The small tree book

Child’s educational book, 'Das kleine Baumbuch' (The small tree book), illustrated with coloured pictures of trees, each one with detailed drawings of leaves, fruit and or blossoms on the facing page. The book, which belonged to Beate Beer, was packed in her suitcase which accompanied her on the 'Kindertransport' from Berlin to provincial England, 19 - 22 April 1939, and then her post-war migration in 1947, from England to Australia.

Beate was born in 1929 in Berlin, “the only and petted miracle of elderly parents” Alex Beer and Alice (nee Davidsohn). On 'Kristallnacht', as Chief Architect for the Jewish Community in Berlin, Alex was forced from his bed to witness the destruction of the Prinzregentenstrasse Synagogue in Berlin. Beate’s parents were deeply affected by this experience and made arrangements for their daughter to escape on the kindertransport.

Beate spent the war years with a foster family in Bridgnorth, Shropshire. Beate’s reflections of her time in Britain echo the experiences of many 'kindertransport' children. Assimilation into unfamiliar families with unknown customs was, in many cases, traumatic. Cut off from their loved ones, kinder children undertook their own struggles to fit in and re-build lives.

Beate discovered only after the war that her Mother had died of cancer in her own home on 5 November 1941 and that her Father died in Theresienstadt, on 8 May 1944.