Book Review: Kindertransport
I’m not sure if I was expecting a beautiful tale of survival against the odds or something depressing. I kind of got a mix of both. A child survives an awful fate at the cost of their childhood, culture, language and family, which seems to be the raison d’être of Kindertransport, our play for this week.
I could not possibly imagine what it was like for our protagonist, Eva (later Evelyn), to be forced to leave your own country because the country you were born in hates you. Even then, there is no guarantee that the train leaving Germany will actually let you leave. But the train does leave, and you are foisted upon an English family, and you do not speak the language and have no idea if and when you’ll see your parents again. Spoiler: many do not. Why? Because you are Jewish, being Jewish is a crime in Nazi Germany.
The structure of this play is unusual; the past interplays with the future and crosses over frequently. Is the play suggesting that the future is hopeful or that the past continually haunts us? Evelyn seems to be, after all; the holocaust is a rather traumatic thing to happen in one’s past. So let’s talk about trauma. There are two mothers in this play, ‘Mutti’ and her English mother ‘Lil’. Lil is a well-meaning but unsuitable guardian to a refugee child, and Eva struggles to acclimatise to English culture. Lil is indifferent to the trials and tribulations of the Jewish community that are happening in Germany and is more concerned about getting Eva to speak English. Mutti appears many years later, hoping to reconnect with a dissociated Eva, only to find out that Eva is now Evelyn, a naturalised citizen in England and thoroughly denies her heritage to the point of becoming baptised into Christianity. Multi is naturally heartbroken, having been broken down by the death camps; this is a sucker punch. All the hope and sacrifice of sending your child to an unknown shore only to have them dashed on the rocks of your survival is a trauma I don’t think any one of us wants to experience.
Trauma has many ways of manifesting, and clearly, the point of this play is to show that while the Kindertransport may have saved the lives of many, many children, of whom I am sure they are grateful, it doesn’t erase the emotional scars and the trauma of having to leave home in such awful circumstances. The play’s structure really plays with this; it’s interesting to note that ‘trauma’ does manifest throughout the play in the form of the ‘ratcatcher ’, a children’s fairytale villain. However, this isn’t a fairytale, and there is no ‘Happily Ever After’.
I think, on the whole, this play does take away a lot of the flashy PR that has surrounded the Kindertransport for years. While the organisers do deserve all the awards, accolades and bells and whistles, this play does point out that it is the children themselves who are often forgotten about when the whole purpose was to save their lives. What is even more illuminating is that the play is based on real-life accounts from children who were part of the Kindertransport. We should know more about their experiences, especially as some of them seem to be less of a fairytale and more like a modern-day tragedy.