Narrating the Margins and the Center: Kindertransportees' Stories of National and Religious Belonging
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Abstract
The memories of the child refugees who fled Central Europe on the so-called Kindertransport between December 1938 and September 1939 are the most widely documented of any refugee and migrant group to come the United Kingdom. However, the dominant narrative has been one of migration to and settling in England, despite the fact that the child refugees settled in places across the British Isles, including Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland—the last of which, for example, received an estimated eight hundred Kindertransportees. This essay will investigate how former Kindertransportees negotiate their different identities in their memory narratives. The majority of the Kindertransportees were Jewish, although approximately 20 percent came from families that did not identify as Jewish but were persecuted as Jews. Therefore, there is a complicated interplay of religious identities, those derived from the country the child refugees were leaving behind and those of the country and the nations of settlement. This article will compare those narratives that construct non-English identity as Other, those that adopt separate national identities in the Diaspora with earlier definitions of Englishness versus Britishness, and others that adopt a center/margin hierarchy common in British culture.
Topics
Holocaust Survivors Refugees Oral History and Biography National Identity Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial Memory
Genre
Geographic Coverage
Original Language
Volume/Issue
37(3)
Page Number / Article Number
203-228
DOI
Link
Link to article in JSTOR, Narrating the Margins and the Center: Kindertransportees' Stories of National and Religious Belonging
Bibliographic Information
Narrating the Margins and the Center: Kindertransportees' Stories of National and Religious Belonging. 2019: 203-228. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.5703/shofar.37.3.0203
