American and Canadian Memories of the Kindertransport

Introduction Whereas British Kindertransport memory has been the subject of some scholarly discussion, there is little secondary literature on the memory of the Kindertransport in America and Canada, where the Kindertransport plays a less significant role in national discourses. To understand how the Kindertransport is remembered in these countries, we turn to the wider scholarship on the Holocaust reflecting upon American and Canadian rescue efforts more broadly as well as on how national memory developed in these nations. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider argue that the Holocaust, through its “Americanization,” was “removed from its exclusively European point of reference” and “de-territorialized.” In their discussion of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), they claim that this museum was designed to transform the “European-based culture into part of mainstream American culture.” They also claim that situating this museum on the Mall in Washington forged a link between “the history of Jewish suffering and contemporary political and cultural institutions in America.” Thus, America comes to stand for “everything that negates the Holocaust.” According to Peter Novick, the “‘Americanization’ of the Holocaust has involved using it to demonstrate the difference between the Old World and the New, and to celebrate, by showing its negation, the American way of life.” Scholars do note that American memory of the Holocaust can veer between a tendency to celebrate America as an ideal new home for refugees and an open acknowledgement of past failings. For example, as Tony Kushner has pointed out, America remembers the failings of the 1938 Évian Conference and the 1939 Wagner-Rogers Bill to pass Congress not once, but twice. The Évian Conference was convened in July 1938 at Évian-les-Bains, France, to address the situation of German and Austrian Jewish refugees wishing to flee persecution by Nazi Germany, but achieved little if anything. Had the Wagner-Rogers Bill passed, thismay have resulted in some twenty thousand Jewish refugee children being evacuated to the United States from the Greater German Reich over a two-year period (1939–1940)—although it is important to note that the Bill would have capped the age of a child at fourteen, whereas the British scheme was open to children up to the age of seventeen.

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