75 years after Kindertransport, Far Rock’s Belle remembers

It was a chink in the ironclad Nazi killing machine, a narrow glint of light in the suffocating darkness.

On Nov. 15, 1938, five days after Kristallnacht, British Jewish and Quaker leaders mobilized to enlist the British government to permit the temporary entry of Jewish children fleeing the Nazis. For nine months, until the declaration of World War II on Sept. 1, 1939, 10,000 mostly Jewish children from Europe were transported to the United Kingdom, with the last group of children arriving May 14, 1940.

Mrs. Belle Silverstein (nee Messing), a long time resident of Far Rockaway and one of the Kindertransport children, will introduce a film, “Into the Arms of Strangers,” about this endeavor this Saturday night, Nov. 9, at the Young Israel of Lawrence-Cedarhurst. This commemorates the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the pogrom that triggered the Kindertransport.

Kristallnacht, Nov. 9 and 10, 1938 was the first explosion of death and destruction in the build-up of anti-Jewish economic, social and political sanctions and persecutions instituted by the Nazis beginning in 1933. During that night more than 90 Jews were killed, 30,000 taken to concentration camps, more than 1,000 synagogues were burned and 7,000 Jewish businesses destroyed or vandalized, their glass fronts and windows shattered, giving this pogrom the name “the night of broken glass.”

Silverstein’s parents came from Poland but she and her brother, anthropologist Dr. Simon Messing, grew up in the “vibrant Jewish community” of Frankfurt. She attended the Samson Raphael Hirsch School there. “It was the first school in the world that had a secular and Hebrew education” for boys and girls, she said, in a slight Scottish accent. “It was the model of all modern yeshivot, founded in 1925. It was fantastic.”

Recalling that period, she said that her parents sheltered her, but she was aware of the tightening noose around the Jewish community: doctors were banned from practicing, shechitah was not allowed, men had to add the name “Israel” and women “Sarah” to their identity cards, professors lost their jobs.