Walter Bingham talks about his remarkable life, including making Alayah at 80, and escaping Germany on the Kindertransport.

Walter: Not at all, my daughter was already living here and I have a grandson living here, but I was in London and I have another grandson there. But you know I thought I'm getting old I should be somewhere close to my daughter, because you can't really be a burden to a grandson can you if anything happens, so I eventually moved here and so here I am.

Paul: You are originally from Germany and came to Great Britain in 1939 how did that happen?

Walter: Well there was such a thing called Kindertransport, which is a collective name and an umbrella term really. It was that the British authorities were finally persuaded to take some children out of Germany after long negotiations. I have a gripe with the British though I must say and that is that it was unaccompanied children without their parents. There was someone in each town who played God and they decided who goes and I was chosen and I came. Lots of organisations had an input: some children went to foster parents, others went to family, and others went into hostels. I went because I came with the Zionist Youth Movement into something that was almost like a Kibbutz in Wales. It was a wonderful castle Gwrych Castle in Abergele on the north Wales coast, it was beautiful, lawns down to the Irish Sea, lambing I could see, but inside was rotten. We had no sanitation and I don't want to talk about it, because it was awful, but I came to Britain and I was happy to be there.

But unaccompanied children, that's what I want to tell you about. You must imagine a mother sending her only and I was an only child, sending her only child to England. All she knew is that I was going to England with some youth organisation, not where, not how, not what. It was about under four weeks before the outbreak of World War Two and Jews knew what was coming, because there was six years of experience before that.

Put yourself into the shoes of a parent who sent their children out knowing full well that war is imminent and they would probably not see them again. In fact and I would say 99 point something percent of children who went with the Kindertransport, it was scheduled to be 10,000, but about 7,500 made it before the outbreak of war, and 99 point something percent of children never saw their parents again.

I must say God was good to me, I was fortunate that my mother who went through the concentration camps came out alive and that we reunited again, which was of course was wonderful. My father had already perished in the Warsaw ghetto. So that was the story of the Kinder Transport, but to send children away! You know there were some younger children who said "what have I done to my mummy and daddy, that they are sending me away, I was a good girl I was a good boy, why am I sent away?" Can you imagine the cruelty, in the process of being kind it was cruel.

Paul: Being Jewish, did that save your life?

Walter: Well it was mainly Jewish, there were one or two non-Jewish, perhaps children of known communists or other anti-Nazi system people. But it was mainly Jewish children on this Kinder Transport.