Fall 2007 Exhibit: The Rescuers
Artist’s Statement: Christine Frieb
Rescued / Rescuer
Kindertransport (children’s transport) was the informal name of a rescue effort which brought thousands of refugee Jewish children to Great Britain from Nazi Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia between 1938 and 1940.
The British government eased immigration restrictions for certain categories of Jewish refugees after the Nazis staged a violet attack on Jews in German during the November 1938 Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”). The first children’s transport arrived in Harwich, Great Britain, on December 2, 1938 bringing about 200 children from a Jewish orphanage in Berlin. The last transport from the Netherlands left on May 14, 1940, the day that country surrendered to Germany. Most of the trains left from Berlin, Vienna, Prague and other major cities in central Europe. However, hundreds of children from children’s transports were trapped in Belgium and the Netherlands by the German invasion. I have chosen to use the children’s transport for my piece in this exhibit because many organizations and unknown individuals participated in the rescue operation, where at least 10,000 children were save. Of course there is a lot more to the story of his humanitarian exercise and some things were terribly wrong as well. One out of ten children were badly traumatized. Imagine what it must have been like to be a child in an unsettled and terrifying world and to be sent away from the security and love of his or her family and placed in a stranger’s home in a foreign land.
To educate yourself about this remarkable endeavor, please read the book by Barry Turner, “One Small Suitcase.” My sculpture consists of symbolic elements. The three wooden boxes, 40cmx10cmx3cm, are padded with cotton and filled with shining pearls. The wooden boxes represent the train cars and the pearls represent the children, because a pearly is something very special and precious. The different pearl sizes suggest the different ages of the rescued children. The pearls are bedded on cotton which represents by deep wish to comfort them.