Holocaust survivor, 99, issues a warning as he returns to his childhood home

Eventually, aged about 14, he was forced to continue his education, with the city’s other Jewish children and teachers, in a dilapidated building in another neighbourhood. 

After Kristallnacht, the British government, appalled by the brutality of the pogrom, agreed to allow in unaccompanied Jewish refugee children via the Kindertransport programme, although they had to come without their parents. 

Bidding each other goodbye at Karlsruhe railway station on July 25, 1939, Bingham and his mother Sofi, a housewife, didn’t know if they would meet again. He recalls feeling “a sense of adventure and trauma”, while younger children called for their mothers. Most would never see their parents again. 

“Can you imagine the [mothers’] feelings?” says Bingham. “I can still see my mother now, standing on the platform as the train pulled out.” 

After making the crossing to Harwich from the Hook of Holland, he was put on a train to Liverpool Street Station in London, then a bus to a farm near Ashford in Kent, where he was housed in an old railway wagon with other refugees. A month later, he was taken to Gwrych Castle in Abergele, Wales, which had been requisitioned to accommodate Kindertransport refugees: “the benighted children who were victims of hate and war,” as Holocaust historian Mike Levy describes them in his recent book, Get The Children Out! 

Bingham would spend the next three years at the castle, with around 200 other such “benighted children”. “[It was] a beautiful castle, but inside was rotten. There was no sanitation, no electrics, nothing,” he says. 

Though he had arrived speaking little English, he worked in various jobs: at a market garden, a locksmith’s, a local newspaper. “We were very welcomed,” he recalls. “We were living in this community, looking after each other. Once a week the head gave a press conference and told us what was happening in the world.”