KINDERTRANSPORTS - WWII, Welcome Refugee Children In Like Manner?

WorldViews
Britain will start taking in child refugees, as it did before World War II
By James McAuley - WorldViews May 5, 2016

On Wednesday, British Prime Minister David Cameron announced that the United Kingdom will accept more unaccompanied children among the hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees currently stranded in Europe.

In a speech to members of Parliament, Cameron did not specify exactly how many. Although the British government had pledged in January to take in child refugees directly from conflict zones, it had been reluctant to accept those children who had made it to Europe. Reluctant, that is, until a campaign spearheaded by survivors of the Kindertransports began to gain significant traction.

The Kindertransports were the famous rescue missions that brought approximately 10,000 Jewish children to Britain from Nazi-occupied Central Europe in 1938 and 1939. In the wake of the Holocaust, many of these children would never see the families they left behind ever again.

Most of the “kinder” were adopted by British families, and many have stayed in Britain ever since, enjoying the pleasures of large families and successful careers. One Kindertransport survivor, Alf Dubs, is now a member of the House of Lords, the British Parliament’s upper house.

Throughout the migrant crisis that has taken Europe by storm — in which roughly 1 million people, mostly from the Middle East and Africa, flooded into the continent in 2015 alone — Dubs was reminded of his experiences in the late 1930s.

In response, he and others — including Yvette Cooper, a Labor MP — proposed an amendment to a recent immigration bill that would resettle some 3,000 unaccompanied children already in camps across Europe.

Cameron’s government initially rejected this proposal, claiming that it did not want to incentivize others to make the same “lethal” journey. But on Wednesday, after a significant amount of public support for the proposal, including from fellow Conservatives, the prime minister announced something of a reversal.

Britain will now take in an as-yet-unspecified number of children who were registered in France, Italy and Greece before March 20, the day the European Union finalized the migrant resettlement deal with Turkey. There is also now a call for British families to volunteer as foster parents.
In an interview, Dubs called the government’s decision a “successful outcome.”

“We can now look forward to welcoming children to Britain,” he said.
Particularly noteworthy, however, was Cameron’s refusal to accept the comparison of migrant children today to the Kindertransport children in the early days of World War II. “To say that the Kindertransport is taking today children from France or Germany or Italy, safe countries that are democracies, I think that is an insult to those countries,” the prime minister told MPs.

Dubs does not disagree that the circumstances today are different from those in 1939. “Of course there are differences,” he said. “The children then were fleeing the Holocaust and the gas chambers.”

But, he added, that does not mean there cannot still be important parallels to consider. “The children are still vulnerable,” he said. “They’re at risk of being forced into prostitution, trafficked, and they’re entirely on their own.”

“I was one of them.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/05/britain-will-start-taking-in-refugee-children-thanks-to-kindertransport-survivors/