Primary Sources: The Holocaust: Children & Teens

The following document is just one of a unique collection of 365 eyewitness testimonies gathered in the days, weeks, and months following the November Pogrom of 1938, alternatively known as ‘Kristallnacht’ or the ‘Night of Broken Glass’. At the time, Alfred Wiener, the German-Jewish founder of The Wiener Library, was heading the Central Jewish Information Office (JCIO) in Amsterdam, which had been a place of refuge for him and his colleagues since 1933. Although no records exist of the methodology for gathering this specific set of testimonies, Wiener Library staff speculate that they were sourced using the JCIO’s several usual modes of information gathering: face to face interviews, telephone conversations, letters and written reports, selecting and cropping newspaper articles, and obtaining informal intelligence via conversations and correspondence with other organisations and contacts.

This particular document may not be what one normally has in mind when one thinks of a ‘testimony’. Rather than being a personal narrative, it consists of a series of transcribed letters written by children while in transit on the first Kindertransport on 1 December 1938. The letters are addressed to their families back in Germany while the children are leaving them behind for the safety of England. They were subsequently transcribed by an anonymous source and sent to the JCIO by somebody who identified himself as Herr Flörsheim (or Mr Flörsheim) from Amsterdam. Beyond those few details, nothing is known about the specific provenance of this item or the individual children who wrote the letters themselves.