Renowned campaigner charts amazing escape from Nazi Austria
22 Dec 2010
A University of Manchester Professor – and one of the UK’s greatest champions for the intellectually disabled - has told of his amazing January 1939 escape from Nazi Austria in a new book.
Emeritus Professor of Special Needs Education, Peter Mittler, was one of the 10,000 children to make it to Britain thanks to an international rescue mission known as the Kindertransport.
Professor Mittler - now 80 – remembers being one of thousands of Jewish children who were banned from school and forced to roam the streets of Vienna. He was then 7.
Jews had their businesses looted, were stopped from working and even banned from sitting on park benches. Many were deported to concentration camps and never seen again.
After making it to England aged 8 and being warmly welcomed by a family of strangers, he eventually became head of the UK’s first research centre on special educational needs at The University of Manchester in 1968. The centre grew to become the largest of its kind in Europe.
Professor Mittler was soon to become an internationality renowned advocate for the educational rights of people with intellectual disabilities and a pioneer of special needs education.
This month, AuthorHouse publishes his memoir: Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: A Personal Journey.
He said: “I remember how when Hitler threatened to invade Austria, Viennese citizens added Swastikas to the Austrian flags already hanging from their apartment windows.
“When the German troops marched in with Hitler at their head, I remember how people wildly cheered and cheered.”
Professor Mittler recounts how three weeks after the Nazis invaded Austria, his mother had organised his eighth birthday party on April 2, 1938.
When a stormtrooper appeared at the front door demanding that she scrub the streets, she gave him a ‘donation’ and was left alone.
Describing the Kindertransport he said: “There were children of all ages on the train but there were also adults to look after us.
“We were allowed a little carry-on bag and were given a label with a number and our name which the Germans inspected at the Dutch border- and that was the most frightening part.
“The Dutch were wonderfully welcoming - they gave us chocolate and hot drinks.
“I remember sleeping in a bunk on the way to Harwich and discovering sheets and blankets for the first time – we only knew quilts in Austria.
“And they gave us bacon and eggs on the boat without understanding that many Jewish people wouldn’t be able to eat that.
”But the Kindertransport showed Britain at its best: they took 10,000 of us while the United States only took 1000. I am forever grateful.”
Prof Mittler was only reunited with his father - a prominent anti-Nazi Socialist who made it England to find work as a research chemist, and mother in 1942.
Besides his work as an academic, he advised the United Nations and the British Government, committing his life to the human rights of people with intellectual disabilities.
He added: “My own oppression led to a lifelong interest in fighting injustice and changing legislation to help people with disabilities.”
But he warned: “The Nazi terror can happen anywhere if the conditions are right.
“I’m proud to have come from Vienna. But not of the way Austrians behaved.
“Today, the far Right still seems to be a powerful force in that country and that is disturbing.”