In the nine months between Kristallnacht and the outbreak of World War II, Great Britain opened its borders to 10,000 Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Most of them came alone. Most of them never saw their parents again.
British families — many of them strangers who had simply volunteered — met the children at Liverpool Street Station in London. Some kids were toddlers with name tags pinned to their coats. Others were teenagers who understood exactly what was happening. The scenes on the platforms were what you'd expect: confusion, terror, grief, and the stunned silence of children who had just said goodbye to their mothers and fathers for what would turn out to be the last time.
The parents who put their children on those trains made an impossible calculation. They weighed the certainty of danger against the uncertainty of a foreign country, a foreign language, and the arms of strangers. They chose the strangers. Most of those parents would die in the Holocaust. The children they saved grew up to become scientists, artists, writers, politicians, and parents themselves. Among them: four Nobel Prize winners.
Ten thousand children. Nine months. A window that opened just long enough, because enough people in one country said: send us the children. We'll take them.
"Perhaps the reason the Universe gave you a broken world is so that you could have a chance to fix it."