Kindertransport

Kindertransport memorial  - Liverpool Station

A humanitarian crisis is taking place on our southern border with Mexico as tens of thousands of unaccompanied children and teenagers flee from their native Central American countries. I, like many others, am not at all happy about this. But I in no way want to send them back "home". 

My thoughts go to Nazi Germany when desperate parents tried any means to save their children, even if it meant they would be orphans in a strange country. Kindertransport was the name given to one specific operation where 10,000 children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland were transported to the United Kingdom and placed in British foster homes, schools and farms. Often they were the only members of their families to survive the Holocaust. It is a black, black mark on the United States that we brought in only 1,400 such children and efforts to open our vast country to more were met with abject failure. How many more children could have been saved?

Do I know what is going on in the Central American countries that is compelling parents to send their children into an unknown future that might result in death, human trafficking, slavery or sexual abuse? I do not. But I surmise that whatever terror is lurking in their home countries is resulting in the same hopelessness, desperation and fear felt by Jewish parents trapped in Nazi hands.

So in good conscience, I cannot help but hope these smallest and most helpless of immigrants find sanctuary and a brighter future in a safe and hospitable haven.