I caught the last train out of hell just in time
RENATE Collins has a vivid first memory of arriving in Britain in June 1939 as a five-year-old.
She was at London’s Paddington station and desperately needed to use the bathroom. The trouble was her English didn’t stretch beyond “yes” and “no”. Renate only has hazy memories of the journey which brought her 800 miles unaccompanied, by steam engine and ferry to Britain.
What she does remember is her mother protesting she was surely too ill to board the train,
Renate being stricken with chickenpox and a fever. A friend of the family, a doctor who was saying goodbye to her daughter, urged: “If you don’t put her on the train, she’ll never go.”
The medic’s warning proved prophetic and saved Renate’s life.
Her’s was the eighth and final Kindertransport train allowed out of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.
Renate lost 64 of her relatives in the war. The last correspondence she received from her mother Hilda was a “typewritten happy birthday message” sent via the Red Cross from a concentration camp in June 1942. Hilda
ESCAPE
Renate Collins and Renate’s grandmother Jenny are believed to have been shot after their train broke en route to Treblinka extermination camp. Renate’s father, Otto, and uncle, Felix, died at Auschwitz.
As we talk, Renate, now 90, stretches out her left hand and motions toward two rings soldered together.
She said: “That’s my mother’s, and that’s my grandmother’s.”
The bands were smuggled out of Treblinka in a loaf of bread by the same doctor who had convinced her mother to put her on the train.
Shielded from the horrors with a foster family in Porth, South Wales, Renate said she “must have been more than seven before I realised there was something wrong”.
In 1988, she part of BBC’S That’s Life with Esther Rantzen to celebrate Sir Nicholas Winton.
The stockbroker-turned-activist initiated a rescue mission before the outbreak of World War Two which saved her and 668 other children from the clutches of the Nazis. He was surprised to meet so many he saved.
Sir Nicholas, who died in 2015 aged 106, is also the subject of the new film One Life starring Sir Anthony Hopkins.