Didn’t cry as we ft Germany... it as an adventure nd I thought I’d e my family gain but Nazis ot them. I was cky to escape
ause she had fallen in love with a tor at the hospital where she was a nee nurse. Later, the 16-year-old wrote had received a suitcase as a gift, a she may have changed her mind. was too late. She and their parents e transported to their deaths in 1942. he was a headstrong young woman,” Leslie. “We quarrelled of course, but oved each other. I’ve had a huge dose uck in my life. But then there was family’s fate...” That luck began with At the memorial in London and r signing up to fight in 1943, right his parents’ selflessness. When Nazi persecution in his hometown of Köslin, then in Germany but now Poland, drove him from school, they sent him to a Berlin orphanage for his protection. After Kristallnacht in early November 1938, when the Nazis ransacked Jewish property and synagogues, he was one of seven from the orphanage selected by the director for the Kindertransport. “I don’t know on what basis I was chosen,” Leslie shrugs. “He was taken to Auschwitz and died. Most of the boys that remained were sent there, too. “The real heroes of the Kindertransport were the parents. They gave away their children without knowing where they would finish up.”
On December 1 they said goodbye at the station. “I can see them still. They tried to maintain a stiff upper lip and not cry,” he says. “They waved handkerchiefs.
“I didn’t cry. To some extent it was an adventure, not realising we would never see our parents again.”
Oscar is clearly struggling to put himself in his grandfather’s teenage shoes. He admits: “I think I’d cry. To leave your parents. But if grandpa had not come over, I wouldn’t be here. It is amazing.”
Leslie recalls the complete hush on the train. The Nazi police were hostile; in some carriages children were abused.
“We were told we had to be on our very best behaviour in case the German authorities threw us off or turned the train back,” he says. On reaching Holland that changed. Astonishingly, a photograph captures Leslie in that moment, standing in the carriage within a group, anxiety darkening his face.
“I was thinking where am I going, what’s happening, what does the future hold?”
The children were met by a throng of press when they arrived in Harwich. “The policemen smiled at us,” he says.
They were taken to a holiday camp in Dovercourt, Essex. Some were picked by couples, but he was chosen for Bunce Court boarding school in Kent.
He flourished there, while missing his family, who sent treasured Red Cross telegrams. The last came in September 1942 from his father. Leslie describes the “extremely wild handwriting”. It reads, simply: “We are going on a journey.”
“I know now he had been told to go to an assembly point two days later. At the time I didn’t know what it meant.”
Leslie joined the British army in 1943, using the name Brent, hoping he could help his family. Tragically, they were already dead. He assumed they died in Auschwitz. In 1976, travelling in Poland
ON FATEFUL TRIP
on a lecture tour as an immunology scientist, he visited the former camp, and broke down for the first time.
It was to be a few more decades before official records revealed they were taken to Riga, Latvia, and shot in woodland.
Leslie, who lives in North London with his second wife, found out another poignant part of his family’s fate from a friend who also survived.
He adds: “When my parents were deported Eva needn’t have gone. She was working in a hospital serving Jews and non-jews so might have been protected. But she didn’t want to leave them.”
It’s important to Leslie people know about his headstrong sister and his brave parents. He couldn’t do anything for them 80 years ago but he can do this.
He sits close to the grandson who would not be here today, living in Bristol, without the Kindertransport, and smiles.
“When I die there will be no one left who knew them. But it keeps them alive when they are in people’s memories.”
■ For more information visit ajr.org.uk. Thanks to harwichhistoricalsociety.org
If grandpa hadn’t come over I wouldn’t be here. It’s amazing LESLIE’S GRANDSON OSCAR