Latest news with #Kindertransport
New York Times
05-07-2025
- General
- New York Times
A Lifetime After Fleeing the Nazis, They Tell Their Stories
Eighty-five years on, the memories come in flashes. A mother's last glance through a smudged train station window. A few belongings held in tiny hands. An anxious wait for a new home in a foreign city. In the months after Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi pogrom widely remembered as the start of the Holocaust, thousands of Jewish families sent daughters and sons abroad to safety. Some 10,000 children arrived in Britain and a handful went to other European countries. Without their parents, and despite language barriers, they built varied and often remarkable lives. Many of them eventually settled in the United States. As this extraordinary rescue mission, known as the Kindertransport, has gained recognition, researchers continue to unearth new information about these journeys in archives, newly discovered papers and interviews with the last living survivors. Only a few hundred who were part of the Kindertransport, which ended in September 1939, are believed to still be alive, and as memories fade, the push to record their experiences has gained urgency. Here, seven survivors tell their stories. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
USA Today
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
'Typewriter Beach' explores McCarthyism in tale of Hollywood screenwriter
Meg Waite Clayton was mulling how to follow up her best-selling 2021 historical fiction novel "The Postmistress of Paris" when fate tapped her on the shoulder. Her father had died and grief was making writing difficult. Then came the global pandemic, which found the California author hunkered down in the new home she shared with her husband Mac in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, a picture-book hamlet snuggled up against a crescent-shaped Pacific beach. And so was born "Typewriter Beach" (out now from HarperCollins), a novel about blacklisted screenwriter Léon Chazan, who goes by Leo, and his journey toward the embrace of family that was denied him by the Holocaust. The tale toggles between Los Angeles during the 1950s McCarthy era, and 2018, when Chazan's granddaughter Gemma decamps to his old Carmel cottage to meet her own personal and professional destiny. "Leo just came to me, that's my father's middle name, and Gemma is basically Meg backwards," says Clayton. "It's not my family's story per se; my father was a tech executive, not a blacklisted writer. But it all comes from the shreds of my heart." Clayton is no stranger to populating novels with real events and even historical figures, and she's particularly fond of slicing off gritty periods from the mid-20th century. In "The Race for Paris" (2015), she crafted a tale spotlighting women war correspondents who helped chronicle D-Day, while in "Last Train to London" (2019) she based her heroine on a real Dutch woman who was integral to the fabled Kindertransport that saved many Jewish children during World War II. In "Typewriter Beach," we're in another difficult period where Senator Joseph McCarthy is on a witch hunt to ruin the lives of anyone even remotely suspected of being connected to the Communist party. Often evidence was thin or fabricated, but that didn't stop McCarthy and others from sending many Hollywood actors and writers into exile. Screenwriters such as Dalton Trumbo had to submit scripts through proxies, often accepting only a fraction of their regular pay. That dilemma is at the core of "Typewriter Beach," which also features an appearance by none other than Alfred Hitchcock, who invites Clayton's '50s actress character, Isabella Giori, to audition for him. There are other well-known name drops, involving real Oscar night dramas and #MeToo movement trials, all of which bubbled to the fore during the author's pandemic writing blitz. "I write best when I write about the things I'm passionate about. And beyond being interested in the impact of the blacklist, I'd been writing opinion pieces for some time about the treatment of women in Hollywood," she says. How women are treated in Hollywood is a big focus on the novel 'Typewriter Beach' In this new novel, Giori is an up-and-coming actress whose life is upended by the scrutiny and demands of a publicity machine that doesn't allow actors to simply be themselves. On the run, she leaves Los Angeles for Carmel. Clayton says she mined those details from reading about real legends from Grace Kelly to Marilyn Monroe, whose careers were subject to intense scrutiny and control. Ingrid Berman was virtually blackballed after her scandalous extramarital affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini, a marriage that would later produce actress Isabella Rossellini. She stayed away from the Oscars in 1957 despite winning for "Anastasia." For Clayton, the power of fiction over news reports is rooted in the heart. "History you read about, but with historical fiction you try and make people feel what it might be like to have something powerful