HERMANN Hirschberger holds up a 70-year-old photograph of himself as a handsome 12-year-old boy and says: "This is what I looked like when I came to England. The strangest thing about the picture is that I'm smiling. I had just arrived with my brother from Germany, having been sent by our parents unaccompanied on Kindertransport, and I was terribly homesick and anxious about my parents' safety, and yet despite that, this picture reminds me of an incident that makes me smile to this day.

"I was sent to school in Margate. The first week was murder - I could hardly speak a word of English and I felt vulnerable and out of my depth - and then on the Friday, after lunch, I was pushed into a very large classroom with 100 other pupils. They were electing house captains. I had no idea what that meant.

"But when it came to nominations for vice-captain, one girl pointed at me. The children voted: the first nominee got four votes, the second six. Then it came to me and almost every pupil in the room put their hand up. I got 77 votes!"

It was an unexpected act of kindness, the first of many that Hermann, now an effervescent 82-year-old with a wife, two children and four grandchildren, will never forget. This Sunday he will be sharing memories like these with his fellow émigrés and Prince Charles at a special celebration to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Parliament's decision to admit almost 10,000, mainly Jewish, children as refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe - a unique act that saved these children from certain death and which became known as the Kindertransport.

An estimated 150 people who came on the Kindertransport are still living in Britain today (3,000 emigrated to Israel), and the majority are expected to attend the gathering at JFS School in Kenton, north-west London. Organised by the Kindertransport Committee of the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), the programme includes addresses by Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, Lord Richard Attenborough, Minister of State Tony McNulty and a keynote speech by Churchill's historian Sir Martin Gilbert.

It was the shocking events of 9 November 1938 known as "Kristallnacht" - when synagogues were set alight and Jewish shops smashed throughout Germany - that led directly to the Kindertransports, the first leaving Berlin on 1 December 1938 and the last on 1 September 1939, the day war began.

Hermann, then 12, remembers Kristallnacht all too well. At the time, he lived with his brother, Julius, 14, father, Sigmund, 60, a bank manager, and mother, Jenny, 42, in an apartment in Karlsruhe, a city on the Rhine 70 miles south of Frankfurt.

"For me," he recalls, "it was a momentous day because it changed everything. I can still recall the acrid smell of synagogues burning as I walked to school and then being told by a teacher: 'Jew boy, go home, you're never coming back.'

"They were rounding up the Jewish men and two Gestapo with guns came to our house and told us to hand over our father. My dad was out of the house but they didn't believe us - I can't convey what it felt like to have a gun pushed in my chest, the fear in the pit of my stomach.

"Things had been bad for some time. In my class at school, there was one other Jewish boy and the other children beat us up and called us 'filthy Jews'. Once, in our naivety, we went to the headmaster to complain. He said: 'Isn't that what you are? Filthy Jews!'"

Of Karlsruhe's 250,000 population, 3,000 were Jewish and there was now a desperate clamour to leave. But emigrating had become difficult. When Hermann's parents heard that England would take Jewish children, they told him and his brother: "You'll go to England, you'll learn a new language, we'll follow you later."

Hermann recalls: "On March 20th 1939, we packed our suitcases and our parents walked us to the railway station. My mother kissed us goodbye, hugged us tight and said: 'Be good boys, say your prayers every evening. There will be a happy reunion when we get to England, perhaps in a few weeks' time.' But she didn't cry.

"We had strict instructions from the Refugee Committee and it had been drummed into us: 'No emotional scenes at the station.' We boarded the train to Hamburg with my father while my mother walked home alone. I'm sure she cried buckets. That was the last time I saw my mother.

"All night, I couldn't sleep on the train. When we got to Hamburg, my father he placed his hands over my head and gave me the traditional blessing that a Jewish father gives his children on Friday nights. It was the last thing he ever said to me.

"That night my brother and I boarded the SS Manhattan - a luxury American liner with lovely cabins and even a kosher restaurant - and I howled like I've never howled before or since. I feared I'd never see my parents again, and I didn't think I could cope without my mother."

