Support for this year’s Guardian and Observer charity appeal to assist child refugees in the UK and continental Europe has already been extraordinary, and we are grateful for your generosity.

Katharine Viner, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, said the plight of refugees was “the great humanitarian crisis of our times” and more than 4,300 readers have already responded by donating money.

Many readers explained why they felt moved to give to the three charities involved - Help Refugees, Safe Passage and the Children’s Society. Here are some of your testimonies.

My mother had to flee from Hitler and this country gave her safety, survival and life. I am saddened that our Home Office has not actively pursued the children from Calais. Ashamed actually. Niki Parker from London, UK

Syrian refugee children in front of their family caravan in Al Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan near the border with Syria Photograph: Muhammad Hamed/Reuters

The organisations provide child refugees from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, northern Africa and elsewhere with vital services that range from emergency aid to support to help them settle once their asylum requests have been granted.

One social worker said she donated because her professional experience had taught her about the long-lasting consequences of trauma, and how small things can help:

I have worked professionally as a social worker and as a child and adolescent mental health worker and know that any material and psychological help given quickly after a traumatic experience will help mitigate against the long-term damage a child will suffer. Erica Filby from West Sussex, UK

Record numbers of children have drowned in the Mediterranean this year; others have been detained for travelling without the right papers. Official figures suggest more than 90,000 children have travelled alone - NGOs, however, expect the number to be much higher because many children may be travelling beneath the radar. Some readers have donated because they see their own children in the faces of child refugees:

I had a little boy in 2015, every face I see in Syria reminds me of him. I find it extremely difficult to think that we have abandoned these people. Our government clearly doesn’t care how history judges them. I don’t want to be judged by their moral and political failings Joanna Cooke from Brighton, UK

A woman in shock is reunited with her baby who had been taken for emergency care after being rescued from a wooden boat. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Others have donated because they would probably not be alive if it hadn’t been for the help their persecuted grandparents received:

My grandparents were refugees during WWII. If it hadn’t been for the care and the food they were given by the Red Cross, they would not have survived. Jean-Baptiste Breliere from Melbourne, Australia

Our readers found themselves reassessing their priorities:

I’ve had a crap day at work; I drove home angry and fed up. I listened to the news coming out of Aleppo - the final hours of that poor besieged city and felt I had to get things back in perspective. The appeal was the best way to re-establish some sense of what was important. Helen Ford from Rugby, UK

And others have donated because they have witnessed how vulnerable refugee families can be, even after arriving in a place of safety:

We are supposed to live in civilised societies and yet we are unable or unwilling to support children who have experienced things none of us can imagine. I have some contact, as a volunteer, with Syrian and Kurdish families, who now live in the smallest county in Scotland, Clackmannanshire. They have been chosen under the Vulnerable Persons scheme and before their arrival lived in camps, in Lebanon mainly. Some have members of their families dispersed in Germany, France. It is not possible to imagine what it must be like for them to find themselves in a small Scottish town, not speaking the language, with families in Syria still under bombardment. Most of them have children but no extended families to help them. They cannot work, at least until they master some English, and that process is very slow. They have nothing, just the bare essentials but they are lucky, unlike thousands of others. I am glad to be living in a part of the UK, Scotland, where refugees are welcome; but it is so little in the face of what is needed. Dr Mireille Pouget from Stirling, UK

• Support child refugees by donating here

