Kindertransport statue to mark refugees' arrival in Essex from Germany

A memorial is being created for a UK port where thousands of children began arriving after they fled Nazi Germany before World War Two broke out.

The Kindertransport to Harwich, Essex, started after the anti-Jewish violence of Kristallnacht in November 1938.

The first children arrived by ferry at Harwich, on 2 December 1938, with some taken to London and others to local holiday camps such as Dovercourt Bay.

The bronze statue will be unveiled on Harwich quayside in September.

Some 10,000 children, mostly Jewish, were evacuated from Germany and territories held by the Nazis before the outbreak of war in 1939.

Many never saw their parents again.

John Rayner, now a rabbi, landed in Britain in 1939.

"We disembarked at Harwich and were taken out into some fields," he said.

"The sun was shining, the air clean, the grass greener that any I had ever seen, and if ever freedom was a tangible thing, it was so that morning in Harwich."

Nearly 2,000 children spent their first weeks at the Dovercourt holiday camp just two miles from the Harwich docks.

Existing memorials trace the journey of children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, via the Hook of Holland and on to London by rail.

However, Harwich is missing from these memorials, according to statue organisers Harwich Kindertransport Memorial Trust.

Funding for the bronze statue, called Safe Haven, shows five children descending from a ship's gangplank.

According to the organisers "several generous donations" amounting to £160,000 paid for the statue by prize-winning Essex artist Ian Wolter.

These included a "significant sum" from the German government and £22,500 from the Association of Jewish Refugees.

"It was a great privilege for me to capture this moment in bronze, and engrave the statues with the words of the refugees, ensuring we never forget this shared history with all its anguish, uncertainty... and hope," said Wolter.

Mike Levy, chairman of the Harwich Kindertransport Memorial and Learning Appeal, said: "The beautiful new memorial will finally recognise the role of Harwich and its people in saving the lives of 10,000 children.

"Our aim is that the memorial will act as a catalyst to a whole new generation of exciting learning opportunities which will highlight the role of ordinary people in that unprecedented act of altruism which we call Kindertransport."

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