On arrival in Southampton, Hermann and his brother were put on a train to Waterloo and bussed to Margate where they were accommodated in a hostel and enrolled in a local Church of England school. At first, letters from their parents arrived weekly. They were brief but they always ended optimistically "we hope to see you soon". Six months later the brothers received a letter that said: "Very good news. We've just received our permits to come to England. In a few days there'll be a happy reunion." It was dated just two days before war broke out.

"I remember walking on the promenade in Margate with friends feeling terribly anxious about whether my parents had got out in time. A few weeks later we got another letter that confirmed they were still in Germany. In 1940 they were deported to a concentration camp in Vichy France and we got letters via the Red Cross saying they were suffering and asking us to send money.

"The last letter we got was from the Red Cross itself in 1942 and it said: 'We regret to inform you that your parents have been removed to an unknown destination.' By then we knew about the Final Solution. We would later learn that they had been deported to their deaths in Auschwitz in the summer of 1942."

Back in England, Hermann had been evacuated to a coal-mining foster family in Staffordshire while his brother went to London to work in a clerical job. "My family, the Deakins, were a decent couple who treated me well but they weren't my mum and dad and they never tried to be. It was a difficult time and while I was with them, I suffered from anxiety attacks and insomnia."

Eighteen months later, at 15, Hermann followed his brother to London where he lived in a hostel and joined the war effort, making components for aircraft at a precision engineering company. He was determined to make something of his life and attended evening classes to complete his school-leaving qualification.

After the war, Hermann qualified as a chartered engineer and later worked in a senior position for Kodak, heading an engineering design team of 90 people. He was 36 when he met his wife, Eva, an artist, also born in Germany but who had escaped to Brazil with her parents in 1939. They moved into a house in Stanmore, north London, where they still live. They have two children, Miriam, 43, a tax consultant for Transport for London, and Danny, 41, an internet entrepreneur. His brother, Julius, is married with six children and lives in Stamford Hill.

In 1951 Hermann returned to Germany and to his heavily bombed hometown for the first time. "I walked round for a long time before I summoned the courage to ring the bell of the apartment where we lived," he says. "The new owners were friendly and when I told them who I was, they invited the neighbours round, including the baker where my parents had bought their bread. The baker told me he remembered the day my parents were deported. He said they were collected in a lorry and that the neighbours came down from the flats and spat at them and kicked them. It was hard to hear. Then one woman asked me: 'What exactly did happen to your parents?' I told her they were murdered in Auschwitz. She said: 'That's not too bad, not as bad as being bombed by the British.' At that point I got up and left."

Since he retired in 1989, Hermann has given hundreds of talks in schools. He says the children always ask three questions: Do you hate Germans? Can you forgive the Germans? Do you still believe in God?

"I tell them: no, I don't hate Germans, only Nazis; that reconciliation with Germans is possible but that I cannot forgive what they did to my parents. As to God, I became agnostic. I am active in the synagogue but it's more a way of life than a strong religious conviction."

Physically Hermann is in good shape - he speaks to me without tiring for three hours - and he is active on half-a-dozen committees, including, until this year, the Kindertransport Committee of the Association of Jewish Refugees, which he chaired. "As you might expect, I'm very patriotic," he says. "England saved my life. I'm so happy to be alive, to have been given an opportunity to have a wife and children."

He pulls out two photographs of his parents - the only ones he has - old passport photos that he enlarged. "They were ordinary, decent, cultured people but because of the climate of hate, they were considered ogres and cruelly murdered. My greatest regret is that I lost my parents so young, and that I was 12, such a vulnerable age, when I came here.

"Hitler's lasting gift to me is a host of psychological problems: I'm neurotic, I get anxious, I worry. Many Kindertransport people suffer like this. We're survivors in a way - we didn't have to be locked up in camps to suffer trauma. Two-thirds of us never saw our parents again."

This Sunday Hermann intends to take a quiet moment to thank the two people whose courage and foresight he values above all else. "More than anyone, I am grateful to my parents for having made the ultimate sacrifice to send us to safety. Not all parents did, you know." He sighs. "Can you imagine what it means to take your children to a railway station and kiss them goodbye with the knowledge that you may never ever see them again?"

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