Part 3: The Kindertransport: Child Refugees to Wales
This is the third in a three-part series of blog posts. See also part one and part two.
Refugees under the age of 18 did not need a visa. They could either travel on their parents’ visa or, after November 1938, they could be part of an organized rescue scheme such as the Kindertransport. But unless they managed to travel with their family, and their family received support in one way or another, the minors’ opportunities for resettling in the UK were dependent on the support of sponsors, whether individuals or charities. The UK government facilitated the visa waiver scheme now known as the Kindertransport, but it did not support child refugees financially or organizationally.
The Kindertransport scheme also stipulated that only children—no other adult family members—would be able to find sanctuary in the UK. As Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stated in a House of Commons debate on the government’s response to the November Pogrom:1
With regard to the United Kingdom, the number of refugees which Great Britain can agree to admit, either for a temporary stay or for permanent settlement, is limited by the capacity of the voluntary organisations dealing with the refugee problem to undertake the responsibility for selecting, receiving and maintaining a further number of refugees.
The UK government even demanded a £50 guarantee be raised for each child coming to the UK on this scheme, in order to indemnify the British state against any future costs that might arise. This lack of government support and inconsistent official policy influenced the experiences of the child refugees.2 Some children were lucky enough to be allocated a caring family, whereas others had to live under very difficult conditions.
Czech Refugees and the Czechoslovak State School in Llanwrtyd Wells
There seems to have been a disproportionately large number of Czech refugees who settled in Wales, perhaps due to the fact that most of them arrived later than the earlier cohorts from the German Reich, and by then, potential accommodation or foster placements in England were already taken, especially near urban centres. There may have been some other practical reasons, however. Some child refugees were evacuated to Wales alongside English children and young people once the Second World War started.
Lia Lesser is an example of a young child who escaped Czechoslovakia via the Kindertransport scheme and had supportive sponsors and foster parents. As Lesser reports in an oral history interview in 1999, she was born Lia Blum on 26 March 1931 in Teplice-Šanov in the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.3 She was the daughter of divorced parents: Ida Blum, who ran a haberdashery shop, and Pavel Blum, a travelling salesman. The family was Jewish, as was about 10 per cent of the local population at the time. Lia lived with her mother and only saw her father at weekends. She was an only child but was surrounded by an extended family consisting of grandparents, one aunt and one uncle on her mother’s side, one aunt and one uncle on her father’s side, and two cousins. All of her relatives would later be murdered in the Holocaust.
After Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and annexed the Sudetenland, Lia and her mother moved repeatedly to evade Nazi persecution. The 8-year-old Lia believed that her stay in the UK would be a holiday and was therefore not sad when she said goodbye to her mother at Prague station. Her father was very upset and did not want her to go.
She was sponsored by a group of four middle-aged siblings, and one of them, Florence Hall, would become her foster mother. Florence was a single woman and an English teacher by profession and lived on Ynys Môn. Florence’s two brothers and her sister lived close by. Lia remembers taking a large suitcase on her journey with lots of nice clothes that her mother had packed for her, a blue travel pillow that could be hung over her shoulder like a handbag, some Hebrew school books, some Czech storybooks, and a necklace with a pendant of Moses carrying law scrolls. The trip took two days: they left Prague on 29 June 1939 and arrived at Liverpool Street station on 1 July 1939. Lia remembered eating jam sandwiches on white bread at the Hook of Holland and she thought they tasted lovely, as she had never had white bread before (the bread in Central Europe was mainly dark rye bread). She does not remember any of the children on the transport being upset.

When Florence picked Lia up, she was glad that her surname was at the beginning of the alphabet and that they were matched up quickly, as the train journey back to Ynys Môn was such a long one. Lia felt strange, but Florence knew German and spoke it to her, which must have been very reassuring. Most Kindertransport refugees could not communicate with their foster parents at all on arrival. On the long journey to North Wales, Lia became exhausted, and Florence was grateful to some Welsh sailors who carried her between trains when they changed at Crewe. They even sang lullabies in Welsh to Lia on the way to Amlwch, where Florence lived. Lia had no knowledge of the UK or Wales before she arrived.
Lia’s story of her time with her foster mother in Wales is very positive. She called Florence Hall ‘Mouse’ as a term of endearment and had a very close relationship with her. Lia corresponded with both her birth parents. After a few months, Florence heard about the Czechoslovak boarding school in Llanwrtyd Wells, and she decided to send Lia there because she had started to forget her Czech. Lia boarded there from 1942 to 1945. In 1945, the school disbanded, as many pupils were united with parents or relatives, and some moved back to Czechoslovakia. However, this was not possible for Lia. At the end of the war, lists were published of those who were murdered in the Holocaust and these included the names of both of Lia’s parents. Her father was murdered in Auschwitz, her mother and her other relatives in Terezín. Lia moved back to Amlwch from Llanwrtyd in 1945 and finished her education at the local grammar school, eventually training as a nurse.
