Interior page of the passport issued to Kurt Moses in France prior to his voyage to the United States on board the Mouzinho.
Overview
- Caption
- Interior page of the passport issued to Kurt Moses in France prior to his voyage to the United States on board the Mouzinho.
- Date
-
August 1941
- Locale
- France
- Photo Credit
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Kurt Moses
- Event History
- In September 1940, HICEM (the Jewish overseas emigration association) began making plans to facilitate the immigration of Jewish children to the United States on special State Department visas. Though the program was designed to help children below the age of thirteen, children as old as sixteen were admitted if they were accompanying younger siblings. The JDC (American Joint Distribution Committee) facilitated and financed the emigration of children without American relatives. HICEM made arrangements for French exit visas, Spanish and Portuguese transit visas, and reservations on ships out of Lisbon. On March 5, 1941, OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants) France in Montpellier sent HICEM a list of 500 detained children as candidates for emigration. These children were released from French internment camps, such as Gurs and Rivesaltes, and taken to OSE children's homes while awaiting emigration. However, both the French and American governments were slow in processing the visas and some children had to wait a full year before they received the necessary papers. The first convoy of 111 children left the Marseilles train station at the end of May 1941. They were accompanied by OSE workers Isaac and Masha Chomski, who coordinated the transport with the assistance of Morris Troper of the JDC as well as the American Friends Service Committee. The train stopped briefly at the Oloron train station, located outside the Gurs concentration camp, so that the children could say a final goodbye to their parents. The children had saved their morning food rations and presented them to their parents as a gift, to the amazement of all the adults present. The brief reunion was traumatic for both the children and the parents, and OSE decided to discontinue the practice on future convoys. From France, the children traveled to Portugal by way of Spain. In Lisbon they boarded the SS Mouzinho which sailed on June 10, 1941. Two additional groups of children reached Lisbon in the late summer of 1941 and sailed aboard ships that left in September, one of which was the Serpa Pinto. In all, the five children's transports that left France for America rescued 311 children. These children became part of the One Thousand Children, the recent name given to the group of Holocaust child survivors who fled from Hitler's threat but without their parents and traveled directly to the United States,
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005519.
Rights & Restrictions
- Photo Source
-
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumProvenance: Kurt Moses
Keywords & Subjects
- Keyword
- CHILDREN'S TRANSPORTS CHILDREN'S TRANSPORTS (FRANCE) DOCUMENTS EMIGRES/EMIGRATION/AID (PREWAR/WARTIME) IDENTIFICATION PAPERS IMMIGRATION IMMIGRATION (TO USA) JEWS (GERMAN) OSE (OEUVRE DE SECOURS AUX ENFANTS) OTC (ONE THOUSAND CHILDREN) PHOTOGRAPHS REFUGEES (JEWISH) SHIPS (MOUZINHO) VISAS/APPLICATIONS
Administrative Notes
- Biography
- Kurt Moses is the son of Bruno Moses (b. 1885) and Herta Lowenstein Moses (b. 1900). Kurt was born on February 5, 1928 in Tuetz, Germany in Pomerania. His younger brother was born the following year on July 29, 1929. In March 1939 the two boys went on a Kindertransport to France and went to the Rothschild mansion, Chateau de la Guette. After the German invasion of France, Chateau de la Guette was evacuated and the children sent to La Bourboule in the Massif Central region. In 1941 Kurt and Werner were sent on another children's transport, this time to the United States under the sponsorship of the American Friends Service Committee. They traveled to Lisbon, Portugal and on August 13, 1941 they sailed to the United States on board the Mouzinho. For a brief period, they were able to maintain contact with their parents, who had moved to Berlin. However this soon stopped. To the best of the donor's knowledge, Moses and Herta Moses perished in the Lodz ghetto in May 1942.
- Record last modified:
- 2006-02-16 00:00:00
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1159508
