Holocaust experts told historian Amy Williams there was no such thing as a list of the Jewish children rescued in the iconic Kindertransport rescue operation, which saw some 10,000 relocated from continental Europe to Britain and other countries between 1938 and 1940.

Contrary to the assumption of experts, however, Williams has meticulously pinned down documents created for 9,000 of the Jewish children evacuated on the Kindertransport. For decades, those documents had lain buried at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum, deep within a Dutch file on “foreign nationals” in the Netherlands — until Williams identified them at the end of 2024.

“I don’t think people found the records [because] they aren’t catalogued under Kindertransport and they exist within a file which has hundreds of other lists,” said Williams. The historian works for the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) as the Kindertransport scholar-in-residence.

“[The Kindertransport lists] are with other lists of people leaving the Netherlands for Africa and British Mandate-era Palestine on the Youth Aliyah scheme,” Williams told The Times of Israel.

“The records were created by the Jewish communities in each child’s homeland, such as Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia. These lists were then sent to the Dutch Kindertransport committee and the Dutch border guards to ensure that the transports had permission to travel through the Netherlands and also [inform them] when they would pass through,” she said.

The records include children’s names, home addresses, dates of birth, parents’ names, chaperones’ names, as well as Kindertransport numbers and departure dates. Williams noticed that some records include the names and addresses of British host families to which the children were........

© The Times of Israel