold. From there, he and a group of other children were shipped to an orphanage to be picked by other family members that they would go to live with. He was not adopted as quickly as some of the other kids, seeing as most of the family members wanted a little girl, but eventually he was chosen by an English family, and he stayed with them until he was old enough to go to college.
After the “Kindertransport era” was over and it was safe for people of Jewish faith to go out and do regular activities, his father came to visit him in America at least twice and his mother only once. Landsberger came to America when he was 23 and by then he knew several different languages such as German, English, and others. He eventually went on to become a professor at a university, and then married his wife who recently passed away after 61 ½ years.
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