happen to you," she says. Part of what keeps "Typewriter Beach" clicking along are the overlapping references to Hollywood then and now, especially when a guest appearance is made by the murder-mystery icon best known simply as "Hitch." To make sure his presence was genuine, Clayton watched countless hours of Hitchcock interviews and "made sure I watched many of his greatest works, which frankly was a great excuse to watch movies during the daytime," she says. As for the accuracy of Hitch's comments and behavior in her novel, Clayton says that while creative license is fair game after someone dies, "I still felt compelled to make sure that things resonated, whether it was his love of eating many steaks at a time or his relationship with his wife, Alma, or the description of the house they had just north of Carmel. It's all the way it was." In writing the new book, Clayton also got to know her new hometown better, strolling its tree-dotted and canopied streets, discovering its hidden beaches and learning about its famous poet Robinson Jeffers. She even dove into 1950s town gossip by perusing the archives of the local paper, the improbably named Carmel Pine Cone. Searching old copies, she'd stumble upon articles announcing that Bing Crosby had just arrived for the season, see ads for movies playing at the local theater and scan announcements detailing which resident had just gotten a telephone. It all made it that much easier to make Carmel-by-the-Sea a key protagonist in her latest work. "It's this tiny town known the world over for its cottages and fog and famous residents like Clint Eastwood, Doris Day and now even Brad Pitt," she says. "But the gift I personally got from the pandemic was being able to focus on where I now lived. And that was just wonderful."
Times
04-06-2025
- Business
- Times
Stephanie Shirley at 91: ‘I think I've got a couple more big trips left in me'
Dame Stephanie Shirley, 91, is a tech pioneer and philanthropist who came to Britain on the Kindertransport in 1939. She built a £3 billion business, Freelance Programmers (later renamed F International), and 70 of her staff became millionaires due to its shared ownership structure. Since retiring in 1993 she has donated more than £70 million to charity. She was made a dame in 2000 and became one of the prestigious few members of the Order of Companions of Honour in 2017. I suppose the most significant trip I've ever taken was the two-and-a-half day rail and boat journey on the Kindertransport. In 1939, my older sister, Renate, and I travelled from Vienna to London alongside a thousand other tearful Jewish children, with our train tickets around our necks. My German Jewish father lost his job as a judge after Hitler took power, so we moved from Dortmund to Austria but had to get out fast after the Anschluss [the Nazi takeover of Austria]. So that trip to England, my first real travel experience, made a huge difference to my life. On arrival in England I was fostered by a wonderful couple in Sutton Coldfield in the West Midlands, Guy and Ruby Smith, whom I called Uncle and Auntie. I spent the next few years with them. Yes, it was wartime, but we had a lovely bucket-and-spade-holiday in Blackpool when I was aged six. Some of my happiest holiday memories are of going camping in a punt on the Upper Thames with my late husband, Derek [who died in 2021, aged 97], during our courting days. We'd hire it for the weekend and use a great big pole to go down the Thames, stopping off along the route in places such as Maidenhead and Marlow. Each night we would pull up a canvas structure to give us privacy, sleeping with blankets over us in the punt. But we were so close to the water that I'd often wake up to see a water rat squinting at me. After marrying in 1959 we honeymooned at a rather swanky hotel, Great Fosters in Egham, Surrey, staying in a room with a four-poster bed. But we had to check out earlier than we'd planned to because we were short of money. Following the birth of our only son, Giles, we had a wonderful summer holiday in Tenby, in Wales, when he was little. But he was profoundly disabled and that made travelling with him difficult from the age of two or three [Giles died aged 35]. A day out was a major achievement — and the one holiday Derek and I took without him, a cruise around the Canary Islands, was a disaster because he was so upset at being left in the hands of carers. We never did that again. As my business grew bigger and more successful in the 1970s and 1980s and we opened subsidiaries overseas, I began to go on work trips to places like Amsterdam (such a beautiful city), and Lucerne in Switzerland, as well as further afield. Given Giles's health issues, and the fact that Derek was not a particularly keen overseas traveller, I started tacking mini-holidays on to those work trips. • 16 of the best hotels in Vienna At one point in the 1980s I was travelling to San Francisco four times a year for board meetings, though I'd fly out a day or two early so I could visit an art gallery and dine out. I had a favourite business class seat on the