As the orchestrated persecution of the Jews intensified in the late 1930s, more than ten thousand unaccompanied Jewish children were brought to England from Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia, between December 1938 and August 1939. Sent by parents, desperate to save them from the Nazis’ “Final Solution”, children aged from three months to seventeen years old travelled on trains that carried them across Europe and then over the sea to England. When they arrived they were fostered in families all over the country. Jewish, Methodist, Quaker, Catholic and Protestant families opened their homes to the children so brutally taken from their own families. For some no foster parents could be found and these were housed in hostels or went to boarding schools; but all had escaped the Nazi terror.
Some were lucky, and their parents managed to escape as well, so they were reunited; others found remnants of family who had survived the death camps after the war, but most of them never saw, again, the parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters they had left behind.
The strength of the love and courage of the parents who sent their children away is hard to imagine… their hearts were broken, but their children were saved.