Time to remember the kindertransport

SEVENTY years ago last week – on December 2 1938 – 200 children stepped from a train at Liverpool Street station in London.

by Tribune Web Editor
Thursday, December 4th, 2008

by Chris Proctor

SEVENTY years ago last week – on December 2 1938 – 200 children stepped from a train at Liverpool Street station in London.

They were the first of 10,000 mainly Jewish children to arrive in this country fleeing the Nazis. The British Government would not accept their parents, so the children stood at the train station, confused and lost, waiting to be led away to foster homes, hostels or camps. They were the lucky ones.

By the end of the war more than a million and a half children left behind were dead.

Last week Suitcase Productions brought drama students from John Moores University in Liverpool to re-enact these heart-rending scenes throughout the day, bringing home the terrible events to commuters passing through the station.

Train drivers’ union ASLEF was among the sponsors of the event along with the German Embassy and comedian David Baddiel. More information is available at www.ajr.org.uk/kindertransport

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About The Author

  • Martin Rosen

    Some 30 of these children came to Croydon, where initially they were housed in the synagogue building (a very large four-story house in Elmwood Road) until homes were found for them, one by one, in th community. Two of them eventually became Presidents of the Croydon Jewish community.

    I knew several of these kindertransport children in their adulthood. They always held a huge admiration for and gratitude to Britain for accepting them into the country, whilst also tinged with an abiding sadness that, in every case, every other member of their family had perished in the Holocaust.

  • Martin Rosen

    Some 30 of these children came to Croydon, where initially they were housed in the synagogue building (a very large four-story house in Elmwood Road) until homes were found for them, one by one, in th community. Two of them eventually became Presidents of the Croydon Jewish community.

    I knew several of these kindertransport children in their adulthood. They always held a huge admiration for and gratitude to Britain for accepting them into the country, whilst also tinged with an abiding sadness that, in every case, every other member of their family had perished in the Holocaust.

  • Martin Rosen

    Some 30 of these children came to Croydon, where initially they were housed in the synagogue building (a very large four-story house in Elmwood Road) until homes were found for them, one by one, in th community. Two of them eventually became Presidents of the Croydon Jewish community.

    I knew several of these kindertransport children in their adulthood. They always held a huge admiration for and gratitude to Britain for accepting them into the country, whilst also tinged with an abiding sadness that, in every case, every other member of their family had perished in the Holocaust.

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