KINDERTRANSP
THE train isn’t steam any more, but the ploughed farmland that races past his window looks as it did 80 years ago, when Leslie Baruch Brent first glimpsed it from his carriage rattling along these same tracks.
Turning from the window, he laughs that his cravat is similar to the one he was wearing then, too.
“My mother was making sure I was smart. I arrived here in one,” he smiles. “I’ve always preferred them.”
But whereas in 1938 the then 13-yearold Leslie was attempting bravely to look forwards; today, in 2018 aged 93, he is bravely looking back.
With 15-year-old grandson Oscar by his side, he sits on the Harwich to London Liverpool Street train retracing his steps as one of 196 Jewish children to arrive on the first Kindertransport.
December 1 will mark eight decades since that groundbreaking rescue mission began, as the persecution faced by Jews in Nazi Germany intensified. They were waved off in Berlin, taken by train to the Hook of Holland, and then sailed across the Channel to arrive in Harwich, Essex on a freezing grey dawn.
Weeks later, young Leslie travelled this route to London before being transferred to a boarding school in Kent. Some 10,000 more children would follow until the outbreak of war in September 1939.
Recalling that first morning, Leslie says: “We landed after a very stormy night, everyone except me was sick.
“We were all unslept, unkempt, unwashed and bewildered. We were in the same clothes, I had only eaten the sandwiches my mother gave me.
“I brought underclothes, carefully labelled with my name which my mother had stitched, a couple of extra shirts and an extra sweater, handkerchiefs, a book or two, and a tiny little teddy bear.”
But the most treasured items were passport photographs of his mother and father, Charlotte and Arthur Baruch, and beloved sister Eva Susanne, who was two years older. Is there anything else he wishes he had been able to bring?
“My sister,” is his heartbreaking reply. Leslie heard Eva chose not to come beca doct train she h hint
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