On Tuesday, the day after Remembrance Day, I was transported back to the late 1930s for an hour and half, without ever leaving the concourse of Central Station, Glasgow.

The station, which has recently been embracing the concept of performance for its passengers, was the first venue on a tour of UK railway terminuses by a piece of site-specific promenade theatre called Suitcase, marking the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the Kindertransports, which evacuated almost 10,000 children from Eastern Europe at the start of the Second World War.

The work is definitively a labour of love by sisters Ros and Jane Merkin, whose mother Johanna arrived in London from Vienna at the end of 1938 on the first of the trains. Their company has plugged into communities on their route that include people who survived the war thanks to the Kindertransports, many of whom never saw their parents again. That was particularly true in Glasgow, where the Merkins have cousins, one of whom was part of the audience I joined.

Playing in a noisy station is a challenge, but one the 11-strong company were equal to. The ensemble passages that opened and closed the show, featuring music arranged by Max Reinhardt, suffered most, but the smaller scenes, presented in half a dozen locations in corners of the station were not only beautfully played, but sometimes unbearably moving. They offered different perspectives on the scheme, from the officious organiser of the Refugee Children's Movement, Mrs Hilton, to prospective foster parents Emma and Edward Garbutt, and from fund-raising railway porter Bill to the Daily Express-reading bystander Edith, by way of Czech refugee Stephan meeting his new "sister" Anne, and siblings Hanni and Kurt from Austria, the one chosen for a new home, the other left alone in a strange country.

It did not need explaining that every element of the script was based on sound research into real stories, as the party of school students who witnessed it would have realised as readily as I.

There was surely nothing else around this past week that brought home the importance of our collective act of remembrance quite so eloquently. The information in the show's little programme booklet that more than 1000 unaccompanied children are still arriving in the UK each year seeking sanctuary added another layer of context altogether.

Suitcase has three performances in Sheffield today and tours until December 2.