plane, as well as a favourite room — 215, a corner room with windows on two sides — at the Marriott on Union Square, which became a home from home. The holidays that were most memorable were the most unexpected. For instance, walking around the awe-inspiring Uluru in central Australia, snorkelling off the Great Barrier Reef (tourism was much less developed there when I first visited) and going on a safari in Zimbabwe. Those experiences were just so different to my everyday life. • Best hotels in San Francisco Have I been back to Germany and Austria? Being a judge and a German-speaker, my father — by then in the US Army — was called upon to assist the Allied authorities at the Nuremberg trials. So I visited him there in 1946, and got to see a few of the Nazi defendants in the dock, though it wasn't exactly a holiday. Both my birth parents thankfully survived the Second World War but I never really bonded with them again, so I stayed in England. I've also since returned to Vienna a couple of times, on work and leisure trips, and on one trip saw my old childhood home. It's quite a romantic city, particularly if you love classical music as I do (there's often music in the air), though I obviously felt mixed emotions my first time back there. Over the past half-dozen years I've used a buggy service to cover long distances in airports, and been joined by my long-time personal assistant, Lynn, a wonderful companion, on my travels. We've visited everywhere. In Edinburgh's airport departure lounge I got talking to the comedian Eddie Izzard, who was wearing a dress, on our return flight to Heathrow. He was great fun and we struck up quite a rapport. When I was younger, and even during middle age, I was never really conscious of getting jet lag, but it creeps up on you as you get older. These days I need to remember my medications when I travel too. I think I've got a couple more big trips left in me, however, and would love to revisit Japan because the only part I've seen is Tokyo. Just so long as I have a companion to keep me company. Let It Go by Dame Stephanie Shirley & Richard Askwith (Penguin £10.99). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members In our weekly My Hols interview, famous faces — from the worlds of film, sport, politics, and more — share their travel stories from childhood to the present day. Read more My Hols interviews here.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Thwarted Telegraph suitor Efune says 'British bid is best'
The British-born newspaper-owner whose takeover of The Daily Telegraph appears to have been thwarted by a £500m deal with RedBird Capital Partners has called on the title's stakeholders to rally behind his bid instead. In an opinion piece to be published later on Friday, Dovid Efune, publisher of The New York Sun, will say that his offer is "now within sight of the finish line, with the bulk of the needed funding committed". Mr Efune has been assembling a bid for the right-leaning newspapers for months, with a series of funding options having been explored. Money latest: He now has backing from Nadhim Zahawi, the former Conservative Cabinet minister whose interest in the Telegraph was revealed last year by Sky News, and Jeremy Hosking, a prominent and wealthy City investor. In his opinion piece, Mr Efune described the Telegraph as a "crown jewel", adding that British journalism was the envy of the world. "It is no coincidence that a meaningful portion of America's largest newsrooms are run by British journalists," he wrote in a piece shared exclusively with Sky News. "These include the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and CNN. "You might say that journalists, editors and journalism writ large are among Britain's greatest exports." Referring to the Barclay family, which owned the Telegraph for about two decades, Mr Efune said the newspapers had "functioned as something of a piggy bank for its previous owners, and as a useful form of real estate collateral". "The Telegraph's achievements and advancements despite these handicaps are impressive. But it deserves better," he wrote. Mr Efune said the £500m RedBird takeover - which is likely to involve minority ownership stakes for Abu Dhabi state-backed IMI and Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail proprietor - had "significant hurdles to overcome". "Since The Telegraph first came on the market I've dedicated much time and resources to finding a solution," he said. "Some details of these efforts have become public. Much has not. "In particular, I've sought to recruit the best-suited investor group to step into the fray. "That means fully aligned partners, committed to the work of unlocking The Telegraph's significant potential." He described the process as "a turbulent undertaking" which had "faced unwelcome interference along the way". "Our group is unique in that, firstly, it is distinctly British, with, as of this moment, the leadership and vast majority of funders being British citizens. "I, for one, was born in Manchester and raised in Brighton. "My family owes a great debt of gratitude