Former HIAS Client and Holocaust Survivor Interviewed on Democracy Now!
Sep 22, 2016
Former HIAS client, Kindertransport survivor and refugee advocate Manfred Lindenbaum attended the Leaders’ Summit on the Global Refugee Crisis, convened on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly by President Obama.
The next morning, Lindenbaum, 84, was interviewed live on Democracy Now!, sharing his personal experiences as a refugee and responding to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s son’s comparison of Syrian refugees to poisoned Skittles.
In a panel segment with Mohammed Badran, co-founder of Syrian Volunteers in the Netherlends, and Raymond Offenheiser, president of the international humanitarian organization Oxfam America, Lindenbaum says the Skittles analogy “brings back the dark images of children being murdered."
He also shared his experience fleeing Nazi Europe as part of the Kindertransport, saying, “the United States at that point said that we’re not taking in any Jewish children...England had decided, under great pressure, to take in 10,000...they got a few hundred of us onto a Polish warship. And that—took me and my brother to England. And they wouldn’t let my sister on. She was 14. So she was murdered with the rest of my family.”
To watch the entire segment with Manfred Lindenbaum, click here.
