As children, they fled the Nazis alone. Newly found papers tell their story

London: When Hanna Zack Miley boarded a German train in July 1939, she did not know that the journey would permanently change her life.

She was 7 at the time, about to travel to Britain without her parents. She remembers saying goodbye to them on the platform of the train station in Cologne, Germany. "They told me it was a nice trip and I believed it," said Miley, an only child. "I think they were trying to make it easy for me. I was the apple of their eye."

As her short legs took her up the steep steps of the train, she wanted to take one more look at her parents. "I turned around and I saw that they were crying," Miley said. "It must have been awful for them."

In that moment she realized that this was not, in fact, a nice trip.

She never saw her parents again.

Miley, 93, now living in Phoenix, is one of almost 10,000 Jewish children who were part of the Kindertransport, a rescue mission that helped minors flee Nazi Germany to Britain, via the Netherlands, between December 1938 and September 1939.

Over time, many details have been lost about this part of Holocaust history. But in the fall of 2024, Amy Williams, a researcher, unearthed a trove of information about the mission: lists of names and other identifying information about most of the children and chaperones who made the journey to Britain, tucked away in the vast archives at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial.

For Miley and many descendants of people who were part of the Kindertransport, the emergence of the lists has helped shed light on a murky period in their family history and offered a sense of connection to others who were affected. For researchers, the findings provide a key puzzle piece, offering new information about the families and rescue organizations involved in the mission.

"I was always told, from when I started my work, 'These lists don't exist, they were destroyed,'" said Williams, who was doing research for her third book about the Kindertransport when she discovered the documents. "And they're not."

The lists she found were used by Dutch border guards to determine which children from other European countries should be let through to Britain and which should be sent elsewhere.

A majority of the children on the Kindertransport, which was funded largely by Jewish communities in Germany and Britain, arrived by boat, traveling from Hook of Holland to Harwich, England. From there, they boarded trains to Liverpool Street Station in East London. Refugee organizations helped to match them with foster families.

The Kindertransport has long been taught as a feel-good story, researchers said, but the mission itself was a complicated affair. The British government, for example, only allowed children to come into the country without their parents, deeply traumatizing many of them. The children had to be healthy, and they had to be from Nazi Germany (which included Austria and parts of the Czech Republic) rather than from other parts of Eastern Europe.

Williams also found documents that helped reinforce the story of how the Kindertransport ended. While many have suggested that it was the start of World War II in September 1939 that ended the mission, the British refugee organizations operating the Kindertransport actually had decided that no more than 10,000 children could come to the country because of the difficulty of housing them.

"The story is much more complex than the way we want to portray it," said Laura Hobson Faure, a professor at Panthéon-Sorbonne University-Paris 1 who wrote a book about Jewish children who fled to France during the Holocaust.

"It's not a feel-good story," Hobson Faure said. "It's a story, though, that did save lives."

While thousands of children were rescued from the Nazis, many of them were traumatized by the experience and never saw their family members again. At the same time, several children of Kindertransport survivors said that their parents always felt a deep loyalty to Britain for the role it played in their survival.

Miley had long known that thousands of other German children had also been on the Kindertransport, but she said that seeing her name in black and white on an official list gave her a sense of belonging. "Suddenly, it wasn't me alone," she said.

Through Williams' research, Miley has connected with the descendants of other children on the Kindertransport. Among them is Richard Aronowitz, 55. His mother -- Doris Aronowitz, who died in 1992 -- was on the same train as Miley in July 1939.

For Aronowitz and other descendants of the Kindertransport children, the lists of names, dates and numbers have led to complicated emotions. "It gave me much more of a profound context," Aronowitz said in an interview last month. But, he added, "I don't think there's ever any closure."

Some learned information about their parents or grandparents for the first time through the lists. For others, the documentation serves as a harrowing piece of evidence of the atrocities their parents survived, and an explanation of why so many of them grew up without grandparents or extended family.

"It's that last, final parting document," Williams said. "It really sealed people's fates."

For researchers, the discovery of the lists may provide new insight into how the Kindertransport was organized and how desperate parents came to their decisions.

"The Kindertransport has never been investigated so much from the Continental point of view," said Andrea Hammel, a professor at Aberystwyth University in Wales and the author of a book about the Kindertransport.

For Bobby Lax, whose father came to Britain on the Kindertransport, the documentation helped fill gaps in his family's story. He found out that his father first went from Berlin to the Netherlands before being sent to Britain, leaving his brother and parents behind in Amsterdam, never to see them again, Lax said.

"While I had discovered most of my dad's story, it's absolutely overwhelming to see these original lists," said Lax, a filmmaker living in Tel Aviv, Israel. "There's something incredibly empowering about that. It's the final piece of the puzzle to me."

More than eight decades on, the lists have brought Miley a renewed sense of grief. "One of the big losses when you're taken away from your family so suddenly," she said, "is that you don't know the personality of your parents."

On the other hand, she said, she feels gratitude. The discovery has helped give her "a deeper thankfulness for the gift of life," Miley said. "My name and details on that list were the means of my escape."