Bea Green neé Siegel was born in Munich, Germany on 14th March 1925. She was born to a relatively well-off family, her father a prestigious lawyer. Her family was Jewish, but she went to a public school. She lived much of her childhood completely normally, but then the Nazi Party came to power. That was 1933 and many things changed. The Nazis started to impose anti-Semitic laws. That year, when she was just eight years old, there was a serious incident that changed her life. She had stayed home from school one day to nurse a cold. At one point, she heard the sound of the door closing. Bea had assumed that it was her mother. It was her father, spattered with his own blood and badly beaten. He rushed into his bedroom, stopping to hang his suit on the hooks outside. As Bea saw this, she felt utter shock and incomprehension. She opened her father’s door to see him in bed, quickly pulling up the bedclothes to obscure his wounds.

Her father had been called that day by one of his clients, Herr Urfel, the prominent head of a department store, as he had been arrested without a warrant. Her father went into the police station to meet his client, was directed to a room where he discovered Nazi paramilitaries. They beat him badly, placed a sign around his neck that read „Ich bin Jude aber ich will mich nie mehr bei der Polizei Beschweren,” or “I am a Jew, and I will never complain to the police”. They then paraded him barefoot in front of the Reichstag. By chance, an American photographer took a picture of the incident this photo was posted in several American newspapers to highlight the serious wave of anti-Semitism taking over Germany.

But that was not the end of the Siegels’ problems. Another event occurred that would have consequences of great magnitude: Kristallnacht, 10 November 1938. This was a pogrom of Jews, approximately 91 massacred. Over 300,000 Jews were also arrested and sent to concentration camps such as Dachau. This was in response to an assassination of Ernst vom Rath by a teenage Jew Herschel Grynszpan. Vom Rath was a German diplomat and member of the German paramilitary, the SA.

Luckily, Bea’s father was tipped off and quickly fled to his sister’s home in Luxembourg, temporarily evading the SA. When the paramilitary came to the Siegel’s home, Bea’s mother responded emotionally, “He’s not here.” This was believed by the SA, as they had assumed the lawyer had already been sent to Dachau. My grandmother thinks this is what saved him. After her father returned, Bea’s parents then decided that it was no longer safe for them to be in Germany, especially for Bea. They found out about the scheme called the Kindertransport, an evacuation of Jewish-German children – without their parents - to willing host families in Britain. There were 10,000 children in all.

Through great effort they found an English sponsor, contacted the Kindertransport organisation and arranged a space for Bea. Departure was from Munich main station at midnight on 28th June 1939. As Bea boarded the train, she looked back out of the window tom see her mother hiding behind her father in order to hide her tears. This was one of the moments that hit Bea hard: she finally understood the gravity of the situation. On the train there was a much younger girl. She comforted her telling the little girl that she would see her family again. But Bea recalls that she was really reassuring herself. She was taken in by an upper-class family in Hampshire. Another German girl had already been placed with the family. Bea asked the girl. “Do you still have homesickness?”. Bea found out the answer over years, a crushing longing for her family and home. Bea acclimatised to Britain, immediately joining a school. It was there that she saw a magazine: Picture Post. In it was the photo of her father being paraded through the streets of Munich. Seeing this, she started to cry. Her teacher brought her to the headmaster, and after Bea explained her tears, the headmaster told her “This is not your father, this is propaganda”. My grandmother realised that the public had very little awareness of events and horrors in Germany.

The following year, 1940, after the outbreak of World War Two, Bea’s parents had managed by extraordinary luck, to secure visas to reach Peru. They escaped Nazi Germany going east, travelling on the Trans-Siberian railway and by ship from Japan to Lima, Peru. A decade later, my grandmother and her parents were reunited and lived together for a while. They were all safe. My grandmother was lucky - most of the Kindertransport children never saw their families again.

My grandmother married Michael Green, has three sons, one of whom is my father. Today she lives a peaceful life in Barnes, London.

By Ben Green, Hampton