On the third day of their visit to Germany, the British King Charles III and his wife Camila arrived in Hamburg. They arrived promptly at noon on Friday with a regular ICE train at Dammtor station. mayor of hamburg Peter Tschentscher (SPD) and his wife Eva-Maria welcomed the royal couple and the German Federal President Frank Walter Steinmeier and his wife Elke Büdenbender at Dammtor station.
A few hundred real and curious fans stood in front of the station, including class 5g from the Bergedorf district school. They really wanted to go to the playground in the park plants and flowers. Now they were happy to see the royal couple. “I’m really excited. So far I’ve only seen the king on TV. Now I think it’s really cool when I can see him in real life,” said 11-year-old Nova. The royal couple also took the opportunity to shake hands with some, to applause from the crowd.
At the southern exit of Dammtor railway station, the royal visited the memorial “Kindertransport – the last goodbye”. There, Queen Camilla, Eva-Maria Tschentscher and Elke Büdenbender deposited white roses after a brief explanation by the initiator Lisa Bechner.
Monument commemorates rescue operation
The sculptural group depicts the moment when two children say goodbye to a track, while a young woman and four other children remain behind. The memorial commemorates a major rescue operation before the outbreak of World War II: from December 1938 to August 1939, over ten thousand children, most of them Jewish, were brought to Britain by train and ship. In 2006, Charles unveiled a similar sculpture titled “Kindertransport – The Arrival” at Liverpool Street Station in London, where Jewish children arrived.
There are other Kindertransport memorials in Berlin, Rotterdam, Prague, Vienna, Frankfurt and Gdansk. The Kindertransport organization in Germany and the Association of Jewish Refugees in Great Britain work together to keep the memory of this shared moment in history alive for future generations.
Later, the king, the federal president and the mayor wanted to lay wreaths at the Saint Nicholas memorial. The church was destroyed during British and American air raids on Hamburg in 1943.