The place where 10,000 Jewish children arrived
The group of bronze figures in front of the south entrance to Liverpool Street Station depicts five children of various ages. The youngest, a girl, sits on a suitcase with a teddy bear in her hand. The boy to her right holds a satchel and a violin case. The older girl behind him is not keeping an eye on the smaller ones at this moment, as they are all looking in different directions. They are waiting to be collected, and the group is about to split up. The names of cities on a length of railway track behind them show the children’s places of origins: on one side »Cologne – Hanover – Nuremberg – Stuttgart – Düsseldorf – Frankfurt – Bremen – Munich«, on the other »Danzig – Breslau – Prague – Hamburg – Mannheim – Leipzig – Berlin – Vienna«.
Between December 1938 and September 1939, almost 10,000 Jewish children arrived at Liverpool Street via the Netherlands and the port of Harwich. Following the attacks on synagogues and German Jews instigated by the Nazi government on the »Kristallnacht« (»night of broken glass«), 9 to 10 November 1938, the British government allowed Jewish children up to the age of 17 to immigrate, provided that a foster family and a benefactor willing to give a bond of 50 pounds were found. The first to come were 196 children from an orphanage that had been burned down in Berlin. The German authorities allowed the children to take one suitcase and one bag, containing no valuables and only one photo. No adult escort and no farewells at the railway station were permitted. The 10,000 children were dispersed around Britain, and few ever saw their parents again. Frank Weisler, who was born in Danzig (now Gdansk) in 1929 and came to his grandmother in London with a Kindertransport, later studied architecture in Manchester and became a sculptor in Israel. He made the monument in London and similar works in Hoek van Holland, Gdansk and Berlin.
Info
Address Hope Square, EC2M 7QN, in front of Liverpool Street Station | Public Transport Liverpool Street (Central, Circle, District, Hammersmith & City, Metropolitan Line) | Tip More information can be found on the website www.kindertransport.org. W. G. Sebald, a German writer who spent most of his life in England, made it the subject of his strange and brilliant novel »Austerlitz«.
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