Customer Reviews

Kindertransport (Nick Hern Books)

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Kindertransport is a moving drama of the effects of the transport of a Jewish girl from Germany to Britain, requiring her separation from her parents. In the present of the play, the girl Eva is a grown woman, a mother herself, contemplating a more normal separation from her own daughter. Her emotions are complicated by her memories of her past. The play is about Jewish identity, the difficult moral choices facing a Jewish parent in the late 1930s in Germany, what it means to "save" your child, and mothers and daughters. Well worth reading or assigning in a high school or college class in Holocaust literature.

It was great to find this hard to find play so easily. First rate.

This DVD was captivating. I am a mother of young children, so my eyes weren't dry from start to finish. The heart of those poor children as they watched their parents disappear, some forever, from their line of sight as the train left the station... the faith and utter selfless love of families to give their own into the hands of others so that they might live... and the compassion of a country that accepted the lost... It is all here in this extraordinary story of human endurance.

This is one of those things I had to read for a class (British Literature) and wound up on my favorites list. Diane Samuels has created a moving, dramatic, creative play made out of history.

Set in England, with a mostly female cast of characters, we see the relationships between mothers and daughters, the truth and the past. Evelyn's daughter, Faith, has decided to move out, and as they pack up things she will need at her own place, we start to learn (through simultaneous staging--we are in pre-WWII Germany with Evelyn as a girl and her mother Helga) that Evelyn has not informed Faith that she was part of the Kindertransport of Jewish children. Sent away from her parents to be kept safe in England during WWII, Evelyn (formerly Eva) has formed a new identity and kept her past a secret... any more, and I'd be giving away the entire play.

At first, the simultaneous staging can be daunting, but if you can imagine the play being acted on your mind's stage, you will be transfixed. I read this in one sitting, which is rare for a procrastinating-prone college student with a short attention span. The emotion, the fear, the tension between characters--all of these make this a superb piece of work.