Kindertransport - to New Zealand - Historian Claire Bruell

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Kindertransport was the unofficial name given to the rescue of between 9 and 10,000 mostly Jewish children brought from Europe between 1938 and 1940. While most went to Great Britain, small groups were also sent to Sweden, Holland, and Belgium, and around 1,400 were transported to the USA. These children survived due to the Kindertransport and some found a new life of freedom in New Zealand.

​Despite their stolen childhoods, the children lived fulfilling lives after the war, studying, marrying and having families of their own, and contributing to New Zealand society.

Claire Bruell is an historian and researcher of family and Holocaust history. Since 1994 she has been involved with the Auckland Holocaust Oral History Project that has interviews and documents on approximately 90 survivors who came to live in New Zealand from the mid-1930s on. Having an interest in the Kindertransports through family and friends and knowledge of the oral history collection, she collected information on all the names of those who had escaped the Nazi horrors on the Kindertransports to eventually become New Zealanders. Reaching out to the families, she was able to use resources and contacts to compile a register of Kindertransportees and their experiences which has now been contributed to the Holocaust Centre website. From thinking initially there was only a handful of Kindertransportees who came to New Zealand, there are now 13 about whom their history is known and recorded. Speaking to one family led to the discovery of another and so on. Their stories are an important part of the whole that makes up New Zealand’s collective history.

Claire Bruell was born in 1947 of parents who fled Czechoslovakia in 1939, just before the Germans invaded there. They arrived in New Zealand in October of the same year. Claire has a Bachelor of Arts degree majoring in history and languages and contributes articles to a number of Jewish and Jewish Genealogy publications in New Zealand and overseas. She continues her research mainly in the area of Holocaust studies and is a some-time speaker to groups interested in her researches. Her interests have taken her to Israel, England, Italy, Austria, Australia, Germany, and Czechia to research in archives and where she still has relatives.