HMV describing Jewish refugee children as Central European Children

[Trulywonderful]

Would I be unreasonable to as any of you on twitter or willing to write an email complaint to HMV to do me a favour

HMV have described the Jewish refugee children in the new One Life film as Central European Children. This is erasing there Jewishness from the description. I know some may feel objection to this is petty but at the moment the Jewish community are seeing a far bit of this behaviour. Erasing us from things to make people feel more comfortable etc

Anyway if people want to help and tweet about this or email HMV I would be very grateful

You can tweet or here are more HMV contact details below

You have a point.

One Life (bbc.co.uk) I note that The BBC here in the press release say that Mr Winton and co rescued 669 children from the Nazis. No mention of their Jewishness.

What is going on?

Wow that is truly alarming.

My grandmother was one of 'Winton's children' and she wasn't Jewish.

Were they all Jewish though? As opposed to Romany etc?

I saw the film last week, they weren't all Jewish

I don't think all the children were Jewish. Most of them but not all.

669 saved

560 Jewish children

But not all the children were Jewish?

Hitler killed a lot of the Romani's before the 1936 Olympic. Yes, thy were Jewish on the kindertransport.

Post 1945 Jewish orphans were housed in a remote children's home in the UK. Jewish orphan children from the displacement camps were also placed in this home long after WW2.

Was she Romani?

Not just Jewish you are right yes

Nobody wants to erase them either. The issue here is the way some of the descriptions for the film have been written is miss leading to say the least.

The nazis didn't just want to dehumanised, kill or put in camps random European citizens.

There were specific groups of people that had to flee

HMV/the BBC should state that the majority of the children were Jewish. All were at risk of persecution. They were rescued for that reason, not because they were from Central Europe, and this should be reflected in any description of them. Anything less is rewriting history.

She was not, no.

The family were political, very well known for being socialists, and then her mother, my great-grandmother, got married to a Jewish man (my grandma's stepdad).

I'm not completely clear on how this happened - but she came on the train with her younger brother and their mother also came with them. Definitely one of the Winton children - they were on the last of the trains to successfully make the journey.

She remembered the German guards stopping them at the border, ordering a load of them off the train and rifling through their belongings.

YANBU

I think we could whatabout this a fair bit. However the point is these were not random central European Children. These were groups targeted by the nazis. Most of which in this case were Jewish

Some media and business are currently a bit reluctant to use the word Jewish on anything. That has to stop before it becomes a thing most do. Jewish people around the world and definitely in the UK should not have to put up with their history or identity being censured, rewritten or erased.

I am sure the other identities of the children would have been mentioned by these people if it wasn't for the fact they are avoiding writing the J word

Of course this is a conscious decision to erase the Jewishness of the majority of the children involved. It's disgusting.

Baddiel was right. Jews don't count.

Except we do. And we won't take this lying down.

I would agree with 'mostly Jewish' being used, for sure - but would rather not see my grandmother's identity erased. It is factually inaccurate to just say they were Jewish when over 100 were not. And that doesn't feel like 'whataboutery' to me - I loved her very dearly.

I haven't seen this but of course I don't agree with anyone trying to sugar-coat it and pretending it was just a bunch of random kids.

Sorry if you thought that was directed at yourself. I was just trying to get ahead of too much whataboutism that tends to happen on these threads. My opening post was written in a rush and could have been worded better. Therefore I was trying to correct that. Sorry for any misunderstanding there.

So then surely you should be complaining about not identifying each different demographic of children who the Nazis wanted destroyed. I know about the Jewish children and families because I went to a school where around 3/4 of the girls were Jewish and as this was in the 70s, a great deal of those girls were direct descendants of Jews who fled the Nazis. It wasn’t until much more recently that I fully understood about the other groups that were also persecuted. I’m sorry that you see this as a deliberate omission. I hope it wasn’t.

Thank you for highlighting this. I'll message them.
The vast majority of the children Sir Nicholas rescued were Jewish, from a population where they were very much the minority. To not state this or, worse, simply say they were "central European" is misleading when it was the very fact that the Nazis didn't consider Jewish people to be "central European" that put most of the children he saved at risk.
Yes, a proportion were not Jewish and that should not be forgotten. But when the overwhelm majority were and when their Jewishness is why they were in that situation it's remiss not to mention it.

It's disgusting, isn't it? You have my full support and I will also write to HMV. It shocks me that anti-Semitism is such an acceptable prejudice.

Let's put it this way; would they have done this for other groups? I think not.

Mostly Jewish. It's not hard.

Yanbu op.

Judaism*