Kindertransport survivor calls for British government to do more to help refugees

Aryeh Neier criticised Britain's plan to accept 20,000 Syrian refugees by 2020, saying it was ‘not enough’

Aryeh Neier fled Nazi Germany as a child (Andreas Rentz/360/Getty Images for 100 Lives)

A second high profile survivor of the Nazi regime has called on the British government to “live up to tradition” and do more to help refugees from Syria.

Aryeh Neier, co-founder of monitoring group Human Rights Watch and former director of the American Civil Liberties Union, was given sanctuary in Britain after being evacuated from Germany on the Kindertransport scheme.

The rescue effort saw almost 10,000, mostly Jewish, children brought to Britain from European countries threatened by the Nazi regime.

"During the Second World War, Britain did more than lead the way,” Mr Neier said at a discussion on the current refugee crisis at a conference in Yerevan, Armenia which is commemorating the presentation of the inaugural Aurora Prize.

“It accepted far more refugees than any other country. The British saw the danger. They saved my life, the life of my sister and the life of my family.”

The Berlin-born campaigner also highlighted how prior to the Second World War, the UK was relatively weak.

"In the period right before the start of the war, England had not recovered from the economic depression,” he said. “England feared that the Germans would be sending spies and saboteurs - nevertheless the humanitarian argument won.”

Mr Neier criticised Britain's plan to accept 20,000 Syrian refugees by 2020 and said it was "not enough".

"I would hope he (David Cameron) would live up to the tradition of British policy," he added.

However, he said the announcement last week that 3,000 more refugees - most of them children - will be brought to Britain under a new resettlement scheme, was a step in the right direction.

Despite the circumstances of his arrival in the UK as a two-year-old, Mr Neier said that he "could not have asked for better or more respectful treatment" from the British people during his time in the country, where he lived in Kettering before later moving to the United States.

"I'm a life-long Anglophile as a result of my experiences in England at that time," he added.

Mr Neier’s voice as a former Kindertransport child joins that of Lord Alfred Dubs, who escaped from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, aged 6, in 1939. The Labour peer recently made the proposal to allow more vulnerable migrant children into Britain.

He told Buzzfeed News: “They are the most vulnerable children imaginable and they’re in enormous danger at the moment. Ten thousand are alleged to have disappeared; they could be trafficked, forced into prostitution.

“They’re going to have a cold, hungry winter and are likely to fall ill. I think there’s a special case there.”

Britain has accepted around 5,500 refugees from war-torn Syria since 2011. An estimated 4.8 million Syrians have fled the country, half of them children.

Press Association contributed to this report.