[Asis-l] Looking for Cataloguer/Researcher

[Iris Posner]

My name is Iris Posner and I am President of One Thousand Children, Inc.
(OTC) which is a non-profit research and education
organization in Silver Spring, MD. Our mission is to document the
experiences of the only unaccompanied children rescued from the
Holocaust by the US between 1934 and 1945. There was recently a first
ever national reunion of and conference about these children and their
rescuers in Chicago. I have appended an article about the event below.

We believe that one of the most important tasks to be done pertaining to
the OTC story is to develop a catalogue or finding aid related to this
subject. It would contain a list of all the archival resources in
various institutions/repositories and in private hands, that pertain to
the OTC story and would be made available to museums, academic and
research organizations as well as the public. This would ensure that
future generations of Americans and researchers would be able to find
information pertaining to this era of history and would also provide the
basis for developing a unified OTC collection in one repository.
Specifically, we are hoping to find a person (a doctoral student perhaps
or experienced
professional who is willing to work pro bono or at reduced rates)
knowledgeable in
library science/information managment maybe specializing in Judaic
Studies, that would do a
thesis or project resulting in such a catalogue or finding aid. Would
you have any academic/research contacts of which we might inquire about
such a project or be able to place this query an appropriate bulletin or
newsletter?

Regards,
Iris Posner
OTC

www.onethousandchildren.org
301-622-0321
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Children who escaped Holocaust celebrate life

By Veronica Gonzalez, Tribune staff reporter. Tribune staff reporter Ron
Grossman contributed to this report

July 1, 2002

When 12-year-old Trude Kobler boarded a train in Vienna, clutching her
porcelain doll on the eve of World War II, she knew she was leaving to
escape the Nazis.

As the train pulled out of the station that day in August 1939, Kobler
saw something she'd never seen before. Standing on the platform, her
usually composed father bowed his head and wept.

"I don't remember being that unhappy," recalled Kobler, 75, who lives in
Wilmette and whose married name is Weiss. "I just assumed I'd see him
again." Weiss, who never saw her father or mother after that final
parting, was among about 1,200 Jewish children whose parents sent them
to the United States to avoid the Nazi threat.

On Sunday some of those children, now adults, gathered in Chicago for a
first-ever reunion that runs through Tuesday. More than 150 people,
including survivors and their relatives, attended the opening ceremony.

Most of their families died decades ago in concentration camps. So did a
million and a half children who were unable to leave Europe.

With few instructions, those who escaped boarded trains and traveled
distances they could barely comprehend without knowing what lay ahead,
whether they would be reunited with their parents.

"[My mother] said to look for the woman with the white handkerchief when
you get off the train,'" said Manny Steinfeld, 78,
another refugee. "That's the woman who's going to pick you up.'"

This chapter of the Holocaust era, little known today, wasn't highly
publicized because of the anti-Semitic climate and isolationism in the
U.S. Legislation that would have admitted 20,000 refugee children from
Germany was introduced in Congress in 1939 but foundered in committee.

Assisted by various organizations, the young refugees who entered the
country arrived legally and received no special privileges.

"The Jewish organizations on the European and American end and Quakers
realized there was tremendous hostility toward immigration," said
Severin Hochberg, a historian with the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington.

"One way around that was by sending unaccompanied children. People would
not object so much if you kind of frame the whole question around
children."

Many children lived with foster parents and some with relatives and in
orphanages, integrating quickly into American society.

For some, separating from parents and encountering a new culture and
family was difficult, even traumatizing.

"After you get here and the excitement wears off, it gets pretty
depressing because you're living by a whole new set of rules," said
Edith Schumer, 77, who left Germany when she was 12. But many of those
children became "inordinately successful" as adults, said Iris Posner,
who organized the reunion in the Palmer House Hilton Hotel along with
Lenore Moskowitz. Both of them founded One Thousand Children Inc., a
non-profit group based in Maryland that seeks to document the refugees'
stories.

It will be the first time--and probably the last--that the survivors,
now in their 70s and 80s, gather as a group, said Posner, a former
researcher and health-care administrator.

Of the roughly 1,200 children who came to the U.S., Posner said she has
located 400.

Many were unaware they were part of this special group of Holocaust
survivors, making the need to document their experiences more urgent,
she said. Some have already died.

"We do hope when this reunion is over ... that this event will make it a
part of Jewish American history," Posner said.

Judith Baumel, an associate professor of Jewish history at Bar-Ilan
University in Israel, has written what is considered the only published
historical account about the refugees, a book called "Unfulfilled
Promise."

"These kids would have been dead had they stayed in Europe, as were a
million and a half Jewish children killed by Hitler and his henchmen,"
said Baumel, whose older brother and sister were among the refugees who
came to this country.

After Hitler invaded Austria, Weiss' mother, Hermine, went to the U.S.
Consulate and began thumbing through phone books for every major U.S.
city, she said.

Her mom was looking for Jewish organizations and people who shared the
family name, Kobler.

One refugee agency, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, found a man in San
Francisco willing to pay for Weiss and her two older sisters and brother
to come to the U.S.

"If it were not for that, we all would have been dead," Weiss said.

Weiss brought her favorite doll, a gift from her mother's friend.

After the train ride from Vienna, Weiss and her siblings sailed to New
York on a boat overflowing with college-age American tourists. She spent
about a month with a foster family before coming to Chicago to stay with
another family.

She was excited to be in a new country, one with so many opportunities,
but she frequently thought about her parents and
wrote to them until 1941 when the letters stopped. Both were killed in
the ghetto in Riga, Latvia.

"You can actually make yourself dream," Weiss said. "You can think about
them long enough, particularly in the beginning, the memory is so deep
it comes to you."

Weiss, a mother of three and a substitute teacher in Evanston for 31
years, said the love of her parents stayed with her and helped her
succeed.

During high school, she worked at a bakery so she could put herself
through the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where she earned
bachelor's and master's degrees.

Steinfeld, who lives in Chicago, was 14 when he left his hometown in
Josbach, Germany, in 1938. His widowed mother had secured a visa for him
to come to the U.S., also through the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

"My mother took me to the train station, and I said goodbye to her,"
Steinfeld said. "She gave me all these instructions--just remain quiet,
just keep reading the book you're reading, don't pay attention to
anybody else."

That same year, his younger brother was sent to Palestine while his
older sister awaited transport to Britain.

Steinfeld left Germany with a "certain degree of anxiety and fright," he
said.

"No one really knew the extent of what the Nazis were planning as far as
annihilation or killing centers," he said. "You couldn't imagine what
was going to take place."

Steinfeld's sister never made it out of the country. She and their
mother were killed in 1945 in Stutthof, a concentration camp in what is
now Poland.

His brother was killed in Palestine that same year defending survivors
of the concentration camps who were trying to enter Palestine illegally.

In the U.S., Steinfeld lived with his aunt and two cousins in Chicago.
He worked in high school, earning enough money to put himself through
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Steinfeld, a father of
three, went on to start a furniture company.

"I was put on this earth to be a survivor," he said.

Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune 
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