Legendary actor Tom Conti led tributes at a concert in Marylebone to mark 85 years since the Kindertransport humanitarian rescue mission brought child victims of Nazi terror to safety in London.

The children arrived on the boat train from Harwich to Liverpool Street station to be placed with foster families in the nine months before the outbreak of the Second World War.

The operation saved 10,000 children from Nazi-occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia before war that led to the Holocaust of six-million Jews.

Conti, one of Hampstead’s more famous residents, was asked by the Association of Jewish Refugees to compare the Wigmore Hall concert, having recently played Albert Einstein in the movie Oppenheimer who had fled Nazi Germany.

“It must have been terrifying for the Kindertransport children, thrust into a strange land without their parents,” Conti told the audience. “I had some experience of what it was like to be an alien as the son of an Italian immigrant.”

Eight of the last remaining survivors rescued as children from Nazi Germany now in their eighties and nineties were among the audience along with the family of the late Sir Nicholas Winton, the man who organised the second Kindertransport from Prague in 1939 rescuing 669 children whose story was depicted in the film One Life.

“The Kindertransport represents courage in the face of adversity,” Conti stressed. “It has an invaluable lesson to teach us all — about the perils of prejudice and discrimination.”

The concert was organised by the refugee organisation’s chief executive Michael Newman to mark the historical milestone of the Kindertransport and the Holocaust.

Mr Newman said: “It is a priority for us at this time of increased anti-Semitism to instill in all audiences the universality of the Holocaust with its warnings in the hope that it can never recur. The salvation of the Kindertransport should never again be needed.”  

The music performed by the Leonore chamber orchestra included works by Beethoven, Haydn and Novak chosen to reflect the culture of the child refugees.

The ‘kinder’ rescued in 1939 who were in the audience at Wigmore Hall included Kurt Marks now living in Edgware, Ruth Jacobs from Whetstone and brother Harry Heber, Bob Kirk from Northwood, Elizabeth Marcuse from Pinner, Albert Lester from Dulwich and Maria Ault from Chislehurst, as well as Anne Woolf-Skinner.

Also in the audience were some of “the Winton children”, Lady Grenfell-Baines, Lord Dubs, Peter Schiller and Bronia Snow.

Guests included Lord Pickles, the UK Envoy for Post Holocaust Issues, and representatives from the German, Austrian and Czech embassies.

The Association of Jewish Refugees is a national charity with social, welfare and volunteer services to victims of Nazi oppression living in UK today. The concert was part of its nine-month programme for the Kindertransport 85th anniversary, which included the King meeting Kinder survivors in November.