Emma Clayton tells the remarkable story of Albert Waxman, who escaped persecution in Nazi Germany in 1939 on the Kindertransport and eventually found a home in Bradford It was a rainy evening in March 1939, when a group of exhausted boys arrived at a large Victorian house in Manningham.

They had travelled across Europe to Number 1, Parkfield Road, after escaping the Nazis on the Kindertransport, bringing 10,000 Jewish children to safety.

For most of them, the last-ever glimpse of their parents was on a railway platform as the train pulled away.

Now 87, Albert Waxman lives in Shipley. He was 14 when he came to Bradford, from Saarbrucken in Germany, and was the only child in his town chosen for the Kindertransport.

Many children were traumatised, but Albert saw it as an exciting opportunity.

“I looked at it as an adventure. I was pleased to be leaving Germany, it was my only chance of escape, and to go to England was fantastic,” he says.

He was later sent with 23 other boys to Bradford. Home was the Bradford Jewish Refugee Hostel, set up by Oswald Stroud, founder of worsted manufacturers Stroud Riley Drummond on Lumb Lane.

In 1989, 50 years after the boys came to Bradford, Albert organised a reunion and produced a souvenir brochure about the hostel.

After three months, Albert was put to work in a comb factory before becoming an engineer apprentice at Philip Morris Ltd. He later joined the RAF – as a Polish national, he was eligible to fight with the Allies – and trained as a fighter pilot in South Africa, later returning to Britain as an interpreter at a prisoner-of-war camp.

It was during a week’s leave in South Africa that an extraordinary encounter took place.

Albert was on a boat, stationed in a port, when he overheard some soldiers speaking Hebrew on the ground below. He called to them and, to his amazement, one of his older brothers was among them! “I hadn’t seen him for over three years. He ran onto the boat,” says Albert.

In 1958, Albert founded A Waxman (Fibres) Ltd, a synthetic fibre business in Bradford. Now Waxman Ceramics, the company is one of the UK’s leading distributers of tiles and mosaic.

Now a grandfather, Albert leafs through letters from boys he lived with at the hostel, which became the Carlton Hotel. In 1989 Albert spent months tracking them down for a reunion, filmed for a BBC programme, Bradford Kindertransport.

Last week, Albert attended Bradford’s Holocaust Memorial Day event, representing the Bradford Hebrew Congregation.

“It was a very extraordinary time, and hopefully it will never happen again,” he says.