In 1939 the Central British Fund for German Jewry organised and funded two important rescues of Jews from Greater Germany. The first, the Kindertransports, brought nearly 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children to England. That rescue is now very well known. The second rescue, of nearly 4000 German and Austrian Jewish men to an old first world war army camp, known as the Kitchener Camp, on the edge of Sandwich in East Kent, is much less well known. In this illustrated talk Clare Ungerson will tell how the rescue came about, what life was like for the men in the camp and what the people of Sandwich made of having 4000 German speaking Jews living in a camp just across the Toll Bridge and opposite the Stonar Lake.

Professor Emerita Clare Ungerson is the daughter and granddaughter of German Jewish refugees who came to this country shortly before WW2. She first came to East Kent in 1973 when she was appointed lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Kent. She ended her career as Professor of Social Policy at the University of Southampton. In 2005, she returned to East Kent and settled in Sandwich where she decided to research and write the history of the ‘Kitchener Camp rescue’. Her book "Four Thousand Lives: the rescue of German Jewish men to Britain", was published in hardback in 2014 and in paperback in 2019.