In 1939, 13-year-old Frank Meisler lived with his parents in Danzig, now the polish city of Gdansk. The Nazi anti-Jewish campaign caused his parents to insist that he leave on the Kindertransport, a scheme to smuggle Jewish children out of Nazi territory. His journey took him and 14 other children from Danzig to Berlin, then to Rotterdam and finally to London. Meisler's parents were arrested three days after his departure, and ultimately died at Auschwitz.
Meisler grew up in England with his grandmother, became an architect, and emigrated to Israel in 1960, where he took up sculpture. There were 10,000 children who survived the Holocaust due to the Kindertransport. Beginning in 2009, the world got to see the transport through Meisler's eyes, when his first bronze monument to his journey appeared in Gdansk. There would be five monuments in all, in the four cities Meisler passed through on his journey, plus Hamberg, the hub of the Kindertransport system. The monuments are all different, two of them evoking the horrible gap between those who were saved and those who were not. They were installed in the order of Meisler's journey, although that was not the order in which they were designed and cast. See all five monuments and the story they tell at Kuriositas.
(Image credit: Yusek)
