Refugee children, hospitality and exploitation

Amy Williams, a young British scholar, talked about her research of the comparative narratives of the Kindertransport. The emphasis of these narratives were, by and large, on the hospitality of the kind British people in welcoming and receiving these poor German and Czech Jewish children fleeing for their lives. The narratives left out accounts of children trying to be brave, but spending their time in the toilet so that people wouldn't see them crying, they left out the stories of the parents these children left behind, most of whom were never privileged to see their children again, they didn't touch on the many children who had lost their Jewish and German identity, and they certainly didn't talk about the exploitation of some of these children. These certainly don't talk about the hundreds of Jewish refugee children who were interned as enemy aliens and were shipped off to Canada, and notably to Australia on the troop ship Dunera on which they were ill treated, and were subsequently exploited by their Australian hosts. Nor do the narratives tell you that these children gained only temporary admission, and were only granted residency after the outbreak of the war. Their stories were used as one of the many justifications for Britain fighting Nazi Germany. 

Every feel good story as an underlying dark side. We celebrate on our Timeline in the Holocaust Centre, that in 1943 'Prime Minister Peter Fraser publicly expresses sympathy over the plight of the Jews in Nazi Europe and his interest in the development of Palestine as a Jewish state', yet we make no mention of the same Peter Fraser bending the rules in 1944 and admitting 734 Polish orphans with teachers and priests who washed up in Persia after tracking through vast stretches of Russia and Siberia,  yet the many Jewish children who travelled with them were excluded from New Zealand and rerouted to Palestine. We do not mention that although Jews lived in New Zealand since the 1830s, and were completely and very successfully assimilated, in 1930 Jews were thought of as hard to assimilate. We do not talk about the deeply ingrained latent antisemitism of the 1930s in New Zealand. We talk about Annie and Max Deckston, who saved twenty Polish Jewish orphans from Bialystok, but do not mention that they were only granted permits for these because they failed to find children in British Jewish orphanages who were prepared to come to New Zealand. The permit was initially issued for British children only.
When you see a feel good story take a critical look and see what is left out, why the story is there, what is it trying to say and what is hidden behind it.