IRIS Wins Wessel Prize

Seventy five years ago, a German Jewish teenager who had been sent to safety in England in 1939 on the Kindertransport arrived in New York where she was reunited with her parents.  After a brief stay in New York, the three of them travelled by bus to Scattergood, Iowa, where the American Friends Service Committee had turned a school into a hostel for European refugees.  As the Nazi terror spread through Europe, the members of a Disciples of Christ Church in tiny Eureka, Ill, decided to go beyond reading newspaper headlines and praying and offered to adopt the family.  The teenager and her parents moved into a fully furnished apartment on the edge of the Eureka College campus and were welcomed into a community that had known few Jews, let along foreign-born Jews. The father got a job auditing municipal books in small Illinois towns. The mother got a job in the college kitchen. And the teenage girl got a free college education there.  Her brother interned in England – he was considered an enemy alien even though he was a Jewish refugee – eventually joined his family in the U.S.