One Thousand Children

One Thousand Children (often simply "OTC") refers to approximately 1400 mostly Jewish children who were rescued from Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied or threatened countries by entities and by individuals within the United States of America, but specifically only those who came unaccompanied without their parent(s). The term also refers to the non-profit research and education organization One Thousand Children (OTC) whose primary purpose is to explore and document this little known segment of American history.

Rescue effort

While a generation of 1.5 million children perished in the Holocaust, approximately 1400 children were brought to America in quiet operations designed to avoid attention from isolationist and anti-Semitic forces. (Originally only about one thousand such children had been identified - hence the name "The One Thousand Children.") (OTC) These children:

• came from Europe to the United States mainly from 1934 through 1945;
• were aged from fourteen months old through the age of sixteen;
• arrived unaccompanied, leaving their parents behind, and
• were then placed with foster families, schools and facilities across the U.S.

The first small group of six children arrived in New York in November 1934. This and subsequent small groups, totaling about 100 annually in the early years of operation, were taken to foster homes arranged through appeals to congregations and organizations' members.

Some children also came under private arrangements and sponsorship, typically made by the parent(s) with a family relative or friend. Such children would live with their sponsor, or sometimes live in a boarding school in close contact with their sponsor.

Prior to 1941, only small groups were brought into the country because of social hostility to allowing foreigners to enter the U.S. during the Depression. Sponsoring organizations wanted to avoid drawing undue attention to the children, whose immigration was limited by quotas for their countries of origin.

The demand on these organizations increased markedly in late 1938 when Kristallnacht convinced more parents that the destruction of Jews was an element of the Nazi agenda. However, U.S. immigration and foreign policy continued to place limits on immigration. The proposed Wagner-Rogers Bill to admit 20,000 Jewish refugees under the age of 14 to the United States from Nazi Germany, co-sponsored by Sen. Robert F. Wagner (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Edith Rogers (R-Mass.), failed to get Congressional approval in February 1939. Jewish organizations did not feel able to challenge this decision. The Ickes plan for settling Jews in Alaska, known as the Slattery Report, failed to get approval.

In the later period of 1941-1942, larger groups were admitted when news of Nazi atrocities was more widely circulated.

In the official programs under the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), German Jewish Children's Aid Society (GJCA), the Quakers, etc., foster families in the U.S. agreed to care for the children until age twenty-one, see that they were educated, and provided a guarantee that they would not become public charges. Most of these children were assigned a social worker from a local social service agency to oversee the child's resettlement process. Jewish children were generally placed in Jewish homes. These children, and their sponsors, expected that they would be reunited with their own families at the end of the conflict. Tragically most of the children lost one or both parents and most of their extended families by the time World War II had ended.

Wyman ^[1] reports that the State Department had a Paper Walls in operation to delay or prevent the issuing of visas. This Paper Wall contributed to the low number of refugees. From July 1941 all immigration applications went to a special inter-departmental committee, and under the “relatives rule” special scrutiny was given to any applicant with relatives in German, Italian or Russian territory. From July 1943 a new visa application form over four feet long was used, with details required of the refugee and of the two sponsors; and six copies had to be submitted. Applications took about nine months, and were not expedited even in cases of imminent danger. Furthermore, from fall 1943, applications from refugees “not in acute danger” could be refused (e.g. people who had reached Spain, Portugal or North Africa). This created a huge barrier, since many of these children (usually with their parents) had fled there from other parts of Europe, some by being smuggled over the Pyrenees.

The OTC Children and their Stories

The One Thousand Children story was first documented by Judith Baumel in her 1990 book Unfulfilled Promise^[2].

A much more thorough presentation of all aspects of the One Thousand Children is given in the book Don't Wave Goodbye by Jason and Posner ^[3]. This book has extensive presentations about the rescuers, the programs, and contains many individual OTC stories and actual journals of the OTC "children," both at that time, and later in life. Don't Wave Goodbye is a most important and complete primary source for much information about the One Thousand Children.

Another very useful source which presents many OTC stories as well as many other facts, is the official OTC Web-site WWW.OneThousandChildren.org (see external links below)

Several books have been written by individual OTC children which describe both their own personal OTC experiences in their homelands before they became OTC children, explicitly as OTC children, and in later life. Some of these are cited in the "Reference" section below.

There is an eight-segment video (see the external links) which presents much of the OTC story, as well as the story of one individual OTC girl.

Most of these OTC children went on to greatly contribute to American society. A very detailed study which demonstrates this is given in the book by Sonnert and Holton ^[4] One OTC child Jack Steinberger became a Nobel Laureate in physics.

The Discovery of the OTC Story, its Importance, and that the OTC are truly Child Survivors of the Holocaust

The very "existence" of the remarkable story of The One Thousand Children was discovered by Iris Posner in 2000. Posner was intrigued by the question of whether there was an American kindertransport effort. Posner and Leonore Moskowitz researched ship manifests and other documents, and originally found the names of approximately one thousand children, (hence the name), and then managed to locate about 500 of these who were still alive. (Since that time, they have managed to find the names of about 400 more, so thus they have identified a total of about 1400.) Soon after, Posner and Moskowitz jointly founded the organization The One Thousand Children.

