Goodbye to Berlin: Postcards from Nazi Germany tell story of the Kindertransport [View all]

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/goodbye-to-berlin-postcards-from-nazi-germany-tell-story-of-the-kindertransport-8665473.html



The card reads: 'Dear Heini. I was delighted to receive your card from the journey. I hope that you are healthy and cheerful and that you like being with Uncle Morris and Aunt Winnie. Please give them my fondest regards. Many loving kisses, from Vati'




The card reads: 'Dear Heini. I received your letter today and am glad that you received your Easter eggs and that you enjoyed the Seder evening. The weather was very nice here today. Have you been out in the garden? Many greetings and kisses. Your Vati'

They are, if nothing else, a tangible testament to a father's love. From 3 February 1939, when "little Heini" arrived in Swansea after leaving Berlin for the last time, until 31 August, when war made such communication impossible, Max Lichtwitz wrote a stream of postcards to his young son. They have left a unique record of his determination to maintain the parental bond with the boy whose life he had saved by sending him to a strange country and parting with him, as he feared, for ever.

What can the journey have been like for a bewildered six-year-old? Henry Foner, as little Heini Lichtwitz would become, remembers the German border guards searching the train passengers and his one small suitcase, the Dutch women on the other side of the crossing handing out "delicious" sausage rolls, a helmeted bobby on the quay at Harwich, the large hall where he waited to be collected, but nothing of the painful departure from Berlin. "It's a strange thing; if you talk to people like me, the traumatic memory is of parting with their parents, and I can't remember it at all. It must have been traumatic and I must have forgotten because I remember the journey very well, but I can't remember saying goodbye to my father and my grandmother." (His mother had died two years earlier.)

The "people like me" to whom Foner refers were the 10,000 Jewish and "non-Aryan" children of the "kindertransport" who, between December 1938 – in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogrom which had terrorised Jews across Berlin – and September 1939, escaped the coming Holocaust, leaving their families in Nazi Europe by train and ferry for Britain, accompanied by youth workers and unemployed Jewish professionals who risked their lives by returning again and again to remove other groups of children to safety.

In a series of events to commemorate the programme's 75th anniversary, some of the children, most now in their eighties, will convene with their families at London's Jewish Free School today in a gathering addressed by David Miliband and Miriam Margolyes, and at St James's Palace tomorrow for a reception given by the Prince of Wales.