On November 10, the exhibition “Without a Home” was opened at Vienna’s Museum Judenplatz. The show describes the situation of the so-called “Kindertransport children”, who once fled Vienna to escape the Nazis. The Jewish Welcome Service and the Jewish Museum invited “children” and their descendants to Vienna for the opening.
After the National Socialists took power in Austria in March 1938, a total of 2,500 children were brought to safety with the so-called “Kindertransport” before the Nazis arrived. In most cases, the children were taken to England. Most of them never saw their parents again. On the basis of documents, photos and the few belongings the children were allowed to take with them when they left, the exhibition traces the different life journeys of these children.
The subject of Kindertransport is always present
The Jewish Welcome Service invited former children and their descendants to Vienna for the exhibition opening. Among the guests were the famous publicist Hella Pick, a long-standing journalist for the British newspaper ‘The Guardian’, the daughters of Lucie and Paul Peter Porges, Claudia and Vivette, Melissa Hacker, the president of the Kindertransport Association (KTA), herself the daughter of a Kindertransport child, as well as Michael Newman and Michael Karp, representatives of the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR).
The subject of Kindertransport has always been present in the work of the Jewish Welcome Service. Since the year 2000, it has acquired even greater importance through the cooperation with the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) and the London Jewish Cultural Centre (LJCC). Since 1999, many of the former Kindertransport children have visited Vienna at the invitation of the JWS – some for the first time in decades.
The exhibition runs until the middle of May 2022.
