“Here we were like adults, we were alone”, Mr Kessler says. “That was the first time I was on a ship. We saw all sorts of things — the ship passed through the North Sea, the Skagerrak and Kattegat [straits], into the British channel and up the Thames.”
As they docked in London, they saw Tower Bridge opening for a passing ship.
A few days later the invasion of Poland commenced, with millions of Jews trapped.
Although they escaped from Poland, the Kesslers were from Leipzig in Germany. The family had been forced to flee eastwards the year before. Bernard’s parents, Avraham Hirsch and Selma Kessler, were able to save all of their children from the horrors to come.
In his newly self-published autobiography, Memories: Real or Imagined, Mr Kessler describes the “superhuman effort” his parents made to ensure that he and Dorle were on the kindertransport. His two older siblings, Zalel (Bezalel) and Susi, also survived. Zalel had been in Germany at a Hachsharah (Zionist programme, training young Jews for life on Kibbutzim in Israel) in 1938. “After we were deported to Poland by the Nazis at the end of October 1938, he was permitted a week later to go in for two days, pick up his things, his documents and a bag and left for Palestine, as it was at the time.”
When Germany invaded Poland, Susi was on hachsharah herself in the east of the country, which the Russians took over as part of their pact with the Nazis. As Mr Kessler describes it, her group “went through Moscow and all sorts of other places including Turkey, and they came via Syria or Lebanon to Israel.”
His parents, having managed to save their children, were unable to save themselves. Mr Kessler describes their “desperate” but unsuccessful attempts to obtain certificates to go to Palestine.
“I cannot imagine, even now, the emotions flooding our parents at the thought of having to send away their two young ones, not being able to visualise the immediate future”, he writes in his autobiography.
He told the JC that “my younger sister and I would not have gone on the kindertransport, except our parents promised us all the time they were making arrangements to get certificates to come to Palestine and they would then bring us over to them and we would all be together again. That was our constant thought and hope.”
Mr Kessler went on to join the Jewish Brigade near the end of the war, before serving in the Royal Fusiliers. He would go on to work in the Jewish Agency’s Aliyah department for 25 years, before moving to Israel himself in the 1970s.
He now lives in Jerusalem but is still in touch with a few of the others who came over on that kindertransport in August 1939.
As for himself, he says “is not planning anything special” to commemorate the anniversary of the event with his four children and five grandchildren. “I appreciate what happened to me at the time, that we were permitted to come to England” he says. “I’m just sorry that the regulations of the British government in Palestine at the time didn’t enable my family to join them, then we would have all been together.”
‘Memories: Real or Imagined’ can be purchased on Amazon
