KINDERTRANSPORT

by Olga Levy Drucker ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

An autobiographical account--compelling in its authentic details--of the author's WW H years as a Jewish refugee in England. Beginning in 1932 with a vignette of her family of four and their servants moving into the fine Stuttgart house her father (a children's book publisher) built for his family, Drucker briefly reviews the mounting restrictions of the prewar years on her family before focusing on the six years after her escape, in 1939, as one of 10,000 children shipped to Britain. Her hosts were various: she moved from a miserable first accommodation, where she picked up lice, to the home of wealthy family friends, who never quite made her feel welcome; a fairly satisfactory boarding school, closed for lack of students, was followed by a stay with a dogmatically Christian couple. Eventually, after leaving school at 16, ""Ollie"" was happier as a live-in nursemaid for a warmhearted family until she could join her parents, after the war, in New York. Drucker enlivens her straightforward narrative with reconstructed conversations; she makes the horrors (what was happening in Germany and her troubles in England, in many ways like those of present-day foster care) clear without dwelling on them. A fine addition to the many other remembrances of the period.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0805042512

Page Count: 146

Publisher: Holt

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992

Categories: CHILDREN'S