In 1939, my grandfather, John Rayner, took one of the last trains out of Berlin. He arrived in London and got on a train heading to Durham. On the train, he struck up a conversation with a girl in English and, for many years, never spoke German again. When he arrived at his new home, he reflected that ‘freedom was tangible, and tasted sweet.’

He was 15 when he arrived in Britain. He never heard from his parents again. He did not find out what happened to them while he was alive. We now know that they were deported to Auschwitz in 1942.

My grandfather belonged to that group of Jewish refugees called the Kindertransport children. On December 2nd, 82 years ago, the first group of children arrived in Britain. Over the course of the next year, nearly 10,000 young Jews would make that journey to safety. This week, politicians and pundits have commemorated that great achievement.

There is much to celebrate. On the brink of war, British civil society pulled together for the sake of vulnerable foreigners, motivated by no more than sincere altruism. My grandfather’s tickets were paid for by the Quakers.

Famous philanthropists like Nicholas Winton and Rabbi Solomon Schonfield organised to bring over as many of the refugees as they could. The greatest efforts came from people whose names are not remembered, but who nevertheless opened their purses, homes and hearts for children fleeing persecution.

Yet it must equally be acknowledged how much of this success took place in spite of government wishes. Britain’s first anti-immigration legislation was the 1902 Aliens Act, designed specifically to keep out the Jews who were fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe.

Faced with the influx from Nazi Germany, they were no more sympathetic. Many international onlookers saw Kristallnacht as a wake-up call to the terrors of Hitlerism; Britain responded by tightening border controls.

Only children were permitted entry as refugees, and then only if they were sponsored, and guaranteed not to burden the British taxpayer. The children had to prove they were physically and mentally well.

Older children were registered as ‘enemy aliens’ and had to report to the police regularly. They had to keep the cost of their repatriation saved, as it was hoped they would go back to Germany once the war was over.

My grandfather was among the lucky ones. He was taken in by an Anglican clerical family and, having joined the army to support the fight against fascism, went on to become a Liberal rabbi.

Not all of his friends made it out, and not all those who did had good experiences. Many of the Kindertransportees, particularly those who arrived in Britain as teenagers, later reported trauma, forced labour and xenophobic hostility.

And those were the ones who were allowed entry. Some were sent back where they came from. Some were shipped out to internment camps in Cyprus. In a now infamous article, the Daily Mail bewailed ‘stateless Jews from Germany pouring in from every port in this country.’ These words were only echoing much of what was being said in Parliament and by ruling officials at the time.

If you feel uncomfortable about drawing parallels between the Kindertransport children who fled Nazi Germany and modern refugees, please know that they themselves wanted people to make the connection. Throughout his life, my grandfather spoke out for the rights of immigrants and refugees.

One of my grandfather’s closest friends, Rabbi Harry Jacobi, was even more explicit. Harry had celebrated one of the last bar mitzvahs in Berlin before Kristallnacht. He fled from there to Amsterdam, where he caught diphtheria in an internment camp; then on to an orphanage; then in the bowels of a boat to Liverpool.

When he spoke of his journey, he often drew comparisons with the same arduous travel undertaken by young people fleeing Syria, Afghanistan and Sudan. Harry saw his own life in theirs. Two years ago, Harry called on the Conservative government to set up a new Kindertransport to resettle 10,000 refugees.

Alongside Alf Dubs and other Jewish survivors from the Nazi regime, Harry begged the government to at least allow child refugees to be reunited with their families in Britain. He campaigned for the Dubs Amendment, which would permit unaccompanied minors asylum in Britain.

At the time when Harry died, only 350 children had been allowed into the UK. The government abandoned the scheme.

The same forces of racism and parochiality that meant my grandfather and his friends nearly had nowhere to live still stand. That narrow-minded fear of immigrants that confined refugees from Nazism to internment camps still leaves children waiting in Calais, Hungary, and on Greek Islands.

It is that same atmosphere of aggression and denial that keeps dinghies stranded in the Mediterranean and washes up toddlers’ bodies on European shores.

The big question is whether there is still enough of a counterweight. In the 1930s, a hostile British government was forced to accept refugees because an engaged civil society promised they would look after the children even if the state would not.

Thousands of families, churches and unions came together to support those young people. They issued a humanitarian demand in a world that seemed to be losing its humanity.

Where is that spirit now? Some of it continues in our religious institutions. One synagogue in South London has housed a refugee family. A few Jewish centres offer free drop-ins for migrants seeking legal advice.

Many other small churches and mosques have gathered funds or resources. But there has been nothing on the scale of the national mobilisation that catalysed the Kindertransport.

The refugees fleeing to Britain today are no less deserving of life and love than those Jewish Kindertransportees who were lucky to make it out alive. Who will advocate for them?

My grandfather and Rabbi Harry are both dead now. The moral voice of their generation is fading into history textbooks. Only we can keep alive their message that migration is not a crime and refugees deserve rights.

It is imperative that those who want to remember the Kindertransport today also remember the many children like them who have been shut out by Britain’s hostile environment. We cannot allow the story of ordinary British people’s bravery in the face of government resistance to be co-opted by the very people who would have turned them away in the 1930s.

In memory of those who fled persecution 82 years ago this week, I revive their cry to open the ports. May today’s refugees know that freedom can be tangible, and see how sweet it can taste.