Independent
Next week, dignitaries from around the world will gather to attend the opening of the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem. It promises to be a powerfully evocative experience, says Donald Macintyre
12 March 2005
Among the flashes of recollection he has of that momentous journey, Henry Foner can remember his first sight of a policeman on the quay when the ship docked at Harwich. He can remember waiting in a large hall to be collected. But he has no memory of what must have been the utterly traumatic moment at which he had parted from his father, Max, for the last time in the winter of 1938. An only child of just six and half, he was uprooted, alone, from home in Berlin, one among 10,000 Jewish children sent by their parents on the kindertransport to Britain to escape what was to come. His mother had died two years earlier.
Of life in Swansea with his foster parents, Mr Foner, who had left Berlin as Heinz Lichtwitz, acknowledges it was "tough at times". Morris and Winnie Foner were childless and spoke only English and Yiddish. He spoke only German. "But somehow we managed to communicate," he says.
Yet by the time his father telephoned him on his seventh birthday, he could no longer understand him in German; after he had spent six months as the only Jew at the local primary school, English had become his first language. People were fairly kind, despite the occasional anti-Semitic gibes from other kids in the playground.
Today an eminent and only partly retired geochemist, Mr Foner is as fit and active man as he is good-humoured. Perhaps that is why, as he sips coffee in his comfortable living-room, the open french windows leading on to to a patio bathed in Jerusalem's spring sunshine, the greatest horrors of the 20th century, which have touched him, and about which he talks without a trace of melodrama, suddenly seem so recent.
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=619203
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