Berlin  - Frank Meisler was ten when he and a group of other children boarded a train at Berlin's Friedrichstrasse that would rescue them from Nazi Germany and take them to England in August 1939.

Meisler, whose parents were Jewish, had arrived in Berlin from the German port of Danzig (today Gdansk). He remembers his aunt Adele waiting for him on the station platform to give him a hug and hand him bananas - a luxury in those years.

A few hours later the youngsters, most of them aged between five and 17, continued their journey to the Dutch coast to catch a ship bound for Harwich in England and then a train to London's Liverpool Street station.

In London, Meisler's grandmother and two aunts who had fled Germany in the mid-1930s were waiting to greet him at the station. "I was lucky and was not alone," Meisler, now 81, said recently.

The so-called "Kindertransporte" (children's transports) to England began in late 1938 after the "Kristallnacht" action in Germany left Jewish-run shops smashed and 267 synagogues ransacked and set ablaze in the notorious November 9 night of Nazi terror.

Terrified by the sudden brutal turn of events, vast numbers of jews desperately sought a country to move to, only to find in most cases entry doors had been slammed on them.

Even the US made it difficult for Jews, granting entry visas only to those who could provide solid proof of income and wealth.

Britain was an exception where Jewish children were concerned. Ultimately some 10,000 youngsters would arrive in England via the "Kindertransporte" from Berlin.

Meisler was excited and soon got used to the sounds of sirens and bombing raids when the war began. Learning English rapidly, he would later become a successful architect, helping to design London's Heathrow Airport and other big projects.

With apartments in London and Tel Aviv, Meisler nowadays shuttles between the two countries. The architect turned sculptor has been a frequent visitor to Berlin of late where he recently offered to donate a major art work to the city.

A bronze sculpture, six square metres in size, it depicts children in sombre grey attire, with Star of David patches attached to their clothing. The girls have plaited hair and
1930s-style clothes; the boys, carry a few possessions and wear flat caps.

The group symbolizes the 1.5 million Jewish children for whom there would be no escape and who would later end up being murdered in the Nazi concentration camps along with their parents.

Separate from this group, two children peer serenely in another direction. A boy has a small suitcase, a girl a satchel on her back.

Both look calm and unafraid. They represent the 10,000 children able to depart a country that no longer wanted them.

A bronze sculpture of Meisler's is already on display at the Liverpool Street underground station in London. Inaugurated by Britain's Prince Charles in 2006 it shows five Jewish youngsters with suitcases on rail tracks against a station background.

Prince Charles, who apparently encouraged Meisler to produce the sculpture, has said Jewish children who came to Britain during a dreadful period were an enrichment for England, with many later becoming doctors, writers and architects.

In March this year, a second work of Meisler's devoted to the war- time rescue of Jewish children was installed - this time at Vienna's Westbahnhof. It depicts a young boy, lost in his thoughts, sitting on a brown suitcase.

In Berlin, the city's central Mitte district authorities were delighted to accept Meisler's more recent "remembrance" sculpture, even agreeing a hand-over date with him and the spot where it is to be installed at the Friedrichstrasse station.

But Berlin government cultural officials were less enamoured and initially rejected it. They found the design somewhat bland, more in keeping with a school outing than a dramatic war-time evacuation.

Mitte district officials, however, have decided to ignore such official misgivings about the work. On November 30 - 70 years to the day when the first "Kindertransporte" to England began, it will be inaugurated.

Three days after Meisler left Germany for England in late 1938, his parents were arrested by the Gestapo and later murdered at Auschwitz.

Although he has a lot to do with abstract art, Meisler insists that real life-size figures were needed for his latest work. People using the Friedrichstrasse station had to be able to identify with the sculpture, he says.

Heinz Kallmann, 81, who in 1939 also escaped to England, recently sat leafing through a photo album with snaps of some of the 100 Jewish children who were evacuated the same day he was.

Along with prominent Jewish groups in Germany, Kallmann has been irritated by the negative city government response to Meisler's sculpture. "The memory of that period has to be kept alive. We owe that to all the victims."

Kallmann returned to Berlin in 1976 after more than 35 years exile in Britain. Since then he's been busy, giving lectures at city schools, church organisations and to Berlin's police academy members, on the evil Nazi years.

In the year 2,000 he was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz, Germany's highest civil award, in recognition of his work.

During the war Kallmann, spent six years in a home run by Quakers in Oxford, England. Contact was lost with his parents for years. Not until the late 1950s did he discover his mother had managed to flee to Chile shortly before the outbreak of war.

She would eventually go back to Germany. When she fell ill later her son also returned "home" to Berlin in 1976 so as to be with her. But contact with his father was lost.

"Had it had not been for the Berlin Kindertransporte I would never have survived the war," Kallmann told the Berlin daily, Der Morgenpost, recently. (dpa)