Frieda Korobkin was orphaned by the Holocaust, but because she spent the war years living protected in the English countryside, she didn’t really consider herself a survivor — and she never thought about writing her memoirs.
That changed a few years ago, when Korobkin saw “Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport” (Warner Bros., 2000), directed by Mark Jonathan Harris and produced by Deborah Oppenheimer.
The film won the Oscar for best documentary feature in 2000 for its telling of the story of 10,000 children from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia who were allowed by the Germans to flee, without their parents, to the relative safety of England and Holland in 1938 and 1939.
Korobkin was angry that the film, though compelling, didn’t tell her own story — and the story of 1,000 other Orthodox children who were saved by Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, a 26-year-old British rabbi instrumental in bringing thousands of European Jews to safety.
So Korobkin, a onetime English teacher, began to write, and the result is her memoir, “Throw Your Feet Over Your Shoulders: Beyond the Kindertransport,” released last month by Devora Publishing.
Korobkin was 6 when her parents put her and three older siblings on the Kindertransport to get them out of Vienna. The image of Rabbi Nissan Stolzberg standing forlorn on the platform, bleeding from an anti-Semitic attack on the way to the station is the last memory Korobkin has of her father. Her mother and grandmother couldn’t bear to go to the station and remained sobbing at home.
Stolzberg made sure his children landed in the care of Schonfeld, who had a school in London.
The book’s title comes from one of the young girl’s first encounters with Schonfeld. Soon after they arrived in England, Schonfeld came to meet his new charges and lovingly tested Korobkin’s knowledge of Yiddish. She blurted out the first expression that came to her mind: “Pack up your feet, throw them over your shoulders, and run.” Korobkin said Schonfeld, who always knew the names and details of the children’s lives, reminded her of this encounter for years after.
Korobkin’s book is devoid of self-pity or maudlin dramatization, but rather contains the heartfelt memories of a girl in extraordinary circumstances, told with a literary sense that transports the reader into her world.
Before Korobkin began attending Schonfeld’s secondary school, she spent two years separated from her siblings, living with British families — Jewish and non-Jewish. She has warm memories of Christmas pudding and a dog named Rusty at the Whyte-Smith family of Thorpe; she has bitter memories of the Jewish family in London where the older brothers were cruel, the mother cold and condescending.
But her fondest memories are of her years in Schonfeld’s Jewish Secondary School in Shefford, the village to which the school was relocated after the bombing of London began. There, reunited with her brother and one sister (the other sister was with an aunt), she made lifelong friends and found comfort in the familiar traditions of the home she had left behind, as well as in the ordinary pleasures of childhood — camping, sports, antics. She studied with Judith and Dayan Grunfeld, who rekindled her Judaism and laid the foundation for a Modern Orthodoxy that would last her whole life.
After the war, Korobkin graduated Schonfeld’s academy and then went to trade school to learn to be a secretary — she had to support herself. At 17, she moved to the newly established state of Israel. Her journey brought her back to London and eventually to New York and then Los Angeles.
Although she searched for years, it wasn’t until 1973 that Korobkin learned her parents’ fate. That year a mass grave was discovered in Brko, Yugoslavia. The names of her mother, father and grandmother were on a Nazi list of 200 Viennese Jews buried there. She learned they were three weeks away from boarding a ship to Palestine when they were executed. Their remains are now re-interred in Vienna’s Jewish cemetery, and Korobkin and her husband, Lenny, took a bitter trip to Vienna to say the Kaddish memorial prayer for her parents.
In 1999, she took two of her three children to London for a Kindertransport 60-year reunion. Her son, Rabbi Daniel Korobkin, director of synagogue services for the West Coast Orthodox Union, said he marvels at his mother’s past, which he is learning more and more about.
“I think it might be natural for someone who was raised as an orphan, as my mother was, to have a sense of inadequacy when you don’t have modeling from your own parents,” Korobkin told an audience at the Simon Wiesenthal Center recently, after his mother spoke. “The more difficulties I see in bringing up my own children, the more impressed I am with how my mother, together with my father, was able to hold it all together and raise a very wholesome family.”
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