My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering The Kindertransports

On Dec. 1, 1938, a train full of Jewish children left Germany for England: They were the first of 10,000 whom the kindertransport movement saved from almost certain death in Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Knowing that war was inevitable, the English government made European Jews a heartbreaking offer (still a better offer than anyone else was making): It would issue visas to Jewish children -- from toddlers to teenagers -- and shelter them until the fighting was over, but wouldn't open its borders to Jewish adults seeking to flee escalating Nazi persecution. Filmmaker Melissa Hacker's mother, Ruth Morley, was one of those children, and one of t...