A MOVING story by a woman who was educated in Oswestry after escaping the Nazis’ reign of terror as a child is being highlighted nationally as part of Refugee Week.

Entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist Dame Stephanie Shirley, now 86, was due revisit Shropshire last April to tell her inspirational story at a seminar organised by the Ellesmere Sculpture Initiative.

It was as part of its project to mark the centenary of the Save the Children charity, founded by locally-born sisters Eglantyne Jebb and Dorothy Buxton.

She was also due to be honoured at a civic reception organised by Oswestry Town Council but both events were called off because of the Covid-19 lockdown.

Dame Stephanie’s presentation is now being featured on the official website for Refugee Weeks which runs from June 15-22. It is also available on the sculpture group’s website.

As the five-year-old daughter of a Jewish German lawyer, she fled Nazi-occupied Austria by train before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 and was brought to safety through the Kindertransport programme which rescued thousands of refugee children.

She arrived in Britain with her older sister, Renate, penniless and without a word of English. She eventually came to Oswestry where she was looked after by foster parents and educated at the former Girls’ High School.

Refugee Week is a UK-wide festival celebrating the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees.

Founded in 1998 and held every year around World Refugee Day on June 20, Refugee Week is also a growing global movement that encourages positive encounters between communities, helping them to connect and learn from each other, and promoting a culture of welcome.

In her speech for her cancelled April visit, Dame Stephanie described her early life in Germany before being forced to move from country to country, where they eventually settled in Vienna, capital of Austria.

But when the country was annexed into Germany as part of the Anschluss, and shortly before Kristallnacht in 1938, the family moved her and her sister to safety.

She added: "The Kindertransport is the largest-ever recorded migration of children and its trains had been running for about six months by then.

"But it was not a simple matter. Forms had to be filled in, documents stamped, permits queued for at deliberately inconvenient times, guarantees provided.

"We spent several weeks in a children’s home while my mother devoted herself full-time to grappling with the obstacles of Nazi (and British) bureaucracy.

"Although the plan had been for 50,000 children to be rescued by the Kindertransport, no limit to the permitted number was ever publicly announced. Britain capped the number at 10,000.

"As time ran out, Nicholas Winton (knighted only in 2002) who rescued more than 600 children from German-occupied Czechoslovakia took to issuing forged Home Office entry permits.

"The Refugee Children’s Movement had found Renate and me foster parents in England who were prepared to guarantee (with getting on for £5,000 in today’s currency) that the two of us would not be a burden on the state. Thank you, thank you, Guy and Ruby Smith. We called them Uncle and Auntie.

"I honour their memories as I do all the Uncles and Aunties who helped us children through those terrible times.

"The fact that people I did not know saved us, by doing what giving people do, made a deep impression."

For the whole speech, head to https://refugeeweek.org.uk/