to this country. "My grandmother was saved by Britain's grace and welcome at the age of nine, fleeing Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport." Read more from Sky News:Energy price cap to fall by 7%Taxpayer loss on RBS bailout revealed Mr Efune said his family had made a significant contribution to the UK, with his grandfather, Peter Kalms, helping to build the electrical goods retailer Dixons into a household name. "My great uncle Michael was killed as a tail-gunner in a Lancaster Bomber over Germany. Mr Efune described his backers as "accomplished British patriots who care deeply about The Telegraph's future". "Our acquisition group is also distinctly devoted to journalism," he wrote. "We don't come with a team of financial engineers or restructuring gurus. "We're seasoned and committed newspaper builders, and have a detailed and clear vision for The Telegraph's growth. We will pursue it vigorously. "This includes specific and in some cases significant improvement strategies on the nuts and bolts of each of the primary revenue pillars of the business. "In our view, the oft-heard moniker "Torygraph" far undersells this opportunity. "In its soul, the paper that braved the Blitz and trumpeted the wartime speeches of Churchill bears a far higher calling. "It is independent, pugnacious, meticulous, unapologetic and free. "It is the journalistic bulwark of Western civilisation and a living reminder of Britain's great gifts to humanity. Mr Efune added that in a world characterised by turbulent geopolitics, "the need for The Telegraph's elevation couldn't be greater". "Many beacons of the Western press have dimmed, and we are all poorer as a result. "The Telegraph's time is now. Its horizons are endless. "We're confident our British group represents the best custodianship of this national treasure by some distance."
The Guardian
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jane Gardam obituary
The prolific novelist, short-story writer and children's author Jane Gardam, who has died aged 96, had a taste for the absurd and an extraordinary facility for characterisation and social comedy. Accused once of being a 'muslin and tea party writer', she shot back: 'I'm more hair-cloth and gin.' It was a remark that deftly summarised two features of her work: religion and the more subversive side of middle-class life. Gardam's commitment to literary experimentation was evident from early on. She hated the idea of writing as a genteel occupation, and set out to challenge both herself and her readers. She did this partly in terms of form: Crusoe's Daughter (1985) ends with a playlet; The Queen of the Tambourine (1991) is epistolary; the denouement of Faith Fox (1996) features the prayers muttered in church by various characters. Her much praised short-story collection Missing the Midnight (1997) explores the many permutations of the ghost story. Changing perspective was another of her interests: The Man in the Wooden Hat (2009) is a sympathetic retelling of the earlier Old Filth (2004) from the point of view of Betty, a judge's frustrated wife, while the final work in the series, Last Friends (2013) , picks up the story of Filth's rival in law, Terry Veneering. These experiments were not always convincing, and there is a sense, even in some of Gardam's most enjoyable works, that too much is going on. Thus the exhilarating God on the Rocks (1978), which was nominated for the Booker prize, features a Christian sect, a psychiatric facility, a tyrannical mother, a thwarted love affair, a husband falling into sin and a wife joyously rushing towards it. The equally vibrant Faith Fox includes various abandoned children, a charismatic vicar, a grieving mother, a disillusioned wife, some disregarded grandparents, a former lover with Alzheimer's disease and a troupe of Tibetans. The tangle of stories in The Flight of the Maidens (2000) risks distracting the reader from Gardam's sensitive recounting of the case of Lieselotte, a Kindertransport refugee. But if her narrative can be overcrowded, Gardam met the other challenge of her writing – to recreate the melodrama and passion of domestic and suburban life – with finesse. 'There's no point in writing anything if it doesn't disturb you in some way,' she said. 'A novel must be about what everyone is thinking, but nobody dares say.' One of her most unsettling books, The Queen of the Tambourine, took its inspiration from life. Gardam had seen a perfectly dressed and made-up woman running down Wimbledon High Street screaming. No one stopped to help her. 