Teddy bear carried by a young boy on the Kindertransport

Teddy bear received by 14 year old Jack Hellman as a child and carried with him on the Kindertransport in early 1939. When Jack was nine, his parents sent him away to boarding school in Frankfurt, Germany, to escape the vicious anti-semitism in his hometown, Tann. During the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9-10, 1938, synagogues and Jewish businesses all over Germany were vandalized or destroyed. Soon after, the housemother of his boarding school petitioned Baron James de Rothschild in Great Britain to provide refuge for the 26 children in the school, as well as her own family. Rothschild and his wife Lilian agreed and Jack and the others left on a Kindertransport for England. Jack persuaded Rothschild to provide a work permit for his father and he and Jack's mother escaped to England in late August 1939.