CHILD SURVIVORS OF THE NAZIS ON I’m lucky to be alive.. we should show that same compassion to kids today

One young man saved us – it was a miracle I lost my parents – but we must put it all behind us It’s hard to think about. All I can do is help others

LADY MILENA GRENFELL-BAINES

MILENA was one of 669 children saved by a young London stockbroker. Nicholas Winton was so moved by what he saw on a visit to Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938 he found homes for them and arranged their safe passage to Britain.

Milena and her younger sister Eva Paddock, then nine and three, were among up to 70 other children who left Prague on a train in May 1939. They were waved off by their heartbroken mum Sonia Fleischmann and locked in a third class railway carriage. Their father

Rudolf, a Jew and vocal anti-Nazi, had fled

Czechoslovakia the day before the invasion.

“Our parents told us they would see us again, said Milena, now 89.

“I held hands with a girl in my carriage and we said, ‘We’re not going to cry’.” The girls were taken in by Lancashire couple Ronald and Florrie

Radcliffe, who took them to their home in Ashtonunder-Lyne.

REUNITED

They were treated like family, with the Radcliffes even sending their own daughter away to live with her grandparents as they only had two bedrooms.

Milena and Eva were later reunited with their parents, unlike the majority of Kindertransport children. “It gets more and more difficult to talk about,” said Milena, who awarded an MBE in 2016 for services to music. “I keep thinking how jolly lucky my sister and I am to be here.”

Their saviour Nicholas Winton was knighted for his services to humanity in 2003. He died in 2015.

“To us it was a miracle that a young man could organise this simply after thinking ‘I’ve got to help’,” said Milena, whose husband Sir George Grenfell-Baines was an award-winning architect. “Now we should be applying the same compassion. The problem today is almost intolerable.

“Of course we should be helping these children.”

LUCKY HARRY BIBRING

AT 92, Harry still recalls being on a railway platform with the other fleeing children. It is a rare happy memory. “It was crowded with people handing us food, sweets, flags and toys,” he said. “At long last there were non-Jewish people who wanted to have anything to do with me.”

Parents Michael and Leah, whose Vienna shop was destroyed by the Nazis, were left behind as he and sister Gerta were taken to Holland then England as part of the Kindertransport in 1939. After arriving at Liverpool Street Station, they were separated, with 12-year-old Harry ending up in Hackney, East London.

He later found out his dad died of a heart attack on the way to a death camp while his mother was gassed. Harry, who has two children, now lives in Bushey Heath, near Watford. He holds no bitterness against his persecutors. “I lost my parents but we have to put it behind us,” he said. He wants to see more done to help child refugees fleeing conflicts around the world

– and called on the Government to help them. “It breaks my heart to see the pictures on TV of child refugees in Syria, or anywhere else where there’s a disaster,” he said. “There’s nobody pushing hard enough for them as there was for the Kindertransport.”

LOSS SIR ERICH REICH

OUTSIDE Liverpool Street Station, a statue of a group of children with their cases stands as a poignant memorial to the Kindertransport rescue.

The smallest figure is modelled on Erich, just four when Jewish parents Schapse and Mina put him on the train in Poland after being expelled from their native Austria by the

Nazis. “At the age of four you don’t think very much

– but I know I’m lucky to be alive,” says Erich, now 83 and living in London.

He was separated from his two older brothers after arriving in London on the eve of war in 1939. After a stay at a refugee hostel in Dorking, Surrey, he was fostered by Emilie and Joseph Kreibich. Later reunited with his brothers, he never saw his parents again.

They were sent to Auschwitz.

“It very difficult to think about,” he said. “All I can do is be true to myself and help people as much as I can.”

The dad-of-five was knighted in 2010 for services to charity and to the Kindertransport.