Walter Kammerling is 91. But he remembers a distressing event from his youth as if it were yesterday.

As a young boy living in Vienna at a time when Jews were persecuted by the Nazis, Walter was one of a number of boys made to scrub the streets.

“The chap next to me fell over because we were not allowed to kneel, only crouch,” he recalls.

“He was kicked and abuse shouted at him. The crowd were all smiling and there was a lady at the back who lifted her little girl up so she could see better this boy being kicked. They were smiling.”

Sadly, this was just the beginning of a nightmare for Walter and the hundreds of thousands of Jews in Vienna.

In 1938, while synagogues were being burned, shops plundered and Jews rounded up and taken to concentration camps, a bill was passed allowing children to travel unaccompanied to Britain.

Each child had to take with them £50, so they did not become a burden to the country, and some 10,000 Jewish children arrived in Britain via the Kindertransport scheme.

Walter was sent on the very first such journey, on December 12, 1938, leaving behind his parents and two sisters, when he was just 15.

“I was almost in a daze,” he remembers.

“My father was in the Jewish hospital at the time with angina. When I said goodbye to him he was in tears and I didn’t want to go. I remember I stood at the door and it was awful.

“My mother and sister came to the station and that was it. But the pain it must have caused my parents...”

Walter’s eldest sister, who was 18, was able to get a work visa to come to Britain. His other sister, however, was just 17 – too young for a work permit and too old for the Kindertransport. She remained in Vienna and Walter never saw her, or his parents, again.

Years later, after the war had come to an end, Walter returned to Vienna with his new wife, Herta, who had also come to Britain on the Kindertransport with her younger brother, a month after Walter arrived. The pair later met in London.

“We went back to Austria to try and help build a new country,” he remembers.

“We were there 11 years. But we realised that anti-Semitism wasn’t dead. It may have been dormant, because there were not many Jews there in Vienna – ten per cent of the population were Jews, almost 200,000 people were Jewish of two million. Now they’ve got about 8,000.

“Herta and I felt more at home here than we did there. Although when we went back we knew the sights, the smells, there were also bad memories.

“When I first got back there I tried to make my way with Herta to where I used to live. It was 1946, only eight years after I left. Nothing much really had changed there. I started to walk up, and it was so painful. I knew my family were not there so I turned around.

“We spent 11 years in Vienna and all the time we were there, I never went to my school or did anything that reminded me of my life before. It was a new life.”

Walter and Herta eventually returned to Britain. But not before learning the fate of Walter’s family.

“They were taken to Theresienstadt concentration camp in Prague and then sent to Auschwitz,” he says.

“My father was 54 when he was murdered. My mother was 44 and my sister was a few days off her 23rd birthday. She was married for about three months so I can only hope they saw some moments of happiness.”

Walter is now one of several holocaust survivors who share their stories with local schools and groups, in a bid to keep the memories alive for today’s generation, a mission particularly poignant this year, the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and in the wake of recent events in Paris.

“One has to be so very, very careful, because what happened there, it was easy to fall into it,” explains Walter.

“If you look at the world today, those elements are still with us, probably even more so. It’s so important we talk about it because nothing has changed there. It’s so easy to slide into something.

“Prejudice starts with one and carries on through, as we’ve seen in Paris.”

He added: “It’s 70 years, it’s a lifetime, but it’s so important because everything is still with us.

“There is a big age gap when I talk to children, but I was their age when it happened. Through us, it becomes part of their experience and their lifetime.”

  • An exhibition commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day and the Kindertransport is on display at Bournemouth Central Library until the end of today. To find out more about Holocaust Memorial Day, visit hmd.org.uk