Posner and Moskowitz, under the aegis of their organization "The One Thousand Children" organized a three day International OTC Conference and Reunion in Chicago, Illinois in 2002. Approximately 200 attendees had the opportunity to listen and interact with over 50 speakers drawn from OTC children, their children and grandchildren and foster family members and other rescuers.

In some sense, it was this conference that both created the concept of the "One Thousand Children," and gave a new group identity to all the "children" in this group. Now they realized that they were truly identifiable as "Child Survivors of the Holocaust." For a very emphatic statement by one OTC that she is a true Child Survivor, see the related external link below.

Other OTC Information and Documentation Sources

Several important sources of information have already been given above, and others are in the references below.

A website with extensive information on the One Thousand Children also exists at www.onethousandchildren.org. This also presents many individual OTC stories (both as children and as adults), as well as articles about OTC, about the 2002 OTC Conference, some OTC photographs, an annotated bibliography of OTC resources, and much other OTC information.

The Organization's archives have been donated to and now reside at YIVO (www.yivoinstitute.org) at their Center for Jewish History, in New York City. The OTC Archives at YIVO are the only such archives in the world and include video-recordings of the complete 2002 OTC Conference as well as partial written transcripts. Many artifacts, including personal diaries written as children or later as adults, are included at YIVO as well as data, information, and photographs. This archive is open to the public and scholars.

Certain other artifacts are located at the National Museum of American Jewish History (NMAJH) in Philadelphia.

The British Kindertransport, and its important difference from the OTC story

A larger but similar British program, the Kindertransport, is more well-known. That effort brought approximately 10,000 similarly defined mainly Jewish children to the United Kingdom, between November 21, 1938 and September 3, 1939. While the Kindertransports came to England under a government sanctioned (but privately financed and guaranteed) program, this was not the case for the OTC children, where the 12 year effort was the result of the work of a "network of cooperation" among private American individuals and organizations. Some of the "kinder" from Britain subsequently migrated to America, e.g. the Nobel Prize-winning scientists Arno Penzias and Walter Kohn.

Notes

1. ^ Wyman Chapter 7 pp 124-142
2. ^ Baumel, Judith T. Unfulfilled Promise. Danali Press, Juneau, AK 1990. ISBN 093873721X
3. ^ Jason, Philip K. and Iris Posner, editors, Don't Wave Goodbye: The Children's Flight from Nazi Persecution to American Freedom, Praeger Greenwood Publishers, Westport, Connecticut, 2004. ISBN 0275982297
4. ^ What happened to the children who fled Nazi persecution? by Gerhard Sonnert and Gerald Holton ISBN 1403976252. This book considers both OTC children, and those who came to America with their families.

References

• Baumel, Judith T. Unfulfilled Promise. Danali Press, Juneau, AK 1990. ISBN 093873721X
• Jason, Philip K. and Iris Posner, editors, Don't Wave Goodbye: The Children's Flight from Nazi Persecution to American Freedom . Praeger Greenwood Publishers, Westport, Connecticut, 2004. ISBN 0275982297. See contents description above.
• Wyman, David S. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945 (Pantheon, New York) ISBN 0394428137
• The book There Must Be An Ocean Between Us by Thea Kahn Lindauer, iUniverse ISBN 9780595452408 presents her own personal OTC story during 1934-1937, and also gives much insight into what was happening in Germany at that time.
• The book War Orphan in San Francisco by Phyllis Helene Mattson, Stevens Creek Press ISBN 0976165600 similarly presents hew own OTC experiences.
• The book Is It Night or Day? by Fern Schumer Chapman is another such OTC book.
• The book In Lieu of Flowers by Louis Maier ISBN 0866632131 describes his experiences in a small village in Germany between his birth in 1928 until 1940, when he fled to the United States as an OTC child at age 16. He later was drafted into the American Army and served as an infantryman and interpreter in Counter-Intelligence,

External links

• [1] This "One Thousand Children" web-page www.OneThousandChildren.org includes many details about the One Thousand Children's rescue, lives before and during their OTC experiences, their resettlement and their lives as American citizens. It includes brief individual stories, relevant news-articles, photographs, multimedia, detailed bibliography, etc.
• [2]This very important link goes to a 12 minute video-segment "part 1: American Kindertransport - the One Thousand Children" which presents much of the One Thousand Children story, with a particular emphasis on the children and the hardships they went through before their final arrival in the United States. This link connects with seven further video-segments (parts 2-8) which present the full story of one specific One Thousand Child.
• [3]] this "part 7" video is a dramatic statement by an OTC that the OTC are truly "Child Survivors of the Holocaust." It is followed by "part 8" - a moving memorial dedication to "The Six Million."
• [4] gives the One Thousand Children's e-mail contact
• [5] National Museum of American Jewish History, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
• [6] YIVO website