GWSS and History Professor Elizabeth Heineman has received an Arts and Humanities Initiative 2020-20201 Grant for her project Children, Transported.

Given by the Office of the Vice President for Research, AHI grants are available for humanities scholarship and work in the creative, visual, and performing arts.

Description of Prof. Heineman's project:

As we ponder the impact of family separation in the course of migration today, older histories of family separation can give us insight into the longer-term consequences. Between December 1938 and August 1939, 10,000 German-Jewish children sailed to Britain with the “Kindertransport,” or Children’s Transport. The immediate impetus was the “Night of Broken Glass” of November 9-10, 1938, in which Nazi agents burned synagogues, vandalized Jewish property, beat Jews, and interned 30,000 Jewish men in concentration camp. In response, Great Britain admitted Jewish children – under the condition that they leave their parents behind. Parents who never would have considered breaking up their families now took this desperate step. Few of the children saw their parents again. Two who did were my father and his brother. Far from a “happy ending,” reunion revealed that the family was irretrievably broken. Family members processed their trauma and adapted to their changed circumstances in ways that made communication impossible. I am completing a book entitled Children, Transported, which embeds the Kindertransport experience in a multi-generation family history. The AHI will support a research trip to Jerusalem as well as a short course in Talmud study in Chicago.