'I wanted to show how a suburban street has tentacles that go out into the world and how a woman who seems to be civilised is as totally alone in a savage environment as someone in the jungle,' she explained. Her portrait of the mental disintegration of a fervent do-gooder, Eliza Peabody, won her the Whitbread best novel award. Born Jean Pearson in Coatham, North Yorkshire, Gardam grew up in the North Riding and in Cumbria, where she spent summers on her grandfather's farm. It was a background of which she was proud and which informs much of her work. Yorkshire and its coast are the setting for many of her novels and she uses its dialect in the Whitbread children's book award-winning The Hollow Land (1981), for the blowsy maid Lydia in God on the Rocks, and for the Smikes, the good-hearted but terrifying ex-burglars of Faith Fox. In fact, she attributed her career to her forebears, explaining: 'Cumbrians can't tell anything without making a story out of it. I suppose that's where I learned most.' Her parents were another influence. Her father, William Pearson, a mathematician turned headmaster, was bitterly disappointed by what he saw as her lack of academic prowess, and Gardam's response is reflected in the alienated, underappreciated young women of her early fiction. Her mother, Kathleen (nee Helm), was a more positive force. Gardam said that she learned her love of language, and her strong sense of religion, from her mother. Crusoe's Daughter is her most politically astute novel and she described this, her own favourite, as partly about her mother. The sense of frustration at women's lot is clear in her heroine Polly Flint's letter to her aunt: 'Because I am a girl … I was to be stood in a vacuum … left in the bell-jar … Nothing in the world is ever to happen to me.' Jane was educated at Saltburn high school for girls and Bedford College, London (now part of Royal Holloway London), where she read English and caught up on the artistic delights of the capital (she had only visited the theatre once before, and often went hungry as a student to finance her craving for drama). She hoped to become a literary scholar, and began a doctorate on the 18th-century essayist and literary figure Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Lack of funds, and perhaps temperament, led her to stop after a year. 'I longed to be an academic,' she said, 'but that time working in the British Museum was the closest I've ever come to going mad myself.' Her first job was as a travelling librarian for the Red Cross, visiting military, naval and mental hospital libraries. She moved into journalism, working first as a sub-editor on Weldon's Ladies' Journal and then as assistant literary editor of Time and Tide, where she met TS Eliot and John Betjeman. Her marriage to the high-ranking lawyer David Gardam in 1954, and the birth of their first child, Tim, in 1956, meant the end of that career. The next 15 years of Gardam's life were taken up with child-rearing. She had started to write as a child, but stopped when she became a mother. 'I just couldn't separate myself completely … There didn't seem much choice,' she said. 'I did have quite exhausting children and their father was working abroad in the far east a lot.' After her second child, Kitty, started school, she wrote a novel in Wimbledon library. It was rejected by Oxford University Press as 'improper' (the protagonist was a gay curate) but her next project, begun the day her youngest child, Tom, first went to school, was successful. A Long Way from Verona, a novel for teenagers, was published in 1971. After this, Gardam became unstoppable. A book of linked short stories for older children, A Few Fair Days, appeared in the same year, and a vivid work for teenagers, The Summer After the Funeral, two years later. In 1975 her first work for adults was published: the short-story collection Black Faces, White Faces, inspired by a trip to Jamaica where her husband was working on a case. The age distinction is questionable for Gardam, however. Long before the teenage/adult crossover fiction of Philip Pullman and Mark Haddon, The Summer After the Funeral's struggling adolescent heroine Athene, feeling her way through vastly strange adult worlds of depressed aunts, lesbian couples and lascivious artists, was straining at the boundaries of teenage fiction. The Summer After the Funeral and the later Bilgewater (1977) are now published as works for adults. Comedy and sympathy are the marks of Gardam's talent. God on the Rocks offers a tender portrait of the struggle of a mother, Elinor, to maintain her close relationship with her eight-year-old daughter, Margaret, following the birth of her new baby, alongside the comic delights of Margaret's misunderstandings of the adult world and the billowing figure of no-better-than-she-should-be Lydia. Faith Fox recounts the bereaved Thomasina's almost violent love for her dead daughter, Holly, amidst the wild social satire of the clash between north and south. The much-celebrated Old Filth trilogy offers a compassionate exploration of the ravages of old age, and its myriad embarrassments. It is for this emotional and social understanding, as well as her ear for comic dialogue, that this joyous and challenging writer will be remembered. Muslin and tea never had much of a place in her work. Gardam was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1976 and OBE in 2009. David died in 2010, and their daughter, Kitty, also predeceased her. She is survived by Tim, Tom, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Jane Mary Gardam, writer, born 11 July 1928; died 28 April 2025
