The last time Dame Stephanie Shirley, 88, stood on the quayside in Harwich, she was a frightened five-year-old called Vera Buchtal.
The girl had just stepped off a boat that brought her and hundreds of other Jewish children to the UK from the horrors of Nazi Europe. Shirley was back at the Essex port on Thursday to unveil a Kindertransport memorial statue commemorating the rescue of 10,000 unaccompanied children.
Her memories of the two-and-a-half day journey to Harwich were mundane, she told an assembly of Kindertransport veterans, their descendants and local dignitaries. “The lost doll, rather than the lost home; the little boy who kept being sick; sleeping on sheets of corrugated cardboard; the labels round our necks.”
“Of course,” she told the Guardian, “since then I’ve reflected how things might have been different if I had not been put on a train. And how things are different because I was put on the train; how it gave me resilience and strength.”
The first Kindertransport train left Berlin on 1 December 1938, and the first train from Vienna departed nine days later. The rescue mission ended with the outbreak of war. It has been commemorated with memorials across Europe, including Liverpool Street station in London. But until now, the children’s point of arrival had been unmarked.
The Harwich memorial, by Ian Wolter, is of five children cast in bronze, stepping down a gangplank on to safe ground. One is striding forward optimistically, one is peering about curiously, one looks anxious, and one is looking back, perhaps to the home, family and life he has lost. The fifth is doing what children do in similar settings: climbing the handrail.
Wolter said: “It was a heavy responsibility – and a huge privilege – to create this memorial. I tried to imagine the storm of emotions these children must have felt arriving in a foreign country, separated from their parents, not speaking the language.”
The artist was selected partly because of an earlier piece of public art, The Children of Calais, which is intended to prompt debate about the treatment of refugees. It was unveiled in Saffron Walden, Essex, in 2018 by the Labour peer Alf Dubs, a Kindertransport veteran who was present for Thursday’s ceremony.
The Harwich memorial was paid for by donations, including a sum from the German government. Miguel Berger, the German ambassador to the UK, told the ceremony’s audience that he was “honoured and humbled” to be present, and the memorial was a reminder of the need to be “vigilant against the rise of antisemitism, prejudice and tyranny”.
Bob Kirk, 97, arrived in Harwich from Germany at the age of 13 in May 1939, six months after the Kristallnacht pogrom, when Jews were killed and rounded up and synagogues destroyed.
“I had very mixed feelings: excited and scared,” he said. “I wasn’t very well prepared – my parents played it down. It was credit to the British government who gave permission, but beyond that it was down to local communities to organise transport, accommodation, support.
“But it saved my life, and gave me the possibility of a new life and a new family.”
Kirk’s parents were deported to Riga, Latvia, and killed. After the war, Kirk married another Kindertransportee, Ann, and the couple had two children. Both are active in Holocaust education.
Shirley was a successful businesswoman and is now one of the UK’s foremost philanthropists. She, her sister and her parents moved from Germany to Austria in the 1930s after her father lost his job.
In the face of the growing Nazi threat, Shirley’s mother took the heartbreaking decision to put her daughters on a Kindertransport train to London.
“It was a trainload of 1,000 children,” she said. “At the station, we were surrounded by weeping parents. My mother held it together but she didn’t really expect to see us again.”
The family was reunited some years after the war. “I was very lucky that my family survived,” she said. “I wish that today’s refugees were welcomed with the same kindness we were shown.
“Britain is behaving rather well in regard to Ukrainian refugees, but black people are not so popular. I love this country with a passion but when I see it behaving in a short-term, little England way, I’m disappointed.”
In 2019, Shirley received a cheque from the German government for €2,500 (£2,150) in restitution – a payment available to all survivors of the Kindertransport programme. She donated the money to Safe Passage, which helps today’s child refugees find sanctuary.
• This article was amended on 2 September 2022. Saffron Walden is in Essex, not Suffolk.
