The Kindertransport children 80 years on: ‘When I was 14, my mother appeared out of nowhere’

Ruth Barnett, 83, was born in 1935, in a Germany that was already descending into Nazi tyranny. Her Jewish father was a judge who had been deprived of his post and frogmarched out of his court by the SS in 1933; her non-Jewish mother ran a cinema-advertising business in Berlin. “We had a brilliant future in front of us until the Nazis came to power,” she says.

Barnett’s father was in hiding for much of the next six years. But the fact that he was blacklisted and his life was in danger may have helped his two children – Ruth had a brother, Martin, who was three years older than her – get on the list for a Kindertransport to the UK in February 1939. Though only four years old at the time, she recalls the journey from Berlin. “I thought it was a holiday trip,” she says. Her mother, who had a short-term visa, accompanied the two children, left them with a foster family in England and then disappeared. “Neither my brother nor I remember her saying goodbye,” says Barnett.

Ruth and Martin stayed together throughout the war – “which is why we were able to survive psychologically”, she says. Her arrival in the UK had been sponsored by the Quakers, who kept an eye on her throughout the war, moving her from the first foster mother, who was cruel and beat Ruth for wetting the bed. She ended up on a farm in Sussex, where she stayed after the war ended. “Four years later, when I was 14,” she recalls, “my mother appeared out of nowhere, a total stranger. I didn’t recognise her; she didn’t speak any English; I didn’t speak any German. I was told she had come to take me to Germany; I refused to go.”