Book Review - Into The Arms Of Strangers : Stories Of The Kindertransport - Mark Jonathon Harris & Deborah Oppenheimer**** So, without googling, who knows what the Kindertransport was ? I've read fairly extensively about WWII and the Holocaust, and I had never heard of this before. In the months leading up to WWII, as the persecution of the Jews in Germany became ever more violent and, world governments were asked to take Jews into their countries to allow them to escape from the Nazi regime, almost universally they refused to help, with the exception of Britain, which agreed to take Jewish child refugees. A remarkable process began in which children of all ages were sent by their parents to Great Britain in the hope of finding a better life there. Once here they were adopted by families, many Jewish, but not always, and in many cases never saw their parents and families again. Roughly 10,000 children were saved from the Nazi's by the Kindertransport. The book is a series of recollections made by the Kinder themselves, a few surviving parents and two brave rescuers, one English and one German-Jewish. I set off naively reading this thinking how overjoyed the children must have been to escape the ever worsening situation in Germany, but of course in reality that was not so. Children were separated from their parents and thrust into a strange (and sometimes backward - outdoor toilets!) country. Often children and foster parents did not share a common language, many of the Jewish children came from fairly well off business families and were appalled at the relatively poor housing conditions they encountered over here. Some of the Kinder were housed with non-Jewish families who made no attempt to understand their religious needs, or were housed with people who immediately tried to convert them to Catholicism/Methodism or Anglicism. Many children were used as servants, and some of the teenage girls suffered sexual predation by their adoptive 'fathers'. The Kinder boys were often arrested at age 18, as foreigners with possible German sympathies they were sometimes deported to the States or Australia. One of the boys relates the quite dreadful time he spent as a prisoner on the British, and the foul treatment he received at the hands of both our army and navy as he was detained and then deported. After all this, he still swore loyalty to queen and country in order to come back to Britain and join the army. Of course, after years of separation, when the war finally ended, there was to be no happy ending for the Kinder, for most of them they would be forever orphans, their entire families murdered in the death camps. Even for the ones whose parent/s survived, reunions were filled with mixed emotion, children had often forgotten how to speak German and their parents were strange foreigners. This book, as it is written by the people involved, gives great insight into the emotional state of the Kinder, all of them have had to do some soul searching to write their parts, some explain how uneasy they are at dredging up these memories after all this time. Some of the Kinder went back to Germany after the war, not often to live, although some few did, but to look for family, or to see what had become of their childhood homes. Virtually all of these children regarded the entire German people as their enemies now, they relate how that, before the war, even in tiny rural villages with no official SS presence, they were still reviled and maltreated, beaten and punished, homes and belongings 'legally' stolen. Kindertransport makes a more damning criticism of the German people as a whole than any other work I have read about this period. This is a powerful and emotive work, the suffering of children is always harder to bear above any else, and it is a credit to the Kinder that they managed to cope as well as they did.