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Headline:

My brave parents made the ultimate sacrifice

Synopsis:

HERMANN Hirschberger holds up a 70-year-old photograph of himself as a handsome 12-year-old boy and says: "This is what I looked like when I came to England. The strangest thing about the picture is that I'm smiling. I had just arrived with my brother from Germany, having been sent by our parents unaccompanied on Kindertransport, and I was terribly homesick and anxious about my parents' safety, and yet despite that, this picture reminds me of an incident that makes me smile to this day.

"I was sent to school in Margate. The first week was murder - I could hardly speak a word of English and I felt vulnerable and out of my depth - and then on the Friday, after lunch, I was pushed into a very large classroom with 100 other pupils. They were electing house captains. I had no idea what that meant.

"But when it came to nominations for vice-captain, one girl pointed at me. The children voted: the first nominee got four votes, the second six. Then it came to me and almost every pupil in the room put their hand up. I got 77 votes!"

It was an unexpected act of kindness, the first of many that Hermann, now an effervescent 82-year-old with a wife, two children and four grandchildren, will never forget. This Sunday he will be sharing memories like these with his fellow émigrés and Prince Charles at a special celebration to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Parliament's decision to admit almost 10,000, mainly Jewish, children as refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe - a unique act that saved these children from certain death and which became known as the Kindertransport.

Publish date:

20 November 2008

Author:

David Cohen

Source:

Evening Standard

Media:

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