Lia Lesser was not the only former pupil to have very fond memories of the Czechoslovak State School in Llanwrtyd Wells. Vera Gissing and Ruth Hálová, who both also fled on a Kindertransport from Prague, had equally positive experiences at the school. The Czechoslovak government-in-exile first established a secondary school for refugees in Surrey, before moving to Hinton Hall in Shropshire and finally to the Abernant Lake Hotel in Llanwrtyd Wells, where it remained from 1943 to 1945. The boarding school had around 140 pupils, all of whom had fled to the UK. Some had arrived on a Kindertransport but others came with their parents, who ranged from those on workers’ visas to members of the military, high officials, and members of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. Most pupils were from Jewish backgrounds but there were also Roman Catholics, Protestants, and pupils with no religious affiliation. The Czechoslovak State School was fully funded by the government-in-exile, and Ruth Hálová, aged 17, was able to benefit from a free place there for the two years that the school was located in Wales. Ruth had initially arrived in London in 1939. She was 13 years old at the time and remembered being one of the older children on the transport who had to help with looking after the younger ones.4

For these child refugees, who were planning to return to Czechoslovakia, it was obviously an advantage to be able to speak fluent Czech. This was one of the central aims of the school. Vera Gissing was very aware of the importance of language from an early age, even before she fled to the UK on a Kindertransport. In her memoirs, she described her father being spat at by a German officer who—after the German occupation of Prague—had requisitioned most of their flat (with the family restricted to a small part of it) and had demanded that from now on the whole family should speak German when in the presence of the German occupiers.5 Her father had refused, and the officer’s aggressive reaction and her father’s humiliation stuck in Vera’s mind. Subsequently, her parents put her on a Kindertransport train and she was first resettled near Manchester.
Her placement was successful, and Vera was keen to learn English from the beginning. When children were evacuated out of urban centres, she had to move to a new family, who proved equally supportive, and her English continued to improve. Nevertheless, despite her eagerness to learn English, she was also acutely aware of the danger of forgetting her Czech. When she met another young Czech refugee who had come to the UK some years before, and who had not had any contact with other Czech people, Vera was horrified by the girl’s broken speech. She bluntly asked her, ‘Why is your Czech so bad?’ Learning that this was due to the other girl having no opportunity to practise the language, Vera vowed that she would never let this happen to herself. Therefore, despite being very happy with both foster families she had lived with in Manchester and Stockport, Vera chose to go to the Czechoslovak State School while it was based at Hinton Hall in Shropshire. She subsequently moved with the school to Llanwrtyd Wells.
Some of the Czech children’s memories are steeped in the idea of an affinity between Welsh and Czech cultural identity: both countries were dominated for centuries by their larger neighbours. Gissing described the locals as being somewhat bewildered by so many foreigners arriving in their small town:6
I shall never forget our arrival in the village of Llanwrtyd Wells, a small community which lies at the very heart of central Wales. We spilled out of the steam train at the tiny station and marched with our bags and cases along an unmade road. We could hardly believe our eyes when we saw our new home, for we had acquired not only a spacious modern building, but also several acres of rolling pastures, complete with cows . . . Needless to say, the arrival of so many Czech youngsters (there were about 130 of us by then) caused quite a stir in the village and at first we were viewed with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. Then one of our teachers had a brainwave: we organised a concert, to which all the people of Llanwrtyd Wells were invited, and most of them came! The audience loved our national songs and dances, and when at the end all the pupils of the school stood up and sang the Welsh national anthem in Welsh there was not a dry eye in the house.
