‘Into the arms of strangers’: child refugees of Nazi Germany remember

Hella Pick and Lord Dubs at a press conference for the opening of the exhibition at the Bundestag in Berlin called I Said, ‘Auf Wiedersehen’. Photograph: IMAGO/Achille Abboud/Avalon

Hella was given the number 4672, and a small suitcase. She recalls saying farewell to her mother in Vienna, and her bewilderment, aged 11, on arriving at Liverpool Street station in London to an unknown future on 15 March 1939.

Alfred, aged six, remembers the tension and his parents’ fear, the Czech salami sandwiches his mother packed for him but that he didn’t touch during the 48-hour journey. He arrived in London in July 1939.