German village’s tribute in bricks
THE SON of a Holocaust survivor has said that seeing three generations of his family honoured by the German village they lived in before the war was “very emotional.”
Laurence Leyens, whose 90-yearold father Gerald escaped on one of the Kindertransport trains to Britain, attended a ceremony in Schwanenberg where the community unveiled the tribute.
Mr Leyens witnessed the opening of a new housing development in the village in west Germany named “Leyensring” after the family. “It was an incredible moment,” he said.
After visiting the building where his father used to live — which is now a pub — he attended the event with three brothers and his wife, who also had a parent aboard the kindertransport.
“The church was absolutely full and the pastor made a sermon about Jewish families who lived in the village, and then the whole congregation — more than 100 people — came to the ceremony,” he said.
“They read out the history of Jews in the area, and it made us very emotional. What was interesting for us was that some of the Germans were crying as well.
“I felt warmth towards them. It was a very strange experience: moving, emotional, but a little strange.”
Mr Leyens, who lives in Stanmore, north London, said his father — who used to speak at schools for the Association of Jewish Refugees — was only stopped from coming by health problems.
“A lot of the people in the village were very kind to him, so he had no problem going back, but he wasn’t well enough. He was very emotional about it. It made him cry, and he wanted to attend. Gerald Leyens as a boy when he lived in Schwanenberg “Then when we got back on the Monday, we found the man who organised the event. My father knows him from his last visit, and they had a conversation about it, and were both crying.” The 64-year-old insurance broker recalled that when he received the invitation, he was “a little bit reluctant,” because he suspected an ulterior motive. “I thought it was driven purely by guilt, and that the people there were being coerced into doing it, which I wouldn’t want to be involved in. “But it wasn’t like that. A lot of the people there just wanted us to know that not all Germans were like the Nazis. They’re embarrassed by that part of their history, which was the overriding message we came away with. “The local councillor is actually living in the housing development.”