Latest news with #NaziEurope
SBS Australia
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- SBS Australia
Musical exile: How migration shapes culture and music
During the symposium, the exhibition of the Royal College of Music: The Story of Emigre Musicians from Nazi Europe in Britain and Australia can also be seen in the foyer of Melba Hall. Credit: Norbert Meyn
Wall Street Journal
10-07-2025
- General
- Wall Street Journal
‘Who Will Rescue Us?' Review: The Children Who Escaped
It may take a village to raise a child, but rescuing Jewish children from Nazi Europe required still more work, as Laura Hobson Faure demonstrates in her wrenching study 'Who Will Rescue Us?' Indeed, without the dedicated humanitarian resolve of religious and nonprofit organizations and individuals throughout Europe and the United States, even fewer of the children evacuated from the German Reich to France would have lived to tell their tales. Initially placed in group homes and orphanages, the child refugees found solace from homesickness and loss by forging close, sibling-like friendships to stand in for the family ties they feared they'd never experience again. In her 90s and living in San Diego, the former refugee Elfriede Meyer Schloss introduced Ms. Faure to her 'little brother,' Werner Dreifuss, whom she had first met in an orphanage many years earlier. The two refugees had created a lasting bond that helped them serve as mutual witnesses, through the decades, to the sadness of their shared experiences. When France fell to Germany in 1940, the added threat of air raids, bombings and Gestapo searches compelled the children and the organizations responsible for them to scramble for new places of refuge. One girl who survived the chaos described trekking through the horrors of war: '[We] hiked, hiked, hiked. On foot. . . . Spent the night in the open. . . . And then came the real hunger.' As the plight of the children became increasingly dire, American humanitarian organizations were forced to transform their aid missions into rescue operations. Ms. Faure, a professor of modern Jewish history at the Sorbonne, diligently chronicles the intricate negotiations that humanitarian groups conducted among themselves, and with the often-reluctant U.S. State Department, about the number of American visas and ship passages available for the endangered minors in France.
