Leichte Sprache
DGS
On 24 March 1939, twelve-year-old Gerald Wiener waved goodbye to his family in Berlin as he set off for a new life in the UK. As one of the children saved by the Kindertransport – the British effort which rescued thousands of Jewish children in 1938 and 1939 – he was spared the awful fate that so many in Hitler’s Germany were to suffer, members of his own family included.
Looked after in Oxford by two cousins of the famous Spooner family, his abilities as a scholar became apparent, and from an early age he was set on the road to academic achievement. He enjoyed a distinguished career as an animal geneticist in Edinburgh. His research department was world renowned, and after his retirement his former colleagues made the astonishing breakthrough which led to the cloning of Dolly the sheep. During his career he was much in demand to assist agricultural development in Africa, China, India, North Korea and many other countries. It was while he was on a postdoctoral fellowship in the USA that he discovered he had a large family in California who had escaped Nazi Germany via Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Their stories, and that of Gerald himself, are amazing tales of resilience and triumph over adversity.
Extract from Chapter 4 “Goodbye berlin”
“It was a luxurious liner, built to carry wealthy tourists to and fro across the Atlantic. But on this day, the passengers were hundreds of refugees leaving Germany, eighty-eight of them children, almost all of them travelling unaccompanied, overseen by the Save the Children organisation. Horst was in the most excited state of his young life. The parting from his mother now behind him, he decided that this was to be a great adventure. Somehow he had developed a capacity to put unpleasant thoughts and bad experiences behind him, and this skill was to stay with him for the rest of his life.”