Life_under_Siege_The_Jews_of_Magdeburg_under_Nazi_Rule.pdf

284
The entire community also worked to facilitate the Kindertransporte to
England 112 and Youth Aliyah to Palestine. 113 One interviewee, whose father was
involved in the rescue efforts, recalled:
Before war’s outbreak many tried to leave the country and get out. Children
went away on the Kindertransport. That was another section my father worked
in. I remember him telling me about trying to get people out at the end of 1938
and early 1939. Many children left. 114
Hemmi Freeman remembered that some forty children were sent to Palestine,
where they remained. The exact number of children brought to safety to England
and Palestine is not known. 115
A number of Jewish families from Magdeburg also made all of the necessary
preparations for emigration, but failed owing to the outbreak of World War Two.
In June 1937 there were 1,256 Jews in Magdeburg. 116 In May 1939 the number
had dropped to 726. 117 These figures would place the number of emigrants at
112
See Wolfgang Benz, “Emigration as Rescue and Trauma: The Historical Context
of the Kindertransport,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, op.
cit., pp. 2–7 and Wolfgang Benz, ed., Das Exil der kleinen Leute. Alltagserfahrungen
deutscher Juden in der Emigration, op. cit. For personal accounts of the experiences
of the Kindertransport see also Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer, Into
the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport New York and London:
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000.
113
See Freier, op. cit.
114
M. F., op. cit., 27 June 1999.
115
H. Freeman, op. cit., 13 May 1998.
116
Mitgliederzahl der Synagogen-Gemeinde zu Magdeburg, Stichtag 1937, Collection
D/Ma3, File VIII.8, CAHJP, op. cit.
117
Landesverband Jüdischer Gemeinden Sachsen-Anhalt, ed., op. cit., p. 189. This
figure is also cited in Jutta Dick and Marina Sassenberg, eds., Wegweiser durch das
jüdische Sachsen-Anhalt. Potsdam: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 1998, p. 125. This
statistic refers to membership of the Jewish community in 1939. However, the actual
statistics from the census based on the respondent’s number of ‘racially’ Jewish
grandparents indicated the following for the city of Magdeburg. All figures are
approximates: four Jewish grandparents – 739; three Jewish grandparents – 5; two
Jewish grandparents – 320; and one Jewish grandparent – 224. The racial
classification of a further 66 individuals could not be established. These figures were
defined according to racial classification as dictated by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935
and, consequently, converts to Judaism were not included in the statistics. For full
details of these statistics, see Sonderaufbereitung der Volkszählung vom 17. Mai