By ELANA WARREN / Assistant Editor
With descendants of Kinder-transport children in attendance, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas (JCRC) unveiled a Kindertransport History Bench on the Barry Family Campus on Sept. 15.
A placard on the bench includes a QR code that leads to video testimonies from Kindertransport survivors.
Following Kristallnacht in November 1939 and into the beginning of World War II, Jewish parents sent away about 10,000 children via Kindertransport operations in the hopes of saving them from the Nazis.
This bench in St. Louis Park is one of a series of Kinder-transport Association benches across the country dedicated to Kindertransport remembrance and education. Sandy Baron, the daughter of Kindertransport Holocaust survivor Kurt Moses, spoke, as did JCRC staff members.
JCRC Director of Holocaust Education Susie Greenberg shared a message from Nick Winton, the son of Sir Nicholas Winton, who organized the Kinder-transport out of Czechoslovakia. Nick Winton, who lives in the United Kingdom, spoke about his father’s life and work at Beth El Synagogue in 2022 (AJW, Dec. 2022).
Greenberg read on Nick Winton’s behalf: “… In 1939, my father, Sir Nicholas Winton, put together a small team and rescued 669 children on the Kindertransport from Czechoslovakia. The lesson from this is that we have more power to make a difference than we think. We must take every opportunity to use it to the benefit of our community. We can no longer rely on others to do it for us.
“He believed in what he called active goodness — the idea that being a good person is not passive. It is not enough simply to do no harm. We have to get up off the couch and do something. A bench may seem like a small thing, but this bench asks something of everyone who sits on it: to pause, to listen, and to carry a piece of that history forward.
“The QR code will bring you the voices of the children who were saved. They are old now. Some are gone. But their testimony is still here, still urgent, still asking the same question my father answered in 1939: ‘What will you do?’
“Those who worked to bring this bench here have shown us what active goodness looks like in practice. It is not a grand gesture. It is a series of quiet decisions that bring a community together around things that matter. …”
(American Jewish World, October 2026)
