The Kindertransport in Literature

The children’s transport, or the Kindertransport as it later became known, is one of the most celebrated and remembered British humanitarian actions that took place in the years directly preceding the Second World War. Between December 1938 and September 1939, transports by trains, ships, and planes carried close to 10,000 predominantly Jewish children (known as ‘Kinder’, ‘Kindertransportees’, or ‘Kind’ in the singular) away from the perils they faced in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. It was just one of several quickly implemented rescue operations.

Recently, amidst the urgency to record the voices of surviving Holocaust witnesses, there has been a lot of activity surrounding the Kindertransport as the historical event begins to slip from living memory into cultural memory. This memory will subsequently be left in the hands of future generations. The growing necessity to remember the Kindertransport is reflected in public discussions, the work of institutions such as The Kindertransport Association and The Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), and the publication of numerous literary works about the Kindertransport.

In his study Remembering Refugees, Tony Kushner argues, ‘of all refugee movements in twentieth-century Britain, both large and small, it is the arrival of what turned out to be close to ten thousand children in the last ten months of peace that has produced the largest number of histories, memoirs, exhibitions, plays, documentaries, films […] and memorials’.¹ Whilst this is impressive, this statement begs the following question: how is the representation of this historical period affected by a genre’s capabilities, creative freedoms, and restrictions? This study responds to this question ←1 | 2→by investigating the role and potential of three literary genres in remembering, representing, preserving, and transforming memory.

Cultural anthropologist Aleida Assmann acknowledges that memory does not ‘simply [yield] to history’, and that ‘the question then becomes how this memory gets extended beyond the reach of lived memory and what changes it undergoes in the process’.² The processes facilitated by literary genres – the transition away from lived memory, transformation of experience, and transmission to future generations – are aspects at the heart of this research. Accordingly, this study responds to the following questions: How do the conventions of each genre influence the construction of the Kindertransport representation? Which aspects of the Kindertransport experience are transformed, emphasized, or reworked across literary genres? What is the position of the reader across the different literary genres, and to what extent are they encouraged to engage or empathize with the texts?

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Over the past two decades, key questions have been raised about transformations in memory and various forms of representation, and these ←2 | 3→questions continue to be grappled with today. Writing in 1992, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub pose the question, ‘[w]‌hat is the relation between literature and testimony, between the writer and the witness?’³ Leigh Gilmore’s study The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony offers a particularly useful investigation into testimony and representation. She examines the difficulty – or ‘structural entanglement’ – of representing the self and traumatic experience.⁴ Sara Horowitz also considers the transmission of memory and muteness in Holocaust representations. In Voicing the Void (1997), she examines ‘the way Holocaust-centred literature functions as narrative – how the telling (writing) of the catastrophe shapes and informs subsequent knowing (reading) of the catastrophe’.⁵ The potential of other forms of representation is explored in After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future (2012), edited by Jakob Lothe, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and James Phelan. They question how writers and filmmakers ‘who may have no personal connection to the event engage with that history: what kinds of stories will they tell, and will they succeed in their effort to keep the public memory of the event from being lost?’⁶ This question can likewise be posed when considering recent Kindertransport fiction written by authors with no personal experience of the Kindertransport.

Whilst engaging with these broader questions of memory and representation across genre and generation, this study also draws upon a substantial body of research on refugees from National Socialism, much of which has been conducted by members of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies. Here, I direct readers to the following ←3 | 4→studies: Marion Berghahn’s pioneering series of interviews, Continental Britons: German-Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany; Marian Malet’s and Anthony Grenville’s edited book, Changing Countries; and ‘The AJR Refugee Voices Audio-Visual Holocaust Testimony Archive’, directed by Anthony Grenville and Bea Lewkowicz.⁷

In 2006, Kushner remarked on how exile studies has witnessed an intensity of memory work especially with a focus on child refugees.⁸ Due to this increased scholarly interest, the Kindertransport has grown to constitute its own research field. It has been examined through a variety of academic and theoretical lenses, and notable studies include: Rebekka Göpfert’s Der jüdische Kindertransport von Deutschland nach England 1938/39: Geschichte und Erinnerung; Die Kindertransporte 1938/1939: Rettung und Integration, edited by Wolfgang Benz, Claudia Curio, and Andrea Hammel; and Andrea Hammel and Bea Lewkowicz’s The Kindertransport to Britain 1938/39: New Perspectives.⁹ Hammel’s research in particular indicates that the representation of the Kindertransport experience in memoirs is influenced by several factors: gender, issues regarding authorship and translation, and issues of narration and agency arising from the memoir’s dual nature as both a social history source and a literary narrative.¹⁰←4 | 5→

This book goes beyond existing studies by offering not only a textual analysis, but by simultaneously focusing on the capabilities of different literary genres and their influence on the construction of Kindertransport representations – an area that has been under-researched so far. Nonetheless, Phyllis Lassner’s detailed study of literary representations by Anglo-Jewish women, in which works from various genres are considered, merits a mention here, even though this is neither a study of genre nor the Kindertransport per se.¹¹ Existing studies on the Kindertransport are mainly of a comparative nature, examining a particular aspect of the refugee experience, such as relationships, acculturation, identity, or religion. This book, The Kindertransport in Literature: Reimagining Experience, steers the focus away from such self-contained themes and frameworks of experience, and, instead, adopts a wider perspective by investigating how the genre itself – the literary form which holds the narrative – influences the scope of the representation. This study takes understandings of genre as a starting point, and these understandings then aid the literary analysis.