Swiss tells of flight to Britain before War

Jewish children were sent from Nazi Germany to Britain. Warner Bros

Klaus Appel was one of nearly 10,000 children sent from Nazi Germany to Britain before the Second World War. He spoke to swissinfo about his experiences.

To mark the Swiss premiere of “Into the Arms of Strangers”, an Oscar-award winning documentary film about the mass evacuation, Appel spoke out about the experience of leaving his family behind in Germany to begin a new life in Britain.

Appel is one of only four surviving Swiss to have travelled to Britain in the months leading up to the outbreak of war in 1939, and is the only one prepared to talk about his experience.

The British-Swiss citizen, who has lived in Biel since 1952, is responsible for bringing the documentary film to a Swiss audience.

“I wanted to give young people in Switzerland the opportunity to find out about what we lived through,” Appel said.

The film, which premiered in the United States before being shown in Britain and Germany, was not originally slated for release in Switzerland.

Convinced that “Into the Arms of Strangers” deserved a wider audience, Appel decided to approach the film’s financial backers, Warner Bros, to find out if the film could be brought to Switzerland.

“You could say I was very naïve in the way I approached the idea of bringing the film to Switzerland,” he says. “I just called up Hollywood and asked them.”

The film comes to Switzerland

The response came several months later, when Appel received an urgent call from Warner Bros’ representative in Zurich. He was informed his tenacity had paid off: the film would after all be released in Switzerland.

Though Appel does not feature in the documentary itself, his own story and experience mirrors that of many other children whose lives are portrayed on film through a carefully woven mix of interviews and archive footage.

After his mother’s death and the arrest of his father by the Gestapo, the 14-year-old Appel was placed in a Jewish orphanage in Berlin.

“The closest person to me at that time was my elder brother. After my father was arrested, it was my brother who looked after me – even though he was only three years older than me,” Appel says.

On August 31, 1939, Appel was told he had been selected to join a group of 40 other children on an evacuation train which would shortly leave Berlin for Britain.

Years later, Appel discovered he had joined the very last group of children to leave Germany before the outbreak of war.

Just one day after the train sped away from Berlin, Hitler’s army invaded Poland, provoking France and Britain to declare war on Germany.

Start of a new life

Appel spent over a decade in Britain, learning English, studying electrical engineering at college, earning a living by working on a factory floor, and wondering about the fate of the family he left behind in Germany.

By the time he left Britain and returned to mainland Europe in 1952, Appel knew his father and brother would not be there to meet him.

“After the war, I found that my whole family had been destroyed,” Appel told swissinfo.

“Today, I’ve got evidence of where and when they were killed. My father, brother, cousins, aunts and grandmother were all taken to Auschwitz. I didn’t see one of them again.”

Though more than half a century has passed since Appel stepped on to the train in Berlin to begin a new life in an unknown land, he is convinced documentaries like “Into the Arms of Strangers” can help make a new generation aware of the times he and thousands of other children like him lived through.

Time is a healer, Appel says, but the scars and the memories are indelible and will last forever.

“Of course, we have grown up today and found our way. Most of us have grandchildren now,” he says.

“So the circle has been closed again, but the nightmare will never leave us.”

by Ramsey Zarifeh