New book offers robust correction of the Kindertransport legend

BOOK REVIEW
The Kindertransport - What Really Happened,
by Andrea Hammel (John Wiley)
Reviewed by Caroline Baum

With each successive anniversary, the rough around the edges story of the Kindertransport have been polished with a smoothing patina of sentiment. As the Kinder generation disappears, there is an understandable impulse, driven by their descendants and by some well-intentioned custodians of the narrative, to not only burnish but gild the story as an example of the very best of humanity, illustrating what happens when people are mobilised to act selflessly and come to the aid of strangers who not only speak another language but practise another religion.

I have experienced this first hand. My kindertransport father could not tell the story of the family that took him and his sister in, (after a traumatic false start that he always chose to relate with maximum gothic horror and humour to make it suitably Dickensian) without becoming teary when speaking of their sustained kindness. I recognise the appeal of that narrative trope, but it was by no means universal.

Today more than ever, we seek out stories that demonstrate our capacity to be our better selves; in Britain, currently experiencing a fiercely harsh policy towards refugees, the Kindertransport initiative seems like a fever dream. Since then, the nation appears to have been led to a heart-hardening position, with some exceptions made for Ukrainians.

But with all the literature the Kinder episode has generated, including memoirs, films, plays and fiction, there has rarely been a voice that has challenged the myth with hard evidence and attempted to present a more complete and accurate version of the tumultuous events that brought 10,000 children to the UK from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, rescuing them from the Nazis.