Mixed Experiences
Some refugees were of course luckier than others. A very young Kindertransport refugee, Renate Collins (née Kress), was 5 years old when she arrived on a train from Prague and was also fostered by a Baptist minister and his wife: Sidney and Arianwen Coplestone, living in Porth. Her foster parents, too, were very supportive, and went to great lengths to help her remember her birth family and her Jewish faith. She was adopted by them in 1947 after finding out that her parents, along with sixty-two other relatives, were murdered in the Holocaust.7

Bea Green, who was born Maria Beate Siegel into a Jewish family in 1925 in Munich, left Germany in May 1939 aged 14. She was fostered by a wealthy older woman, a certain Mrs Williams, in Brasted Hall, near Sevenoaks in Kent. Her foster mother sent her to a private school, and when this school was evacuated, most pupils went home to live with their parents; only twelve or thirteen children followed the headmistress to Bryn Gwalia Hall in Powys. There, she obtained a school leaving certificate and was one of the lucky Kindertransport refugees encouraged to go to university. She joined the education department at UCL, but by October 1942, UCL was evacuated to Aberystwyth and so Bea made her way to Wales for a second time. Bea made some friends and generally enjoyed her time in Aberystwyth very much. However, she also had a negative experience when she received antisemitic abuse from a fellow student, and she describes her feelings vividly in an oral history interview: ‘So I remember I walked down to the beach . . . and sat on the pebbles and wept into the sea. I was just so frustrated and so upset thinking that here I’d come away from this thing, only to meet it again.’8
The children who came to Wales with the Kindertransport certainly faced many challenges, but the story of twins Lotte and Susi Bechhöfer is one of the most disturbing and complicated of all. Susi and her twin sister were sent to the UK aged 3. They had been living in a children’s home in Munich because their unmarried mother was unable to care for them full time. Lotte and Susi were fostered by Fred Legge, a Baptist minister from Cardiff, and his wife Audrey. The Legges had not been able to have biological children, and this was something that Fred especially found very difficult to live with. Although the placements for all the Kindertransport refugees were fostering arrangements, a small number of the foster parents in the UK chose to ignore the fact that they were not supposed to adopt the children, or the British organizing committees failed to communicate this fact to them.9 Some foster parents therefore made no effort to help the child refugees remember their birth parents, their home country, or their religious background. This was the case with the Legge family. Fred wanted the girls to be seen as his and Audrey’s biological children, and he was controlling and cruel. Lotte suffered ill health in childhood, and Susi was sexually abused by her foster father.10
Conclusion
These three blog posts have shown that ‘The story of Wales is the story of migration.’11 Refugee resettlement contributed to the cultural and religious diversity of all parts of the UK, so it is pleasing to see that the history of refugees from National Socialism is now considered to be part of migration research and the history of Wales. The conditions for sanctuary seekers are necessarily dictated by the UK government, as it controls the country’s borders. There has been a lot of myth-making regarding governmental refugee policy during the late 1930s, but as we have seen here, historical research shows that policies were not overly generous during the Second World War, and were to some extent motivated by British self-interest. Research also shows that many of the refugees who managed to resettle played a part in shaping post-war culture in Wales. This history needs to be addressed in more detail in commemorative and educational activities, and I hope this blog post series is a contribution to that.12
Featured image: Plaque on Hope Square at Liverpool Street Station, commemorating the arrival of Kindertransport refugees into Liverpool Street station. Photo by Megalit, 2020. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International licence.
- Hansard, House of Commons, vol. 341, col. 1314 (21 Nov. 1938). [↩]
- See Andrea Hammel, The Kindertransport: What Really Happened (Cambridge, 2024). [↩]
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, oral history interview with Lia Lesser, 17 June 1999. [↩]
- Andrea Hammel, Finding Refuge: Stories of the Men, Women and Children who Fled to Wales to Escape the Nazis (Aberystwyth, 2022), 119–25. [↩]
- Vera Gissing, Pearls of Childhood (London, 1994), 30. [↩]
- Gissing, Pearls of Childhood, 98–9. [↩]
- ‘Renate Collins BEM “Kindertransport and Porth” Online Interview’, People’s Collection Wales, 16 Aug. 2024. [↩]
- Imperial War Museum, Sound, 16784, interview with Bea Green (12 July 1996), Reel 7. [↩]
- For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see Hammel, The Kindertransport, 702. As the Kindertransport scheme was largely organized by volunteers, placement policies were not always applied or communicated consistently. [↩]
- Jeremy Josephs and Susi Bechhöfer, Rosa’s Child: One Woman’s Search for her Past, (London, 1996); Susi Bechhöfer, Rosa (Leicester, 2016). [↩]
- Catrin Wyn Edwards, Laura Shobiye, and Rhys Dafydd Jones (eds.), A Welcoming Nation? Intersectional Approaches to Migration and Diversity in Wales (Cardiff, 2025) 11. [↩]
- The Jewish History Association of South Wales and the Centre for the Movement of People at Aberystwyth University collaborated, with funding from the Association of Jewish Refugees, on the Holocaust Education Wales project for the Curriculum for Wales, education being a devolved matter. Twenty bilingual resources were created which can be used for Holocaust and refugee history education in secondary schools. They include numerous examples from the lives of refugees from National Socialism who made their home in Wales. See Refugees from National Socialism in Wales: Learning from the Past for the Future. [↩]
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Andrea Hammel (November 5, 2025). Rethinking Transnational and Devolved (Hi)stories: German-Speaking Refugees from National Socialism in Wales. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved December 8, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/153fg
