Germany offers compensation to Kindertransport survivors

Survivors of the Kindertransport will receive a one-time payment from Germany’s government.

By Joseph Wolkin, World Israel News

Survivors of the Kindertransport will receive a one-time payment from Germany’s government, the nation announced on Monday.

Those who are still alive from the transport that occurred 80 years ago will receive 2,500 Euros, equating to over $2,800. About 1,000 survivors from the Kindertransport are still alive.

“In almost all the cases the parents who remained were killed in concentration camps in the Holocaust and they have tremendous psychological issues,” Jewish Claim Conference negotiator Greg Schneider said in a statement to the Associated Press.

Half of the Kindertransport survivors who are still alive currently live in Britain. The payment, Schneider said, will be a “symbolic recognition of their suffering.”

The Jewish Claim Conference, located in New York, will give out about $350 million of reparations to over 60,000 Holocaust survivors. The survivors currently life in 83 different nations. The organization will also have $550 million in grant spending to help social service companies that provide services to survivors.

Germany has paid over $80 billion in reparations since 1952.

Most of those who survived the Kindertransport never saw their parents again. The transport took place in November 1938, just after Kristallnacht, bringing children from Berlin to Britain, where their parents assumed they would be safe from the Nazi regime.

The transport continued until 1940 across Europe, from Germany to Austria, Czechoslovakia to Poland and other nations. About three-quarters of those on the transports were Jewish.

“This money is acknowledgement that this was a traumatic, horrible thing that happened to them,” Schneider said.