Vienna Prague Then children disembarked at ports in the Netherlands and sailed from there to Harwich England German dictator Adolf Hitler was in power He passed laws against the Jews Germany teetered on the edge of war with the rest of Europe Jews were not safe in their homes They were not safe at school or at work The Jews of Germany knew that they had to get out Aid groups in Great Britain tried to help They pleaded with the British government asking them to allow the refugee children into Great Britain Then they had to fill out the paperwork necessary for the German government to allow children to leave Both governments agreed Germany wanted the Jews out of the country Britain rarely allowed refugees into their country but they made an exception for children with conditions The children would not be citizens of Great Britain Instead they would be allowed in on temporary visas They would remain refugees They could not bring their parents And
when the war was over they would go back to their families right away No one could know that when the war was over there often would be no homes to return to No parents No families Only the charnel houses that were the concentration camps The first Kindertransport arrived in Harwich England on December 2 1938 It carried 200 children from a Jewish orphanage in Berlin that had been destroyed by the Nazis The last transport from Germany left on September 1 1939 on the eve of World War II The last transport from the Netherlands left on May 14 1940 just as Dutch forces fell to the German Nazi forces Back in the train Tom Berman might have curled up on the train seat his eyes squeezed shut his hands clenched between his knees A heavy dark brown leather suitcase was jammed down in the space beneath his seat perhaps Around his neck was a string with a numbered tag
Tom was very young He had almost certainly never been away from his mother and father before Tears may have squeezed their way from between his tight-closed lids A lump in his throat too big to swallow would have threatened to choke him as the Kindertransport train thundered its way through the night Tom is likely to have dozed and slept off and on through the night and stared out of the window during the day If he cried there were only other children there to comfort him Finally the train crashed to a stop the brakes squealing The children crowded the windows of the train pressing their faces to the glass
Tom Berman and his mother before the Kindertransport They were loaded onto a ship and carried seasick rocking on the ocean until they docked in England Tom remembers getting off the ship Night from the ship a gangplank to England
