(JTA) — Vienna will be the home of what organizers are calling the world’s first permanent museum dedicated to the story of the Kindertransport.
The memorial museum known in German as “For the Child” is set to open in the center of the Austrian capital on Wednesday.
The Dec. 10 opening is on the 76th anniversary of the departure of the first group of Jewish children from Vienna as part of the Kindertransport — the German-language name for the organized shipment of Jewish children, often by their own parents, to save them from the Holocaust.
The museum is dedicated to the stories of the people who helped organize the shipment of approximately 10,000 children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland to England between 1938 and 1939.
The modest-sized museum will open in a basement on the Radetzkystrasse, which the Nazis used to house Jewish families before their deportation.
It was made possible with donations from five sponsors, according to Milli Segal, a Viennese communications professional who was involved in the museum’s creation. Visitors must make arrangements in advance through contact details available on her website.
The main exhibition comprises 23 posters of suitcases with objects that children who survived the Holocaust thanks to the Kindertransport took with them when they left. Over several years, curators Rosie Potter and Patricia Ayre collected photographs, books, dolls, ice skates, school reports and clothes. One child’s suitcase contained an apron believed to have belonged to the child’s mother.
Among those scheduled to attend the opening are Ingrid Joseph from Britain and her son, Julien. In her diary, which she later turned into a book, Joseph documented her arrival in Britain from her native Vienna at the age of 12 with her sister Lieselotte, where the sisters learned of their mother’s death in a German Nazi camp.
