Time was when voyage meant train steamship distances unbridgeable waiting for a thinning mail weeks then months then nothing Children’s train across the Reich stops and starts again Holland a lighted gangplank night ferry to gray-misted sea-gulled Harwich again the rails reaching flat across East Anglia to London in my bedroom the suitcase a silent witness
with two labels Wilson Station Prague Royal Scot London-Glasgow Leather suitcase from a far-off country Czechoslovakia containing all the love parents could pack for a five year old off on a journey for life 1 Tom Berman saved by a Kindertransport The fog pressed at the windows of the train screeching down the tracks Outside night lay like a blanket over the German countryside The Nazis were out there They had destroyed Jewish shops They had shot Jewish men in the street They had burned the great synagogues of Frankfurt People were frightened No one knew what would happen to the Jews of Germany Inside the train car children leaned against each other in
the seats sleeping mouths open curled like shrimp in the laps of older brothers and sisters Older children kept watch over little ones Sometimes the fretful wail of a baby broke the rhythm of quiet breathing The older child who was the baby’s only guardian bounced the little bundle in her lap Tom Berman at age 4 There were no parents on this train Only a few adult volunteers had gone with the children Those adults had to return to Germany as soon as the transport was complete Once the train left the stations in Germany no one else could get on No one could get off Tom Berman was five years old He was alone on the train alone with the other children who were also alone Back in Prague in Berlin in Vienna mothers and fathers were sad to have lost their children but also relieved They
themselves were in danger from the Nazis but their children were safe because they had found places for them on the Kindertransport which took children to safety Tom with his parents Karl and Lenka in 1938 in Czechoslovakia All over Germany Czechoslovakia and Austria trains loaded with Jewish children were pulling out of train stations Jewish organizations had organized the transports Priority was given to children without homes orphans and children whose parents were in concentration camps The trains left from the major cities in central Europe Berlin
