Commemorating the 85th Year of the Kindertransports
Click here to register for this free in-person program, co-presented by the Kindertransport Association and the JFCS Holocaust Center. The Library is located at 1835 Ellis Street in San Francisco, with free garage parking at 1227 Pierce Street between Ellis and Eddy.
It has become more important than ever to find meaningful ways to commemorate and educate about the Holocaust. A still too-little-known Holocaust story is the Kindertransport, a rescue mission that brought ten thousand Jewish children to the United Kingdom in the nine months before the outbreak of World War II. Kindertransport survivor Ralph Samuel and daughters of Kindertransport survivors Jacqueline Shelton and Robin Herzog, all Bay Area locals, will speak about the impact of the Kindertransport on their lives. New York-based moderator Melissa Hacker, Executive Director of the Kindertransport Association (KTA) and daughter of a Kindertransport survivor, will speak about the KTA, a thirty-year old intergenerational nonprofit dedicated to connection, education and advocacy. We will hear about the creative and innovative ways the KTA is commemorating the 85th year of the Kindertransports, including an intergenerational trip to England, a talking bench, speaker trainings, and more.
Speakers:
Ralph Samuel was born in Dresden, Germany in 1931 and at age 7½ was sent alone on a Kindertransport to England to escape the Holocaust. At the outbreak of war, he was evacuated to the English countryside to escape the expected bombing. Samuel was educated in England including the London School of Economics and at age 27 immigrated to the United States. In 1962, he moved to California, and in 1997, he retired after 25 years in public agency real estate, including the East Bay Regional Park District and BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit District).
Samuel resides in Oakland and, since retirement, has been a member of the Speakers Bureau of the JFCS Holocaust Center in San Francisco. He has spoken about the Holocaust and his experiences in public and parochial schools, to single classes, and general assemblies of more than 350.
He has returned to Dresden to speak to students and adults auf Deutsche. In 2015 and 2018 Samuel spoke at several Dresden high schools, including the Gymnasium (high school) that he would have attended, were it not for the Holocaust.
Robin Herzog is currently the co-chair of the Northern California chapter of the Kindertransport Association. Involved in the KTA for many years, she organized the last KTA reunion, held in Detroit in 2015. Having completed the KTA Speakers Training, she looks forward to sharing her family’s story with students. She is working on a book about her father, who was on a Kindertransport from Frankfurt, Germany in March of 1939 when he was eight years old, and her grandmother, who was able to leave Germany on a domestic workers visa days before World War II broke out. She has been researching this story through family documents that survived the war, and interviewing survivors who knew them, during a recent trip to the UK, as part of the 85th Anniversary Celebration of the Kindertransport.
Herzog’s careers have included working at the University of Wisconsin as a research technician and working at Project Home, a nonprofit that helped elderly and low income people with home repairs. After relocating with her family to California, she assumed her next career as a residential garden designer. Now retired, she lives in Oakland, where she enjoys having time to spend with her grown children and grandchildren, as well as working in her garden.
Jacqueline Shelton loves creating connection and community. She is a consultant and facilitator with Belonging by Design, with expertise in building cultures of belonging. She is a board member of the Kindertransport Association (KTA) and serves on the planning committee for the World Federation Conference of Holocaust Survivors & Descendants. Shelton started sharing her mother’s story about leaving Berlin on a Kindertransport with middle school students in the Bay Area after completing the KTA’s inaugural speaker training program. Shelton worked as a consultant with the Goethe-Institut San Francisco for Lest We Forget, photographer Luigi Toscano’s public art installation featuring contemporary portraits of Holocaust survivors. She was the exhibition director for Lost Stories, Found Images: Portrait of Jews in Wartime Amsterdam by Annemie Wolff, which premiered in San Francisco and traveled to museums across the USA. Shelton’s current and prior communal involvement includes Sinai Memorial Chapel Chevra Kadisha, the Jewish Community High School of the Bay, the Wexner Heritage Alumni Council and the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco. She is an avid challah baker and the founder of a women’s weekly online challah baking and discussion circle. Shelton lives in San Francisco with her husband and children.
Moderator:
Melissa Hacker is the daughter of a Kindertransport survivor from Vienna, Austria, and the first member of the Second Generation to serve as President of the Kindertransport Association, of which she is currently Executive Director. Hacker is a filmmaker who made her directing debut with the documentary My Knees Were Jumping; Remembering the Kindertransports, which was short-listed for an Academy Award nomination and seen in film festivals, cinemas, museums, on television, and in universities worldwide. Honors received for Ex Libris, A Life in Bookplates, Hacker’s current work in progress, include a Fulbright Artist-in-Residence award in Vienna, and residencies at Yaddo, VCCA, Playa, Willapa Bay AIR, Saltonstall, Millay, Digital Arts Studios in Belfast NI, and a LABA Laboratory for Jewish Culture Fellowship.
Hacker has spoken internationally on the Kindertransports, consulted on the exhibit Rescuing Children on the Brink of War at the Center for Jewish History in New York (currently at the Illinois Holocaust Museum), written for the catalog and provided material for Without a Home: Kindertransports from Vienna at the Vienna Jewish Museum, and will be traveling to Vienna in 2025 to present at an exhibit on Vienna-born Kindertransport survivor writer Lore Segal: I wanted to love Vienna, but I didn’t dare to. Hacker is the editor of two Academy Award-nominated documentary films, Sister Rose’s Passion and The Collector of Bedford Street, and a wandering professor of documentary film, currently at Yangon Film School in Myanmar, Marymount Manhattan College, and Yeshiva University. Hacker serves on the Executive Committee and the Governing Board of the World Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Descendants.