Bring Eva Back to Balshaw's

Balshaw's CE High School has a Student Archivists group who have discovered that one of the Kindertransport children came to our school from 1947-1954 when we were Balshaw's Grammar School. We are immensely proud of this and have made contact with Eva Paddock (née Fleischmannová) and are set to interview her via Zoom on 22nd January this year (2025). We are hoping to invite Eva over to visit our school in November, not only to host the Awards Presentation Evening on 13th November, but also to run workshops with our current GCSE history students in Year 10 and 11. Eva is enthusiastic to come over and visit her elder sister Milena Grenfell-Baines as well as visit school but has asked if we can pay half her airfare (£600). As a school we have limited funding but if we could raise this or even more to enable 89 year old Eva to return to Balshaw's and see her sister again then this would be an amazing thing to do. Please help us achieve this goal.

Every child on the train had its ID card. Eva had the number 639.

Eva Paddock (née Fleischmannová), was born on the New Year’s Eve of 1935 in Proseč, Czechoslovakia, from where they moved nearly three years later to the capital city of Prague. Her father, Rudolf Fleischmann, was an active regional politician, thanks to which he arranged the honorary citizenship to the German writer Thomas Mann, and afterwards also a Czechoslovak citizenship. His help to Thomas Mann was, unfortunately, not well perceived by the Nazi system, and Rudolf Fleischmann knew well that he had to escape from Czechoslovakia before the war starts, as the Nazis would search for him immediately. Meanwhile, when the war was about to begin, Eva’s mother Sonia, (born Ziv) was a physician (an emigre from Soviet Latvia). She heard about the trains heading to Great Britain, which could take her two daughters to a safe place. These trains were later known as the “Winton trains”, upon the name of their main organizer Nicholas Winton. Both of the Fleischmann girls were sent to Great Britain and stayed with the Radcliffe family in Ashton-under-Lyne. A year later, finally girls’ mother arrived in England, through Norway, and the family gathered again, and survived the war moving to Preston where Eva was enlisted at Balshaw’s Grammar School, Leyland.

Extracts from the Balshavian Magazine mentioning Eva:

Autumn ‘48

1952

1954

However, despite their plans, they never returned to live in Czechoslovakia, where in 1948 took place the communist coup, and so, they stayed in England and naturalized there. Eva studied English and Psychology for her undergraduate degree. Eva moved to America and became a teacher for 15 years and then School Principal for a decade. She worked to innovate education making a name for herself in her field. It wasn’t until 1988, thanks to a television program of BBC, Eva got to know who was the organizer of her salvation, and her sister Milena met personally with Nicholas Winton. Eva was then living in Massachusetts with her husband, however, she met Sir Winton a couple of years later. Nowadays, Eva and her family, live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America.

Please help us bring Eva back to us again