Bob and Ann Kirk, are no different it would seem from any other grandparents...they've been married for fifty years, have two sons, and three grandchildren. But in 1938, in Nazi Germany, the violence of Kristallnacht prompted the Kindertransport initiative which brought 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children to safety in the US and the UK. Bob who was 13, came from Hanover. Ann, whose home was in Berlin, was 10. Neither ever saw their parents again...

Anne and Bob met at a Jewish club in England, and they eventually married. When their children were born, they kept quiet about their past, but when their grandchildren arrived, the couple felt the need to tell their story.

Ann recalls the day she waved goodbye to her parents for the last time, "There were great attempts at joking and being cheerful, but it fell rather flat. Parents and children were weeping, but we three, my parents and I kept up this pretence.." Bob's experience was similar to Ann's, "It was very matter of fact. You're just going on a trip, you'll have some fun, and we'll be following on - which I knew wasn't probably true." As Ann's parents hugged and kissed her goodbye, they told her to look out at the next station, "At the next station, there were my parents waving as if their arms would break. They'd taken a taxi from the last station. And that is the last time I saw them. That is my last memory of them, waving and waving and me waving back."

Ann and Bob didn't really talk about their experiences, even to their own children. "I couldn't talk about it. I couldn't even cry about it. If the subject came up on television or radio, I'd leave the room. When David was born it was only five or six years after coming we'd come to terms that our parents weren't coming through. So the horror aspect was very difficult to talk about."

Anne and Bob's sons were aware at a young age that something had happened, but it was difficult for them to know what it was. There was feeling of unfinished business. Bob explains, "We take the view we don't want to ram anything down our children's throats, if there are questions, that's fine - we can take it from there. But you can't say 'Sit down, we're going to tell you a story.'"

It was when Davora, the daughter of their son David and his wife, Jenny, approached the age of 10, that Ann felt herself re-living her own life at that age, "Everything came swirling back," says Ann. As fairly young children, both Davora, now 15, her brother Ben, 13, and Josh, 9, began to ask their parents questions. "As you learn about it at school," says Davora, "it becomes more and more personal, and you think, 'This happened to my family!'" "There was this unbelievable sense of needing to tell the story," says Bob. "It must be written down and told so that everyone really understood it."

Ann's father was a cellist and it meant a lot to her when her granddaughter chose that instrument to learn to play. Ann herself never had the chance. She remembers the flat in which her father and his friends would play chamber and the bookshelf which was left empty for her to curl up in and listen, "The sadness is that my father would have just adored this family. It is just him! It is a great sadness that he did not live to see it."

Ben and Davora talk to their grandparents about when they realised that they'd said goodbye to their parents for the last time. Ann explains to them, "After the war ended, gradually people were found in various camps, and you kept on hoping and hoping, and it took 3 or 4 years of total silence, and very very gradually, one accepted the fact that they were not coming back." Bob tells them how he wrote to his parents before the war started, "Then you were only allowed a 25 word message once a month. And then everything stopped. The next thing I heard was a letter my brother got in early 1947 from a man we had known, who was in a camp and survived and got to Sweden." Although no definite information was given, Bob says that it was quite clear that both his parents had died in the camp.

Davora explains why she feels a responsibility to keep practising Judaism, "I'm so proud of them, and admire them so much for what they did, and what they've managed to achieve and how they've managed to carry on their Judaism."

"This is the best respect we can give to our parents," says Ann, "that we have carried on living a good, cheerful and worthwhile life." "The major plus is that we did meet each other and we've had a wonderful married life," adds Bob, "and we hope we have managed to pass that on to the next generation." Ann describes it as a "snub to Hilter" that they'd built a new life and new family out of such horror.