Some suggestions for family research

A couple of descendants have been making suggestions for places where people can check their family history research in this context.

One suggestion was to highlight again that World Jewish Relief (WJR) would be very happy to hear from families wanting to enquire about records of Jewish relatives who entered Britain throughout the 1930s: https://www.worldjewishrelief.org/about-us/your-family-history

Some background as to why WJR are significant in this context is here:

Another suggestion pertains to Austrian searches:

https://www.nationalfonds.org/home.html

These pages in particular, on life stories, look interesting: https://www.nationalfonds.org/life-stories.html

https://www.nationalfonds.org/dan-porat-en.html

Anyway, I know there are a lot of Austrian descendants among Kitchener families, and something here might prove interesting / useful.

For Kitchener specifically, around 1,000 places were given to Austrian Jews, and around 2,000 places were for German Jews.

In Vienna, the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (IK) ran operations to get people out; in Germany the first port of call for families was the Hilfsverein der Juden in Deutschland, and applications then went to the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland.

An RV letter is shown below, as an example:

Above and below: Letters from the family collection of Werner Weissenberg. Copyright Clare Weissenberg

Below – an example of a Hilfsverein letter – a route out to Britain

Letter from the family collection of Werner Weissenberg. Copyright Clare Weissenberg

I’d be really interested to know if anyone has had any luck finding access somewhere to travel permits, passports, or boat crossings for this era. Records must have been kept somewhere, but I’ve had no luck finding anything myself.

You know where to contact us if you can help, and if anyone does know I will add the information to this page.

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Don’t forget – if you live in the USA, Australia, Canada, or Israel (particularly, but not exclusively), your father, grandfather, or uncle may still have been in Kitchener camp if they left Europe in 1939. Many came to KC first before moving onwards – either voluntarily or through deportation.

Please do check – and feel free to ask if you have a name you would like me to try to find out about. I may not be able to help, but I’m always happy to try.