Meet the Kindertransport refugee who fled the Nazis and turbo-charged mankind’s journey into outer space

The technology was bought by Nasa and used on the space agency’s Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 missions, and on its more recent Mars rover missions, Perseverance and Curiosity.

Also in the archive is the tag placed around Abeles’ neck when he boarded the Kindertransport and, most poignantly, the other letters his parents wrote to him from Czechoslovakia.

In one of the intimate telegram-style missives from 1939, his mother tells him: “I keep all your photographs on my vanity table so that I have you in front of me all the time… At night I dream about my boy.” Another heartbreaking letter, from May 1940, reads:

Abeles Wedding credit Ben Abeles archive

Ben Abeles' sister Mary on her wedding day (Photo: Ben Abeles archive)

“It is so painful for me to know that you are so alone …On Mother’s Day I stayed in bed all day and cried my eyes out.” The next month she told him: “My dearest wish is that we could embrace one another.”

He received only two short messages after this, in August that year, via the German Red Cross.

When the war ended he returned home to Prague to discover that his mother, father and sister, Mary, had all been taken to the Trawniki concentration camp in Poland, where they were killed.

Abeles, who was born in Vienna in 1925 before living in Czechoslovakia from 1934, thought about his parents “every single day, even in his nineties”, Helen said. “It was because of them that he was so determined to make something of himself,” she said.

She added: “He would tell me that the real heroes of the Kindertransport story are the parents who, through courage and foresight, made the sacrifice to let go of their children and send them away to an unknown but hopefully happier life.”

The Ben Abeles archive can be viewed on request at the University of Southampton.